I'm not American, so I'm less interested in debating your (or even any Anglo!) political traditions and norms. I'm more interested in systems design and the implications of structures. It's easy to get stuck in the particular when the questions are universal, let's not fall for that.
I don't think a democratic system has to be inherently majoritarian in design and I don't believe they are synonyms - how the demos is determined and weighed is not a given based on the etymology itself. Think of Ancient Athenian democracy, where the demos was considered wealthy male land owners, or even pre-emancipation America!
More importantly, I'm less interested in abstract labeling than I am in designing a democratic system that is robust and can survive authoritarian impulses of a ruling class (that might be democratically elected, as it has been in all the examples I've named).
I saw the result of what you propose - ruling party control of government funded media - happen right in my backyard. Hungary was functionally a one-party dictatorship with total media control through a combination of government controlling the purse strings of public media and government-aligned oligarchs capturing the private market.
It functionally stopped being a democracy precisely because party with majority support at one point in time used said majority to completely take over control of the fourth estate, thereby effectively kneecapping democratic control mechanisms going forward.
As an extreme example, this mechanism was also core to the process the Nazis used to take Weimar Germany from democracy to dictatorship - they even had a fancy term for it, Gleichschaltung.: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gleichschaltung
There's lots of precedent for why letting the ruling party control the budgetary survival of the mechanism that is supposed to keep it in check is dangerous to democratic survival. That's my point. The labels are a distraction, an inaccurate one at that.
Comments
I'm not American, so I'm less interested in debating your (or even any Anglo!) political traditions and norms. I'm more interested in systems design and the implications of structures. It's easy to get stuck in the particular when the questions are universal, let's not fall for that.
I don't think a democratic system has to be inherently majoritarian in design and I don't believe they are synonyms - how the demos is determined and weighed is not a given based on the etymology itself. Think of Ancient Athenian democracy, where the demos was considered wealthy male land owners, or even pre-emancipation America!
More importantly, I'm less interested in abstract labeling than I am in designing a democratic system that is robust and can survive authoritarian impulses of a ruling class (that might be democratically elected, as it has been in all the examples I've named).
I saw the result of what you propose - ruling party control of government funded media - happen right in my backyard. Hungary was functionally a one-party dictatorship with total media control through a combination of government controlling the purse strings of public media and government-aligned oligarchs capturing the private market.
It functionally stopped being a democracy precisely because party with majority support at one point in time used said majority to completely take over control of the fourth estate, thereby effectively kneecapping democratic control mechanisms going forward.
As an extreme example, this mechanism was also core to the process the Nazis used to take Weimar Germany from democracy to dictatorship - they even had a fancy term for it, Gleichschaltung.: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gleichschaltung
There's lots of precedent for why letting the ruling party control the budgetary survival of the mechanism that is supposed to keep it in check is dangerous to democratic survival. That's my point. The labels are a distraction, an inaccurate one at that.