With Citizens United, democracy requires a socialist economy

America isn't a democracy.  The word democracy is used to conjure pride and other sensations in Americans, but the US is a "representative democracy," not a true democracy.  In a true democracy, each citizen would actually debate and vote on every law.  That would be a pretty free society, I suppose, except that since the entire society would effectively be a member of Congress, it would be understood that there wouldn't be a lot of time for anything else.

I'm being a little facetious.  There could be ways devised to preserve genuine democracy while giving people time to, for example, grow food and/or send pictures of their genitals to friends and strangers.  The main point I'm actually driving for is that the US is a representative democracy, meaning that we decide collectively who the people who will decide the laws will be.

As such, the best we can do, as far as democracy goes, is to make the process of choosing our representatives as egalitarian as possible.  We aren't doing that.  "We" are doing the opposite, in fact.  The Supreme Court's Citizens United decision officially allows the rich to buy politicians, for all intents and purposes. Since there isn't any limit to the amount of money that a company can "donate" to a political campaign, they can strongly influence the outcome of any election in the country. 

A medium-sized corporation has tremendously more financial resource than all but the very richest American families.  Since the very richest American families generally run those companies, they rarely go against one another.  In fact, the richest 20% of Americans control about 85% of the wealth in the country, which gives them the ability affect elections in a way that is almost impossible to counteract by ordinary citizens.

So, the combination of Citizens United plus tremendous income inequality in the US means that the US isn't a democracy of any kind anymore.  Since the very wealthy choose the representatives, the representatives represent the very rich.  This kind of government system is called an aristocracy.

Given these data, there are two ways to make the US into a more democratic country.  The first is to overturn Citizens United.  The second is to outlaw wealth.  Which would you prefer?