Democracy

There are significant anti-democracy tendencies in the US, on many levels...

Internationally
The US, at least verbally, promote democracy internationally as long as it is within countries. A true global, international democracy, as the UN could be the beginning of, is obviously not in the interest of the US. On the contrary, the US government makes strong efforts to undermine the UN in a multitude of ways (not paying their dues, ignoring resolutions and international agreements, unilateral actions, etc).

Within the US

• The US has a winner-takes-it-all system that polarizes, is inefficient and creates very limited choices. There are only two parties, which - from an international perspective - are very close to each other. Large realms of the political spectrum is ignored in the political life of the US.
• Money plays a large part of the political process, to the point where politicians - on almost every level - is dependent on corporate backing to be elected.
• The voting process is flawed and vulnerable to abuse in many ways, as Florida is just one example of.
• Large segments of the population is barred from voting due to a past conviction.
• Media does not provide sufficient feedback to the population for them to make informed choices. On the contrary, essential issues are ignored and others skewed.
• There are remarkable anti-democracy attitudes, even among many who consider themselves educated and progressive. One example is the strong/emotional disapproval of people voting for Nader (ignoring far more important factors, such as the 50% of the population that does not vote, the 1/3 of registered democratic voters that did not vote, Gore insisting on campaigning in states he knew he would loose, voting fraud, the many voting for Nader who would otherwise not have voted or would have voted republican [1/3 of Nader's votes came from those who otherwise would vote republican], etc.) In a democracy, each person is free to choose who they vote for, and voting - independent on who they vote for - is something to applaud. It seems a difficult consept to grasp for many in this country.