Is the USA still a democratic republic?

[pbrower2a]

The United States is now a plutocratic oligarchy with remnants of democracy.  Dictatorship? Dictatorship requires the formal strongman in charge, whether a despotic President or parliamentary equivalent, a military chief, a party boss with unaccountable power, or a stooge who does anything that some oligarchic elite tells him to do. Elections either do not happen or are shams. It also requires a secret police that can do anything to anyone.

Barack Obama is not a despot; he is certainly not a military chief who achieved power in a coup; he does not wield unaccountable power;  he has some independence. Some state governors have established a model for what the Koch syndicate wants short of murder... in 2017 some of us might want to find another country.

[pbrower2a]

I was concerned about America becoming a plutocratic oligarchy.

This scares me more:






In view of this graphic, I shudder at how America has gone. Yes, I can register shame at the obscenely-large percentage of Democrats who think it acceptable to threaten the family members of the accused, stick someone in a coffin-sized box, threaten physical or sexual violence (sexual violence against a helpless person is one definition of rape), waterboard someone (although most Americans don't understand what it is), compel unwelcome nudity, slam someone into a wall (good for causing broken bones and cartilage), or deprive someone of sleep (a damaging act that leaves no physical scars but can truly mess a victim up).

Maybe we Americans have had it too soft in that we have never had experiences with a KGB, Stasi, Securitate, Mukhabarat, SAVAK (Iran under the Shah), BOSS (Apartheid-era South Africa), State Research Unit (Uganda under Idi Amin), CDR (Cuba) or DINA (Chile under Pinochet). I wish that someone with experience with life under fear of an unaccountable secret police could tell us what it is like to live in fear. OK, there was the Mississippi Sovereignty Commission that I added to the list of defunct secret police organizations in Wikipedia and explained how it fit among the KGB, Stasi, Mukhabarat, and BOSS -- questionable activity by an unaccountable organization subservient to unaccountable politicians. Mississippi was basically a single-Party dictatorship until the Civil Rights Act of 1964 took effect.

It is the REPUBLICANS who scare me. Maybe the older ones are from the Gerald Ford-Hugh Scott-Charles Percy era in which the Republican Party was a center-right opposition to a center-left Democratic Party.  Torture usually serves a totalitarian, authoritarian, racist, or mad ideology. I can't quite place Idi Amin on the Left-Right spectrum, but he was certainly mad.

Republicans seem to hold rectal "feeding" excessive. Maybe they would also consider whipping, amputations, burnings, and summary executions excessive, too. They show a near-majority (48%) support for putting someone in a coffin-sized box for several days and majority support for every other abominable deed depicted as torture. Every one of those deeds is a crime.

Our political system operates on basically a majority-of-a-majority system on anything not specifically prevented in the Constitution or mandated by a decision of the Supreme Court, and now that Republicans are soon to have a majority in both Houses of Congress, have a majority of Governorships, and have majorities in a majority of State Houses...