One of the most helpful things for understanding this, at least in my experience, is studying how fundamentally undemocratic liberal democracies are in any practical sense. Public policy doesn’t match public sentiment. Huge numbers of people are disenfranchised, effectively and literally. Political parties hold immense authority over who has a practical chance of holding any given elected office. Plenty of positions are appointed without democratic process. That’s to say nothing about the fact that private interests, which are not democratic, are in control of most of the economy.

Others can speak to the relative democratic nature of the Bad Countries, but I think that it’s helpful to do a closer analysis of whether the ostensibly legitimate democracies even really qualify as democratic in the first place when they don’t produce democratic results, in either legitimacy or practical outcomes.

When comparing, say, American democracy with Cuba, it's valuable to critically examine what one means by democracy, as Americans all grow up learning that it's fairly specific things that the US has and it glosses over other ways in which the US is not particularly democratic but other countries, including Cuba, are.

A simple example is: if something is popular and benefits the public, how likely is the state to create interventions and draw its policies from the public? When was the last time the US had a plebiscite for a major national policy change? Cuba had one to introduce its new family code just a year and a half ago and it's more or less the best one in the world. Last year in the US, a series of unelected oligarchs allowed the banning of abortion by individual states, with those that have highly racist voting policies leading the pack. When looking at states run by communist parties, it's actually fairly common to see substantial reforms and changes in response to popular demands and bottom-up organizing. This is almost never the case in the US, where every major protest movement fails and is often put down by the cops and very popular and practical policies go unimplemented because they aren't favorable to capital.

Speaking of capital, a lot of freedom boils down to economic exploitation and the extent to which it is capital, not the public, that dictates policy. The reason so many people in the US suffer without healthcare is due solely to the profit-seeking system that controls the country. There is no practical benefit to the private health insurance system, it's purely a drain on everyone except for the people that run and own the insurance companies themselves. It doesn't matter that nearly everyone hates the system, though, because (1) capital invests in a large volume of propaganda to spread a false understanding of the issue and (2) capital buys the politicians that could otherwise introduce serious policy changes. Capital is not democratic, it's oligarchical. Cuba has one of the most effective healthcare systems in the world and guarantees it up all of their people based on need and their ability to fund it (i.e. avoid blockade-induced crises). It's extremely popular and healthcare inequity was one of the first issues recognized by the communist government as limiting modernization and core freedoms (along with literacy and the overall economic base). These are not just good things, they are how needs of the public elicit important changes in policy.

Living under a capitalist system like in the US, 1/3 of your waking hours are controlled by a petty dictatorship known as your boss and the overall hierarchy of privately owned enterprise. If any of those petty lords up the command chain feel like it, you can lose your job and therefore your ability to have housing, food, warmth, healthcare. The reason doesn't even matter if they're half-intelligent, various policy protections usually only apply if the employer is stupid enough to telegraph their reasons. In places like Cuba, there is frequently direct workers' democracy in the workplace itself, with the same people who do the work also voting on how to run their enterprise and allocate resources. Want to have a cantina with a cook for all your meals so folks don't all have to bring in their own individual meals? If you convince your fellow workers, that can and will and does happen. It happens fairly frequently, in fact, even in a country so impoverished by US imperialism.

And don't forget about that imperialism! The capitalist system places these other countries under siege, actively limiting their capacity to develop and prompting defensive measures. Cuba developed its secret police in response to sabotage and terrorism funded and coordinated by the Americans that attempted to invade and then blockaded. If capitalist countries could let others be, you would see less of this "siege socialism" that requires various forms of monitoring and policing. Though to be clear, none of these communist-run states are anywhere near the level of policing and incarceration of the United States. It's a pure propaganda coup that Americans think state oppression is somehow worse in these other countries with vastly smaller percentages of people imprisoned and cops employed.

The DPRK and Cuba get special mention for being under siege, they literally don't have the luxury of complete openness or whatever because that's how you get the CIA creeping in and doing a Pinochet. Their revolutions have to be defended and the US is more than happy to demonize those defensive measures while neglecting to mention its own role in necessitating those measures.

us freedom is the freedom to die penniless in the street with the little that you own. cuba is, as corgi points out, a great one to contrast that situation with, since we both a) can know quite a bit more about cuba than say the dprk because of proximity and language barriers being lower and b) seem to have less propagandized views of cuba in my experience than east asian states. cuba also has some of the best freedoms wrt access to basic necessities, especially healthcare.

