The PRC has the same three branches of government, including a President at the head of the executive branch, and a constitution that lays out their roles (more thoroughly than the US does the power of the judiciary), and it also holds direct elections for municipal offices. Neither country directly elects its President, as the PRC has elected officials vote and the US has the Electoral College say “just trust me bro” before giving the election to the other guy half the time (based on elections this century).

The US is not without its flaws, but we are a democracy.

We literally had a bunch of unelected people in robes declare the president, just over 2 decades ago.

Our representatives in federal, state, and local governments are democratically elected and ideally should represent the majority of the population.

ideally should is doing a lot of lifting in that sentence- They don’t. Local governments are often dominated by landlord interests, as well as homeowners- that’s often accomplished by systematically disenfranchising renters.

Again, the unelected people in robes declared that money is speech, not only swaying elections but allowing influence to be bought directly. How is that a democracy?

You seem to be conflating the concept of ‘democracy’ with the freedom to spend money however it may hurt someone else structurally. That’s pretty authoritarian if you’re someone without money.

Defend what? I don’t think the parallel you want to draw works quite as well as you think. My point is that Redditors can cast stones in their ignorance at people who they would struggle to string a whole sentence together to describe without buzzwords because they know jack shit about what those people actually think. Western communists are typically quite familiar with the ideology of liberals.

I completely agree, do you see why I linked it in response to the use of authoritarian?