The US was not a true democracy before the Voting Rights Act. Wednesday\u2019s decision has essentially destroyed the law<\/p>\n
Is America a democracy? The term implies an equality of rights and dignity among citizens, a collective and uniform right of individuals to participate in self-government and to shape the laws that rule them. In that sense, the answer is no: though it has been a republic since its founding, America has only rarely been a true democracy, one where all citizens have the full right to vote and to have that vote counted.<\/p>\n
Political scientists such as the University of Notre Dame\u2019s Christine Wolbrecht have argued that America wasn\u2019t really a democracy, not in the meaningful sense of the term, until the passage of the Voting Rights Act, the law that formed the signature achievement of the civil rights movement and sought to end racial barriers to voting across the south when it was passed in 1965. If you accept that premise, you could say that the era of American democracy officially ended on Wednesday, when the supreme court finished its project of dismantling the VRA in its 6-3 decision<\/a> in Louisiana v Callais. Whatever this country has become now, \u201cdemocracy\u201d does not describe it.<\/p>\n Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist<\/p>\n Continue reading…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The US was not a true democracy before the Voting Rights Act. Wednesday\u2019s decision has essentially destroyed the law Is America a democracy? The term implies an equality of rights and dignity among citizens, a collective and uniform right of individuals to participate in self-government and to shape the laws that rule them. In that … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-72854","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/72854","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=72854"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/72854\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=72854"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=72854"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=72854"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}