Wed probably need to start by picking one country to focus on at a time.

Off the top of my head, Cuba has some top notch laws that enshrine rights for queer people, or at least laws surrounding that that put America to shame. That's a huge W worth pointing out to people.

a recent example, U.S. Government forcing the sale of TikTok because they are not happy about the content being posted there.

U.S. is 'free' so long as there are no threats (see Red Scare, McCarthyism). You can speak all you want, even 'subversive' shit but as long as its not significant to cause a revolution or something, they'll let it slide.

Try this, under 5 minutes. Michael Parenti on the Cuban Revolution. https://youtu.be/npkeecCErQc

I don't know that there's a simple answer for what you're looking for. We're talking about trying to undo a lifetime of propaganda.

For me, Blackshirts and Reds, Yellow Parenti, The Jakarta Method, Wretched of the Earth and then Blowback were probably the biggest de-. Plus, lot of books on US history to realize how much of what I'd known was more mythology than history.

Did you know the US never ended the Korean War? It's still officially ongoing. Everything you've ever heard from Americans and their allies about North Korea is quite literally war propaganda. And it's not a cold war either since the US annually partners with South Korea to practice invading them.

AES countries are not utopias and are in some cases more reactionary on certain issues than socdem capitalist countries. These are real socialist projects and they are imperfect just like every other system. However, they are making strides towards socialism. Cuba has LGBT+ rights enshrined in the constitution, something the "democratic" U.S. could only dream of.

Oh yeah healthcare is lightyears better in these countries than the old imperial U.S. too.

To be honest, I struggle to see how most countries aren't more democratic than the US. The two-party state ensures that the same very small clique of people, often even the very same bloodline, maintain dictatorial political power. The vast majority of voters don't have the option of voting for anything even remotely aligning with their desires, hence why most don't at all. Meanwhile the house and senate just play silly buggers with peoples' lives for the spectacle and illusion of doing anything, occasionally throwing the odd breadcrumb at most. It's closer to a monarchy than a republic.

Both Lenin and Marx noted these fundamental issues over a century ago, and especially in the US' and UK's cases, nothing has ever been done to address them. That doesn't sound like the barest minimum kind of a free democracy to me.

My usual answer is:

You can just go there. You know that you can do that, right? Just hop on a flight, go see China. It's a cool country. I highly recommend it!

And (if you aren't an American—gee, I wonder why that's illegal for you) you can take a weekend trip to Korea while you're there. Also an extremely normal place. The street food kicks ass.

Somebody needs to put that on that skeleton meme. YOU CAN JUST GO! HIT DA BRICKS! BYE, CAPITALISM!

In addition to what others have said, remember that the US (and its client-states such as Canada, Britain, France, Sweden, Japan, etc) which have 'democracy' and 'welfare' have these things because and so long as the global south is under their boot. The majority of intense class struggle, the actual "propertyless-except-for-their-labour-power" proletariat, the majority of environmental degredation and all the repressive measures needed to maintain "order" in spite of this naked exploitation have largely been exported to the neocolonies, where such rights and democracies are more obviously nonexistant or fraudulent.

And even in these states, in times of crisis the mask of democracy falls off immediately (e.g. responses to anti-ww1 protests, responses to anti-vietnam war protests in the 70s, responses to environmental protests in the 60s, or responses to indigenous land rights struggles basically all the time.) The freedom of speech is also only freedom from government persecution for free speech. It is not protection from private persecution for speech.

Note that e.g. Walmart, Amazon, Google, and other entities, despite being larger than some nations, are private, are autocracies run by a CEO appointed by money through its physical representatives, the shareholders. There is nothing to stop an employer from firing you from excercising 'free speech' to criticise their practices (if one is even lucky enough to live somewhere where the employer requires a reason to fire someone). As, on the average, all of these CEOs, shareholders, owners, etc share class interests, and the managers, supervisors, etc have delusions of sharing class interests, this works out to a fairly extensive network for suppression of dissent.

