Up there, they're a democracy.

Congressman Crockett has a point.

There's no democracy worth the name that doesn't have a transparency move, but transparency is openness in only one direction, and being given a dashboard without a steering wheel has never been the core promise a democracy makes to its citizens.

No democracy anywhere in the world offers this feature to its citizens for either legislation or for budgets, even though those are the things done with our consent and with our money.

Russia and China may no longer be communist, but they certainly are illiberal and definitely not democratic. Russia is poised somewhere between authoritarianism and totalitarianism and, for all of China s recent economic progress, the rising Asian power remains squarely in the same camp.