The fact that in US you can win the most powerful seat in the world while not even voted for by majority of its own population is properly ridiculous. Yes we all heard about historical this and that but that doesn't matter, thats not a democracy at its core and at the lowest, most important layer of building a resilient democratic society.
Then on that questionable base you build a shaky empire that is supposed to work if people behave nicely. It works till somebody comes around who doesn't care about that and it all falls down. Lets not forget current government was voted by +-half of US population, for second time. Nobody should be shocked by direction its taking again, maybe surprised by intensity of it but thats it.
I am a minority in the fact that I openly welcome the visible consistent hostility of USG towards whole Europe and Ukraine conflict when russia attacks whole western world including US and our philosophy of existence, as much as it can (luckily for us not that much). We are waking up from our deep comfy slumber, not in ideal fashion but we already have a bigger combined military than US has in many, for us the most important aspects (since we don't want to drag ourselves to remote wars unlike you guys so ie aircraft carriers are rather unimportant).
Green deal will be soon gone (good idea in vacuum but not in world where literally nobody else cares about it and we just destroy our economy and future trying to make our 10% part count), social services will get cuts to bring them to more sustainable levels based on unavoidable demographics and more focus on more practical and military manufacturing, like it or not.
I also take issue with the electoral college system, but to claim that a representative democracy is not a democracy based on the intermediary representation seems like a fairly hollow concern.
My bigger issue with regards to how democratic we are would be more related to campaign finance laws, corruption, and the immense power wielded by those in charge that can be pointed at political challengers if the politician is so inclined.
It's not a democracy to the extent that it has systematically unequal representation. That's not a problem of “intermediary representation”, its a problem of both the system of executive election (more of a problem for the US than it would be in many other systems because the US also has an extremely powerful executive branch) and the system of apportionment of the more powerful house of bicameral legislature (having a less-democratic upper house is not uncommon, but having it still be functionally more powerful is, and having that simultaneously with it being as far from democratic as the US Senate is even less common among things that pretens to be representative democracies.)
Unless I'm mistaken, electoral college representatives are assigned based on state borders and individual state laws - usually either winner take all or proportional. The electoral college itself can't be gerrymandered in the same way congress can.
Electoral college representatives are currently elected on a statewide winner-take-all basis except Maine and Nebraska, each of which assign two electors (corresponding to the votes due to two Senate seats each state gets) based on the statewide winner while assigning the other electors based on the winner in each Congressional district.
So, in those states only, electoral votes can be gerrymandered in exactly the same was as Congressional seats, because they are exactly the same districts. (Of course, both states are small enough that the gerrymandering opportunities are fairly limited, and would have limited impact on Presidentual elections, as Maine has only two CDs and Nebraska only 3.)
Then on that questionable base you build a shaky empire that is supposed to work if people behave nicely. It works till somebody comes around who doesn't care about that and it all falls down. Lets not forget current government was voted by +-half of US population, for second time. Nobody should be shocked by direction its taking again, maybe surprised by intensity of it but thats it.
I am a minority in the fact that I openly welcome the visible consistent hostility of USG towards whole Europe and Ukraine conflict when russia attacks whole western world including US and our philosophy of existence, as much as it can (luckily for us not that much). We are waking up from our deep comfy slumber, not in ideal fashion but we already have a bigger combined military than US has in many, for us the most important aspects (since we don't want to drag ourselves to remote wars unlike you guys so ie aircraft carriers are rather unimportant).
Green deal will be soon gone (good idea in vacuum but not in world where literally nobody else cares about it and we just destroy our economy and future trying to make our 10% part count), social services will get cuts to bring them to more sustainable levels based on unavoidable demographics and more focus on more practical and military manufacturing, like it or not.