Much as the feudal king didn't have to raise the national levies for every uppity peasant, the bourgeois has no need to raise the national armies in response to every uppity citizen-worker. The feudal king would leave such small matters to local lords, priests, or voluntary action of middling landowners; the bourgeois leaves such small matters to the petite-bourgeois, managers, and the 'middle class' generally.

In general wrt 'convincing libs', in my context (imperial core, cannot speak for non-core folks' experiences) I focus more on showing them that our country is evil, that our system is evil than trying to show that e.g. China is good. The fact of the matter is that no matter how good China is, it falls short of the imaginary-utopian America/Canada/France/'The West' the average lib has in their head. No actual real state with flaws will ever measure up to their imaginary utopia; it needs to be shown to be false first.

check out luna oi!'s videos for how the government/elections in viet nam work.

How democracy works in Cuba

The Truth About The Cuba Protests

Why is North Korea so weird

Pretend I’m a lib

Look into the structure of their democracy. Cuba is genuinely democratic to the point they have children stand guard over the ballot box. It is extremely bottom up. Neighborhoods. It’s, a group of neighborhoods have their chosen reps vote, and so on and so forth.

It’s amazing and beautiful.

Even from a liberal perspective the US barely qualifies as a democracy, the electoral college basically means only about a quarter of the population gets a real say in who the head of state is, the senate is undemocratically structured and the judiciary is blatantly partisan.

Socialist government have expressly socialist constitution, same as the US as an expressly bourgeoise liberal one, democracies can be founded a core set of principals and limit democratic participation around them.

Most countries are more democratic than the USA. Any country that follows the principle of "one person, one vote" and/or "the candidate with the most votes wins" is inherently more democratic than the USA.

The range of options is so limited in the US, effectively the ruling class will drive it off a cliff, it isn't sustainable. So much production was done in the US, but it's going to collapse because of how much value was squandered over the decades since WW2. Virtually none of it invested into lasting infrastructure or social projects. Just war machines, bombs, and highways. Financial vehicles to exploit neocolonial relationships. There's no mechanism to reorient the system, for the average people, so the floor will just continue sliding with more labor being displaced and falling from their rungs.

North America depends upon so much unequal exchange from several other billion people, but most of its people are some combination of too disenfranchised, propagandized, or undereducated to do anything about the eventualities that will produce. That's not democracy.

Essentially everyone is coerced into benefiting from slavery, even if it's just a bit, and for those who benefit greatly that turns into propaganda reinforcing system. Its eventual decline due to inherent unsustainability makes militarism and fascism almost inevitable.

We have democracy in the US to elect basically stand-ins to represent the capitalist class, because our democracy and all the interconnected institutions we have are built for the capitalist ruling class specifically to wield power. We don’t have a way of electing someone who can, on a broad level, give us more power over our economic and social lives (except in rare instances at the local level for sporadic, hyper specific causes. But never anything foundational). We can’t change the overall economic and political paradigm we experience through our democratic process. It is literally just a lie of propaganda that we “might have this power if we just vote hard enough,” a lie that allows the ruling class to keep the working class docile. These communist countries however, in their different ways relative to their own historical development and social structures, have, through the power of revolutionary collective action, built institutions that allow normal people of the working class to express their will over their own economic/social circumstances rather than a capitalist class. And socialism is that. Whether that’s the worker council Soviets of the USSR, the community collectives forming and ratifying changes in Cuba, the bottom-up stages of democratic voting process in China, etc, they are expressions of the working class wielding power in a way that the capitalist class does not. That doesn’t mean it’s as simple as voting in good or bad economic/social circumstances of course. Most of the power of the world is aligned specifically against them, violently, and there is no hardship too inhumane to inflict on the people of these countries by the West/Global North. The US is more democratic if you use the idea of that which the capitalist class has defined for us. These other countries are more democratic than the US if you use the idea of that which the working class has defined for itself

Edit — just to drive this home further, the capitalist class in the US/West/Global North goes to great lengths to perpetuate the implied (but untrue) feature of our system that the working class could have whatever power it wants, if only it were able to organize itself and vote that reality into being. That is the root of the difference here — that simply is not possible in our system and the capitalist class knows that. But the US presenting our system anyway as something that hypothetically could allow for that, allows them to say hey our system is more democratic than the system of one of these other countries because they don’t allow for the hypothetical reality of the inverse of that — for the capitalist class to vote itself into power in the same way. That’s of course an obvious farce. How those countries are set up is already an expression of the will of the people over the capitalist class.

