Is America at risk of following the path of failing nation-states? | Hacker News Reader

Is America at risk of following the path of failing nation-states?

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15 points_of13 comments

I recommend Matthew Yglesias' "American democracy is doomed" [0] if you want to explore this thesis without the abysmal writing standards of CNN online.

[0] http://www.vox.com/2015/3/2/8120063/american-democracy-doome...

I believe there is a way a to end ideology in our ( well, maybe your ) lifetime(s). I see less and less ideology day by day. I think that Wm. F Buckley invented this with "Firing Line". And with the Internet, it's eminently possible to train ordinary people in the rhetorical skills necessary to oppose ideology as a force in politics.

And if I may, Trump is what a non-ideological politician looks like. So... his process is more akin to a standup comedian, refining his material in front of an audience. This is an interesting experiment.

This being said, people throw the F-word (Fascism) around like they know what it means. The US was much more explicitly (economically) Fascist when J.K. Galbraith wrote "The Modern Industrial State" - there was little diversity in large business, central planning was believed-in and employment was cradle-to-grave. The U.S. is oh-so-very-much more free market, with (IMO) relatively weak challenges of the Piketty sort. I think his is important work but it's merely a grain of sand around which more analysis is needed.

The strengthening of the Presidency ( and presumably, the weakening of the Legislature ) is due to one thing - nuclear weapons. The election cycle and advertising hasn't helped.

There is perfectly useable nonfiction entertainment product out there. CSPAN for one. How do we get our friends and family to pay attention to it? Once you've developed a taste for it, the other stuff is clangorous and dissonant.

But again, the solution is to embrace the core Liberal Art - rhetoric - at the level of the public, as it was (more) in say, the 1950s in NYC.

But people are going to have to stop with criticizing the religious, the irreligious, the Left and Right and come to a human level understanding how it is that we are divided, what the limitations of our positions are. I do this with people I care about, I believe as a service. Or maybe I'm just a blowhard. I am Skeptical :) of that. If your politics are what props up your personal sense of identity, you're in trouble.

The strengthening of the Presidency ( and presumably, the weakening of the Legislature ) is due to one thing - nuclear weapons. The election cycle and advertising hasn't helped.

And here I thought it was, at least as of late, the GOPe at the national level becoming gutless would be members of the ruling class, part of a "Uniparty". Or note how little sunshine you could put between George W. Bush and the Democrats on things like the Patriot Act and immigration....

But you bring up a number of good points, especially about the Fascism of the period at least from post-crash Hoover through when Galbraith wrote that book. James Burnham wrote about it more contemporaneously, in his 1941 The Managerial Revolution.

The GOP thing is much, much later. I don't think it's the structural explanation. And I did throw in "the election cycle" and advertising - both mean a Representative has no time for nothing but campaigning.

If POTUS has the "football", how is it that Congress can maintain control of the declaration of war?

My explanation for the arc of the GOP is - term limits killed it. Dead. When Newt G. et al resigned, they lost all continuity - to the point to where hacks left over from Nixon came into power. Then, using the Internet as a formation mechanism ( under the auspices of the Vast Right Wing Konspiracy of anti-Clinton attack dogs) , you had the Tea Party, which seems designed for deadlock.

It wasn't necessarily intended, but it was completely intentional.

The GOP thing is much, much later. I don't think it's the structural explanation.

Oh, agreed, but I think it's a very useful data point in studying this.

And you have a point about the declaration of war, but, in our small c constitution, the president pretty much had free reign with the Navy, including of course the Marines, it took the Congress to get the Army seriously involved.

Which ended with WWII (see e.g. http://www.senate.gov/pagelayout/history/h_multi_sections_an...), since then we've bled mightily in the Korean "Police Action" (although be careful about the figures for the dead, the initial one was accidentally for all servicemen in any part of the world who died for any reason), Vietnam, heck, the Republican Congress explicitly refused to declare war after 9/11, and I don't think that had anything to do with the football et. al.

Between official governmental suppression and co-option, the "Tea Party" never got anywhere, I'm not sure it's relevant.

My explanation for the GOP is that they never got over the minority party attitude that was inculcated from 1955 or 1931 through 1995. Even when Newt and company were in theory running it, they didn't act like the party in power, see e.g. the Waco hearing(s).

Of course, your Nixon era retreads theory comports perfectly with mine ... but does it, for example, explain Boehner, who's political career started in 1981? Well, he he came of age before Nixon's election, but look at the much younger Ryan, he was born a few days into Nixon's 2nd year in office....

I'm going to have to look at that in more detail, but I already see some howlers, like implicitly claiming there was a low degree of political polarization in the early FDR years. Sure, the Congress was relatively less polarized, but there was great tension between it and FDR, and him and many Democrats and Republicans "in the street" in general. I.e. guess who had a much better chance of being allowed to grow food on their farms....

And what about the polarization between Republicans and Democrats when the former came into existence and got Lincoln elected? 600,000 million dead in a civil war, about as many in all our other wars combined.

A lot of people don't believe we really had the same system of government during and after each of these men were president....

You should carefully read his definition of "polarization". It has an exact meaning that is objectively measurable: it's how often individual politicians vote against the majority vote of their party. It does not refer to the amount of animosity between the parties or the extremeness of their positions. Part of his thesis is that these two measurements are now moving together, and were not necessarily doing so before.

I suppose I should, but in that case I think it's something of a redefinition of the word and less than useful. Especially since you have to, for example, factor in strength of party discipline methods. For example, expect a great discontinuity when the Senate started being selected by popular vote instead of by each state's legislature.

We usually haven't had the same after each of these wrenching events.

Great read. This has been debated in Latin America for many years. Apparently, the only country where the presidential system works is the USA. And it only works because the elites work extra hard to make sure that it works. But the political system has been deteriorating in the later years. More and more polarization.

Furthermore, that piece was written in Oct 2015. The author had no knowledge of surrealistic world in Sept 2016.

Errr, what about "semi-presidential" systems like France's Fifth Republic? Per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semi-presidential_system the difference is to whom the cabinet is responsible, i.e. who can fire them.

Other examples where I'm pretty sure "it works" would include the Republic of China (Taiwan) and maybe Portugal?

From the list of fully presidential with a prime minister (see link below), South Korea seems to have been making it work for a long time now, and, yes, I remember Park Chung-hee et. al. ... ah, and I see his first born daughter is now President, but obtained that by normal means, yes? Hasn't their Sixth Republic has been stable since 1987?

For fully presidential, while I'd be hesitant to say Argentina entirely "works", their system of government has been in place since after the Falklands, right? I would tentatively add to the list from vague memory Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Mexico, and the Philippines from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presidential_system#Republics_...

Although few of these systems have been in existence for that many decades (but see my other comment, I believe the same as of Hoover/FDR), and you could legitimately claim e.g. Mexico prior to the PRI allowing itself to lose wasn't really one, but I'm not sure it's quite that dire.

I've read too much Graham Greene, which causes me to sort of give up on Latin America. But Micheal Palin's "Brazil" travelogue is quite detailed, and it looks like things are getting better there. I do know that it's a massive country. Then again, the resource curse and Venezuela... tragic.

At least the US seems to have given up foementing coups in the region.

This is rich. James Clapper says the rule of law is under assault, which is true. He's a notable assailant! He hasn't been indicted for perjury, and the CIA is spying on Senate oversight, for starters.

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