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Originally Posted by tspikes51
No problem. The idea that America is one of the most (if not the most) advanced democracy in the world was actually presented to me by my American Government professor, who, in fact, is of Arab origin (origin, not descent). One thing that makes a democracy advanced is obvious: time and experience. America, as we know from history, is one of (if not the) oldest democracies in the world. Therefore, we have had had more time to develop than other democratic governments. The point that my professor made was that America is at such a state (because of the amount of time that it has existed) that overthrow of the system would be almost impossible because no single party could impose something that would cause a majority to want to change its form. The majority would just remove that party from office.
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One could argue that one of the oldest
representative democracies in the world today is the United States government. But that isn't the case if we speak about a
particpatory democracy. Time and experience doesn't make something more advanced, in my opinion. But if it does, the oldest particpatory democracy is older than the US version by far. By your professor's own logic, that version would be the most advanced of the two. Like many of the other contributions we've made to this nation, perhaps our contribution to the framers' implementation of people governing themselves is unknown by your professor. Asking him what role Native Americans played in the development of democracy in the United States could bring a very interesting and enlightening discussion into your classroom.