This is the case for every single decision that any election official makes. The general public doesn't vote on individual laws, unless you live in Switzerland. Calling quarantine measures "not democratic" is dishonest for this reason.
Like I said, I think the word democracy is abused. Is the U.S. a democracy? The word appears zero times in the constitution. Is the Democratic Republic of North Korea a democracy, just because they say it is? Is Russia a democracy because people get to vote?
In the U.S. we don't vote on issues, we vote on which one of two factions will be in power any given year, the same two parties for the last 150+ years, increasingly the same people over and over, rotating in and out of corporate board rooms and the media, a political class bought and paid for, seemingly more concerned with keeping the population distracted rather than representing them, happy to take on more and more responsibility even thought the population trusts them less and less. Why the need to defend this hot mess and everything it does as democratic, when technically it is not?
Thanks for the Switzerland call-out, I'll be reading more about their system.
If we're arguing technicalities, the US is "technically" a type of democracy - specifically a representative democracy. If we go by your more exacting standards every government decision, ordinance, or law except those by referenda isn't democratic. Which is neither technically correct, nor is it correct as generally understood by laypeople. I agree with all the problems you pointed out but those are orthogonal to the question at hand.
DPRK is not a democracy because it fails several criteria. Russia is a de jure democracy but not a de facto one.
Candidates are effectively preselected via funding by .02% of the population before people can vote, and gerrymandering districts is rampant so that political parties are selecting voters, instead of the other way around [0].
Would you say that things like that make the U.S. a de jure democracy, also?
I think the problems with our so-called democracy explain why Trump has had the following that he does. He had the money and media experience to get elected based on the outrage so many people have for all other politicians who do not really represent them. The establishment seemed more interested in getting rid of him than addressing the sentiment that brought him to office. I'm not a Trump supporter myself, and I loathe his demagoguery, but I think that understand why he got elected. He's popular with a lot of politically apathetic people because they really believed he would "drain the swamp" and that he wasn't like every single other politician - not another Bush, not another Clinton, another insider, not someone who was going to bail out Wall Street again, etc.
Apologies for nitpicking and spouting off a bit, but like I said this has all very much been on my mind lately. I know that I may be tilting at windmills here, but words are important and shape our thoughts, which led me to throw my original comment out there.
