Socialism

If however we want to have an adult conversation about it, then we need to agree on the meaning of words, and “democracy” is literally “rule by the people”.

This “adult” conversation is coming from a lifetime of Cold War I & Cold War II anti-communist propaganda. You’re not engaging with the material presented; you’re just repeating your preconceptions.

They’re both terrible, though at least the US has free(ish) and fair(ish) elections.

It’s demonstrably false that they’re even very -ish. The US government was never not captured by the bourgeoisie, because the US was born of a bourgeois revolution[1]. The wealthy, white, male, land-owning, largely slave-owning Founding Fathers constructed a bourgeois state with “checks and balances” against the “tyranny of the majority”. It was never meant to represent the majority—the working class—and it never has, despite eventually allowing women and non-whites (at least those not disenfranchised by the carceral system) to vote. BBC: [Princeton & Northwestern] Study: US is an oligarchy, not a democracy