Comment by InsideOutSanta
1 day ago
The exact opposite is true. The only consistently working, stable democracies do not have a single leader of the executive branch, e.g. Switzerland.
The CIA sponsored extensive studies on this and came to the conclusion that democracies with a strong presidential role are associated with a greater risk of failure. It's not really surprising, and it can be seen in the US right now.
>that democracies with a strong presidential role are associated with a greater risk of failure.
Matthew Yglesias wrote a prescient article about this roughly a decade ago:
https://archive.ph/B3mMG
> The only consistently working, stable democracies do not have a single leader of the executive branch, e.g. Switzerland.
That system had to develop organically over many generations to be successful (in the case of Switzerland it was 500+ years with only a few significant interruptions) . In a centralized country with no traditions of communal and local politics it can just result in chaos.
The system was introduced around 170 years ago and it was done very suddenly after a civil-religious war won by protestant liberals.
On the federal level yes but that only reduced the autonomy that the cantons had, it didn't introduce a fundamentally different system of government, most decisions were still taken on the local level.
The system we had in the US pre New Deal was much more like Switzerland. Decentralization works just fine out of the box. The problem is that human instinct tends towards power which requires more centralization to accumulate.
Liberalism is dead Switzerland is ground zero.
The US has not failed yet, only grown unpleasant for certain groups of people.
> The exact opposite is true. The only consistently working, stable democracies do not have a single leader of the executive branch, e.g. Switzerland.
That's correlation, not causation. Switzerland made enormous amounts of money from its banking secrecy system over many decades until the US pressured it to end it. And the trends are not looking good for Switzerland based on data. We'll see how stable it remains as the cost of living keeps rising, real wages decline, and unemployment goes up.
If you provide wealth and a good lifestyle to your citizens, then almost any system will be stable.
Yes and no. The US presidency is very different than the way it's reported on, but it is true that the executive branch is being more assertive to make up for the disfunction of the legislation. We're doing that intentionally and for good reason, to demonstrate to China that the US can act with speed as one small part of the overall deterrent against World War 3. The US is almost always hugely misunderstood, because there isn't any other country in the world that actually works exactly like the US does.
No one knows how the US works anymore because the current administration doesn't follow laws and just makes it all up as they go along. It turns out the court system is too slow to matter: illegal tariffs just move to new illegal justifications when the patently absurd ones are tossed out after more than a year of using tariffs to drive inflation and stroke Trump's ego.
How about ask AI for all the times all the US presidents did something that went against the constitution. I think you'll be shocked. The court system being a bit slow is part of the point, because we're in an environment where China wants to use the speed of democracy as a weakness. Since you're on HN maybe you understand the concept of slow journalism or the benefits of anything being slow. Most people agree with that, having things be a bit slower is a useful check against errors. We understand that, the US was literally founded on that. China does not care. In that environment, we have to make compromises.
Being less predictable makes it harder for our adversaries to calculate. We're still good people, but we're in bad times. You don't need to understand. Through most of history only a tiny number of people anywhere in the world truly understood what was going on and what was necessary to respond to the times. This is true in science as well. How many times in history was it only a few scientists that had a clearer picture? Everyone thinks their religion is _the_ religion. The same can apply to news and opinions.
If you think the US is about Trump's ego, you still don't understand.