Hacker News Reader

Comment by echelon | Hacker News Reader

In the US, you can prosecute and vote out bad behavior. There are also term limits, investigation boards, and laws whose spirit are to protect the people.

Yes, bad actors can thrive in any climate. But the US is set up with an immune defense against totalitarian authority and exploits.

View on HN

Given how many systems in US fail and at what scale it seems that those mechanisms that you mention when compared with other civilized countries are very much inadequate.

The US is the one of the more long-term stable democracies in world history. I would challenge you to produce the list of democracies (and yes, of course the US is a democratic Constitutional Republic, not a majority rule democracy), spanning merely the past 100 years, that have been stable the entire time. It's an exceptionally short list. The two party system in the US produces a high degree of stability at the cost of increased rigidity. Compare that to the not infrequent chaos of N party systems across Europe (as in Greece, Italy), or the way eg Australia has turned over its leadership in such a rapid fashion as to make governance nearly impossible.

If you go back a hundred years, Europe was still governing like it was stuck centuries in the past, ruled by monarchies. The rest of the world was even more backwards.

This says it all: https://i.imgur.com/4QhaQkn.png

Your chart seems to be drawn according to some very strict and modern definition of democracy.

I don't know history of countries in Europe, but in regards to stability some form of democracy was a form of government in Poland since XV century with pauses for getting raided and split up and ruled by our strong neighbors. We had kings but they were elected by the people (who owned land) since XVI century on average every 19 years [1] and had their power limited by political influence, in quite similar manner that US presidents have. And in nearly all elections our people had wider choice in candidates for kings than Americans had with candidates for presidents ever. We had a written constitution just 4 years later than the USA had it. So yeah, democracy can be stable and evolve without being a two party system.

Recently Poland had a few rough years but it's mostly due to our recent tendency to get polarized towards 2 party system by intentional messaging of one party over last 20 years.

So if your argument is USA must have all the dysfunctions because keeping every last detail of the system that is unable to fix them is the only way to maintain stability, then you are probably not quite right.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_elections_in_Poland

Responding to the question "what are the long-lived, stable democracies?" by giving an answer that has "pauses for getting raided and split up and ruled by our strong neighbors" misses the point of the question. Also, your Wikipedia cite has this gem:

> Particularly in the late 17th and 18th centuries, the political instability from the elections led numerous political writers to suggest major changes to the system

That doesn't sound very stable?

I thought you meant stable as not collapsing into authoritarianism.

I called it stable because it was a kind of a democracy for all that time. It wasn't petrified like US democracy is. Changes were suggested and some were implemented for the benefit of the people and the system.

In Europe democracy wasn't our secular religion with founding dogma. It was just a good idea that was allowed to evolve rapidly to become better.

Whatever your response to this is, I concede. I'm way too ignorant about history (of USA and in general) to discuss those subjects. Apologies.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com