I’m of course really generalizing here when I say “how they’re set up.” Every system has its contradictions that place it more or less on a spectrum of how the working class is able to express its power within the confines of its own historical development

I don't know or care much about the DPRK's political system. Other than blatantly sensationalist lies, I don't really see much reason to challenge anyone's read on it. I can't think of many practical questions that would be affected by the DPRK being democratic or not. I oppose US imperialism in the region regardless.

Stepping back from that, in general, no matter where you are in the world, it isn't hard to rig votes, which means a lot of legitimacy has to be derived not from principle, but from who you trust, subjectively. No matter what system you design, somebody has to count the votes. Obviously, election observers from the "international community" can't be trusted either. So like anybody can say they're doing a poll or a vote and announce whatever results they want and there's no reliable means of oversight if you don't trust the people doing the oversight - "Who watches the watchmen?"

I can speculate that Alan Dulles had JFK killed because his job was assassinating world leaders and he was fired shortly before it happened and he was on the investigative committee into his assassination (which was a clownshow), and from that I could argue that the US is a sham democracy controlled by the intelligence community. When people talk shit about the DPRK or many other countries, that's generally what they're doing. Replace Alan Dulles with Kim Jong Un, replace JFK with some rando, and make the evidence flimsier, and then say, "Oh, the CIA/Kim Jong Un can kill whoever he feels like without repercussion so it doesn't matter how supposedly democratic the system is, anyone who goes against the real power gets merked."

But the difference is, we don't have to rely on speculation and trust to know about a lot of the bad shit that the US is involved in. Neocolonialism, for instance. We can see as an objective fact that many countries had their resources violently seized during colonialism and that those resources were never given back. We can also see the restrictions that organizations like the IMF place on their domestic policies, written in ink. We can also see the stuff that the CIA has admitted to, whether it's Operation Condor, MKUltra, or whatever atrocity you prefer, because there's no shortage to choose from. More recently, the politicians and journalists we have are the exact same ones that lied us into the War on Terror which left millions dead - and none of them ever faced any consequences for it. Even if a dictator somewhere kills some dissidents to stay in power, it comes nowhere close to the mass death and suffering the US has caused. And if it turns out that the supposed "dictator" was democratically elected and the people he supposedly killed were alive the whole time, you know, that's cool too. But I don't see much reason to die on that hill either way.

To oversimplify, the US virtue signals as democracy, which muddies the term when you try to map the details and rhetoric and the theory and what the US actually does (at home and abroad) together. Socialism is about expanding democracy to the workplace and the economy. The US is about democracy for the rich.

the thing is we must change our definitions of democracy to not just democratic ability to interact with politics, but for the population to be free to decide their politics and labor while being provided with food and housing

I try to think back on high school "Civics" class and Social Studies/History classes throughout public education.

And I think I remember democracy, regarding the US political system, as being nothing more than being allowed to vote for a person to represent you. This definition/description was usually given without criticism or a discussion of the implications or how that actually plays out in the US political economy. Sometimes it would be spoken of like this was a good, great and/or wonderful thing even.

But I get older and realize that being able to vote for a person to represent you isn't the same as voting for policies that would benefit you. At the city level, its pretty much "do you want to pay more in taxes? VOTE: Yes or No", usually in relation to paying for sewage/water/road repair. At the county/parish or State level you might get to vote on some change, but most of them are some archaic bureaucratic change that probably has some practical affect on my life but its all so incomprehensible that even when I try I can't understand the consequences of voting Yes or No.

But at the Federal level? It's never about "Do we go to war?", "Do we continue to stay at war?", "Do we defund the CIA, NSA and fund public healthcare?"

Nope... Its just which asshole gets a desk job and what seems like a pretty easy income with platinum level healthcare for a minimum of 2~4 years and then a pension plus a pile of business cards to call when they want to go work in the private sector.

Hooooly shit. I’m gonna read through all these.

I can't wait to vote for which rich old white guy I want to oppress me in congress!