No, just the opposite, because actually the irony is that in a so-called democratic government where the government has to resort to false flags, propaganda, and other CIA-like techniques to drive political agenda whilst still maintain the illusion of freedom/ democracy for the populous, its in fact top down governmental policy that trickles down "Inception" style as common themes under the labels of "freedom, democracy, etc" to give the people the illusion of choice whilst on the backend its always been the power elite running the show... Do you think the average American knew anything about Huawei before Trump, at the direction of the Deep State (as he calls it) embarked on his campaign against Huawei and 5G? American people don't see China as benign because the American government, its intelligence agencies and the media arms of the government all take directives from above. AT&T was about to strike a deal with Huawei to offer their handsets /smartphones before US gov stepped in at the last moment and put a stop to it. I suppose that was something the American people decided too?
I'll be honest with you, I think either you are trolling or you are incredibly misguided and naive in the workings of geopolitics.
The US political system is an oligarchy. There is no correlation between public opinion and the likelihood of a bill being passed by congress. However there is a strong correlation between elite opinion and the likelihood of a bill becoming law.
You can have a social democratic system, which combines the best ideas of modern liberalism (human rights and democracy, with personal liberty) and economic socialism (a strong welfare state, universal health care, housing, education, minimum wage, etc.) Most countries that run on this system are very stable, such as Scandinavian countries, and to a lesser extent Japan/South Korea/Taiwan. They are not collapsing. There is a lot of scaremongering going on that is not necessary. China is not Russia. Ironically Mao Zedong understood this better than some people today. If Mao had tried to learn everything about China's direction from Russia, he would never have succeeded in the Long March or the Chinese revolution.
You have an elementary understanding of socialism, human rights and democracy. Welfare benefits are still capitalism because economic activity in those social democratic countries are still directed by profitability rather than rational planning, the means of production are primarily privately owned, and workers have no say on how the product of their labour is disposed. In short the M -> C -> M' circuit prevails in the economy, thus the system is capitalism. Further more European social democracy only existed due to imperialism and the threat of the USSR preventing the capitalist class from oppressing the working class to it's fullest extent. The USSR is gone now and the social democratic welfare programs are being dismantled all across Europe. Finally you should understand that capitalism is a temporary system, all the classical capitalist economists of the 18th and 19th centuries believed it to be. Only in the late 19th and early 20th century, after the system became entrenched, that a new breed of economists arose to act as priests to proselytize how capitalism is an eternal system transcending history and culture. Unfortunately for neo-classical apologists for capitalism, the rate of profit falls over time and that puts a clock on capitalism. We already see all of the degenerate "economic" activity that occurs in wall street since there is no profit to be made in actual productive investment into new factories, new machines, new production methods etc. Only financial strip-mining remains. Capitalism today is a cancer.
Personal liberty, or more generally, negative liberty, is a ridiculous concept. I'll let comrade Stalin's quote speak for me here.
I've already debunked the idea that the US political system is democracy above, it is an oligarchy. In fact, I expect the situation to be similar in all developed capitalist countries. There is a reason Marxists call it the dictatorship of capital. But I will add, elections and electoral systems are not democracy. Elections have always been the preferred method of oligarchy going back to ancient Greece. Democracy in contrast uses sortition, the random selection of political officers from the general population. If you know your science, you should know that random selection is the only scientific way to produce a representative sample from a population. The same applies to politics. So called "representative democracy" using elections is a farce, completely unrepresentative of the population, and favoring corrupt professional politicians who are better at talking that doing anything useful.
