Coups in Haiti, supporting gangsters and strongmen, overthrowing democratically elected presidents multiple times - supporting Democracy!
Pushing fake candidates in Venezuela - supporting Democracy!
Ousting left-leaning governments in Australia - supporting Democracy!
Overthrowing the democratically elected government of Iran, returning it to authoritarian monarchy - supporting Democracy!
Overthrowing the democratically elected government of Chile, installing a dictatorship - supporting Democracy!
Supporting the overthrow of democracy and establishment of a military dictatorship in Brazil - supporting Democracy!
And so on and so forth, with plenty of logistical and moral support for mass killings, disappearances, assassinations, and political imprisonment mixed in to boot.
We have never promoted democracy, we've only ever promoted the interests of American corporations and opposed socialism.
You are judging the U.S. in the context of an otherwise utopian world that doesn't exist.
Yes, it gets messy. And, yes, United Fruit Company et. al. happened. We've absolutely had government capture and promotion of special interests. But, even these aren't always so neatly separable from U.S. interests, which are not always so neatly inseparable from promotion of democracy. For instance, a weak economy would make it nearly impossible to have influence in the world.
There's a simplified world view that ignores the good, measures each discrete misstep on its own (or interprets every difficult choice as a misstep), then tallies a final score. But this is not realistic in a world where lesser evils are frequently the viable option. America does not operate in vacuum and you have to look at the entire arc.
You'll not see me defending every egregious thing this country has done or endorsing the instances when it has truly veered from its creed. But, to measure us by only that metric and declare the country evil or completely non-democratic is to exonerate other bad actors on the planet.
Worse, adopting such a simplistic point of view makes it impossible to recognize when we've entered a truly treacherous phase, wherein an authoritarian regime comes to power and eschews democracy entirely. Everyone would just throw their hands up and declare "we were never democratic anyway, so it doesn't matter". And, by the time they're shown the difference between our imperfect democracy and frank authoritarianism, it's too late.
I'm not claiming the US is not democratic - by most definitions of democracy, it is. I'm claiming the US has never promoted or protected democracy.
I'm not judging the US in comparison to anyone else. I'm judging it in comparison to your statement that it has promoted and protected democracy around the world.
US interests justify all kinds of nastiness, sure. But we claim to be civilized, claim to be champions of justice and democracy, and say we act for the good of the world. There is no evidence at all to give any credence to those claims. Claiming that other countries would be even worse is just a strawman. We should be better, and we know we should be better, because we feel the need to hide and deny the things we do. I don't care what other countries do - I don't live in them, have no vote in them, and am not represented by them. I want MY country to be good and just, rather than pragmatically evil because we can't let anyone else "win".
>I'm judging it in comparison to your statement that it has promoted and protected democracy around the world
The point I'm making here is that this doesn't always look like we think it should (though it also frequently has). The world doesn't just cooperate. It's a nasty place filled with competing, often hostile ideologies. And sometimes nastiness is required.
>There is no evidence at all...
Of course there is. If I give you examples, you might wave them off as the U.S. merely promoting its interests versus democracy, but these are frequently directly linked. The U.S. does have an interest in promoting democracy in the world, even if there are counterintuitive scenarios wherein we must take a short term approach that reads anti-democratic. For instance, if a candidate were democratically elected, then ruled as a dictator, removing that democratically elected president would conceivably be a democratic action.
Beyond this, the U.S. must protect its interests (and power) if it is to continue wielding influence in the world.
But, it's true that there have also been grave missteps along the way. I want my country to be perfect too. But, alas. Still, I don't believe it's so binary (though I once did).
In any case, we seem to disagree and I'm not sure that this goes much further without us simply repeating ourselves. Thanks for the chat.