China

Other people can give more thorough answers than me than I can, but since I'm first I'll go ahead and say that I begin by asking them if they know what the national peoples congress is. They nearly always say no. Then I ask them if they know what the Politburo is and all of the layers of it. They usually say no. I'll give them a short primer if they're still interested that the National People's Congress are direct people's representatives voted in layers.

If they haven't heard of anything and they're at least kind of curious, I'll tell them to start there because there's actually a lot more voting going on than people think. You'll never convince someone in one conversation that a country that they believe is not democratic, is actually democratic. But this is enough to get them to question things, and that's pretty much how I started, so hopefully it helps others that I talk to.

If they're willing to continue listening, then I mentioned that the government has a over 90% approval rate and has for a very long time. If I'm paying attention to the news lately and I've heard good things that liberals would actually support coming out of China, I will usually mention those. The most recent one about the workers' rights to have a council on their board of directors in every company, that kind of stuff.

The hard one for people to get past is democratic centrism, but they need to learn a little bit about what communism actually is before they can stomach that. That usually comes off as anti-democratic. When in reality, it's just a good fucking idea. They just need a better theoretical basis before accepting that democratic centrism is necessary to keep the peace.

If who I'm talking to is pretty pissy about United States democracy, then I usually put my thumb on that scale and ask them if they think that two parties trying to sabotage each other all the time is really a good strategy. Even if Democrats get something passed, if the Republicans turn around and spoil the barrel with their bad apples, then nothing can get done anyway. Even when you pass policy, it tends not to work.

If they're a gun-toten red-blooded American, I'd probably just stick to the workers' rights stuff. How their middle class alone is bigger than the entire United States population, and is growing, not shrinking as it is in the United States.