Excellent post. Noam Chomsky put it like this when he famously remarked: "The US is a single-ideological state with competing political factions." That's the reality of the situation as it stands in the US today. Clearly, the US is an oligarchy. In fact, the US is no more a democracy in terms of OUTCOME than for example Cuba is. In reality the opposite is true as I will attempt to illustrate below.

You see, in order to ascertain relative levels of purported democracy, we have to evaluate countries' democratic credentials in terms of OUTCOME rather than the FORM a particular democracy may take. For example, few people outside of Cuba would describe that country as a democracy in the FORMAL sense. But in terms of OUTCOME, as any person who has visited or lived in Cuba will confirm, the country is far more democratic than the US. So what we need to do in the first instance is define our terms. I would argue that we ought not to view democracy in the formal and abstract sense in terms of whether we get to vote once every 4 or 5 years, but rather whether it is actually delivered in a real meaningful way that is beneficial and responsive to the society in question.

In Cuba, unlike my country, Britain, the elderly do not die of preventable diseases because they cannot afford, for example, to heat their homes in winter. In Cuba, access to health facilities and treatment is not dependent upon whether you have a big bank balance. Last year my wife was refused IVF fertility treatment in our national health service, but nobody in Cuba is refused this. In Cuba, there are more medical doctors per capita than anywhere else on earth. Fidel tried in vain to dispatch many of these doctors to New Orleans in the wake of hurricane Katrina but they were refused entry into the US by Bush for ideological and political reasons.

All students in Cuba, from the cradle to the grave, receive free medical care and free primary, secondary and university education. Nobody in Cuba is homeless and it has a higher life expectancy and lower infant mortality rate than any other comparable developing country on the planet. Moreover, Cuba has a higher literacy rate than the US. It has managed to do all this despite the country being under a virtual state of economic siege by successive US administrations for the past 49 years.

Naturally, not everything is perfect in Cuba and it certainly cannot be classed as a socialist society in the Marxist-Leninist sense. What I am merely pointing out is that democracy is better judged not purely in terms of monetary and capitalist values as is the case with the vast majority of Western liberal democracies like the US and Britain, but in terms of how responsive it is to the needs of its people. In my view, this is the real measure of the wealth of a nation through which the term 'democracy' should be best applied.