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Comment by claaams | Hacker News Reader

Americans on average are too stupid and too easily manipulated for this to ever be a matter of concern for them though.

Its interesting to see this comment about a blog article that conflates lobbying with campaign donations and super PACS. Lobbyists certainly make donations - as do many entities - but that isn't what makes them lobbyists.

Half of Europe didn't even get democracy until the 20th century and they're calling Americans "stupid"? LOL.

Half of Americans did not have democracy until 20th Century

The percentage of people who can vote isn't a linear measure of "democracy." It's the classic case of "getting from 0 to 1 is the hard part." Extending the franchise to a large fraction of the population and having stable transition of power and fair elections is the hard part.

And women have been able to vote in the U.S. for decades longer than the governments of the E.U.'s largest countries (France, Germany, Spain, and Italy) have existed in their current democratic forms. When women got the right to vote in Wyoming, kicking off the movement towards national women's suffrage, the French were on Napoleon III, Spain had a king, Germany wasn't even a country yet, and Italy was a recently unified Kingdom.

By this logic, 25% of Americans don’t have democracy today.

Who are "they", you mean one commenter you assume is European? You are right that at the beginning of the 20th century, there was still a lack of democratic structures, in Europe, as well as in the United States of America, where the 19th amendment was introduced in 1920 and the Voting Right Act in 1965.

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