Comment by sarchertech
16 hours ago
There is no system that is immune to takeover from a demagogue. There's not even any hard evidence that any system is more resilient to it than the US is. It's all just tradeoffs.
Germany had 7 major political parties in the run up to 1933. In fact if you look at the history of dictatorships that took over democracies, having 2 to 3 stable institutionalized parties is actually protective. The other thing that appears to be protective is a history of peaceful transitions of power, which the US has the longest or second longest.
Germany only became a democracy under duress in 1919, and it never really settled into a stable democracy.
Under immense pressure from an impressive list of disasters during the 1920s, it reverted back to authoritarianism in 1933.
I don't think this teaches us much about the US
Germany was a constitutional monarchy with a written constitution, and a representative legislature 50 years before 1919. The Kaiser in many ways was more limited in power than the President of the United States.
Nearly every democracy to dictatorship is preceded by disasters.