I always wonder why many democracies devolve into politicians just looting the government, whereas others become successful and relatively less corrupt.
In the case of Lebanon, the story is that it's ethnic/religious diversity is too much for stability, it being constantly open to interference from its neighbours and super-powers playing proxy war games.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_political_philosophers
What you say is true but besides the point. There's no argument to be made against ethnic/religious diversity. But there is a problem with foreign interference that stokes ethnic tension.
My own London is perhaps the most successful multi-cultural population in the world. We don't have RPG attacks on schools because we don't have superpowers spending millions on manipulating and arming the Hoxton Crips against the Hounslow Massive. And there's the important difference.
LOL.
Not forgetting the Chelsea Gym Rats, the West End Wide Boys, the Hackney Pirates, the East End Geezahs, the Brixton Yardies, the Camden Punks, the Camberwell Carrots, etc
2. Turkey as a whole is questionable. They have rampant ethnic violence even if Istanbul is doing ok.
3. The US and Western Europe arent turkey but again, have various degrees of ethnic tension being played out. Whether that’s trump and all he stands for or France’s burka bans. They’re also generally more powerful so less susceptible to meddling.
I am very concerned that US/UK appear to be decolving for the last 10 years. The standards of acceptable behaviour from politicians have definately gone down.
In the US the situation is quite a bit more dire, and roots of the current situation are also quite a bit deeper and go back longer beyond just "this asshole got elected to office".
presidental systems are really quite awful in practice
in the UK the electorate don't pick the leader
the electorate vote for an MP, and the group of those that form the party alone select the leader (and they can dismiss them just as easily)
the party has power over the leader, which is absolutely not true in most presidential systems
(and as to your second point, yes, under some hypothetical system that doesn't exist it's possible things may be different)
Voting itself is an averaging process, and you get the average of what ordinary citizen wants. It is hard to make people want good things for themselves without proactive investments in education and developing a population with scientific temper.
Yes, absolutely, but they also depend on a strong civil society beyond government. You need a media that's interested in and capable of investigative reporting, a layer of trade unions and professional associations, and a social layer that integrates people. The units larger than extended family and smaller than the country. And they need to be somewhat independent, not all run by the Party, nor all aligned along ethnic or religious lines.
You don’t see that anymore in America anymore for example, republicans across the nation believe that if there candidate loses, it must be voter fraud by either by one scheme or another. Shit, Trump himself still claims that he won the previous election.
https://www.newsweek.com/fact-check-did-democrats-object-mor...
About as comparable as a housefly is to an elephant.
The only question that should be disputed is if it was enough to sway the election.
When people with the motivation, mandate, and access, plus often full support of an entire state government, to find as much fraud as they can, go looking for it, that's typically all they find. A handful of cases, mostly accidental, not part of a big conspiracy or effort to swing the election.
Like when Kobach, a guy who'd made his entire political identity "voter fraud is rampant and super-serious" got clearance to go on a big crusade in Kansas. 6 convictions, mostly accidental, none part of a coordinated effort, mixed R and D (IIRC the cases actually leaned R, but small sample size, so either way, not that meaningful)
Rhetoric that it's a big deal (that stupid D'Souza "documentary"), but when they have to put up or shut up (i.e. take their evidence to the courts) there's simply nothing (meaningful) there.
https://www.reddit.com/r/electionfraud/comments/v85iy4/mind_...
This report looked at the 64 court cases and 187 allegations of election fraud in all 6 battleground states and documented the evidence showing that each and every claim of voter fraud by Trump's team was false, consistant with all the court rulings. You can scroll to any case you are interested in and read the details.
They found that there were many republicans who voted a straight party ticket except for their vote against Trump. This is consistent with the recent Wyoming primary results, where some 25-30% of republicans voted for the person in congress who is trying harder than anyone else to put Trump in jail.
The 2020 presidential election was most definitely lost by Trump, not stolen. I acknowledge that there are biased sources claiming otherwise, much to the detriment of our democracy.
Well, what's their reddit user names?
What point exactly are you trying to argue by posting a mind map?
We do have a stable and functional democracy, though it's rather brittle against a bad-faith executive. One prominent theory is the 'good chap' model of government, which holds basically that the system is set up such that 'reasonable chaps like us' can govern well and with few constraints, but the flipside is that Johnson's impact was limited by his government's lack of competence, not by institutional constraints. That might be liberating or terrifying, depending on your views about good government.
Go and read the Soviet Constitution of 1936 (Stalin) [1]. It talks about freedom of speech, freedom of press, assembly, demonstrations. It actually goes much further than the US constitution. It talks about the right to rest and leisure. Old age care. Education.
We all know that the reality of life under Stalin didn't quite live up to this. A constitution is just a piece of paper. It doesn't mean anything unless it is enforced. That's why I think we focus too much on things like originalism vs living constitution... the reality is that we should be focused on maintaining our democratic institutions which no longer look as secure as they used to.
[1] http://www.departments.bucknell.edu/russian/const/1936toc.ht...
The british sent their criminals to Australia (a harsh island continent) and they turned it into a thriving liberal democracy. Meanwhile most democracies in the developing world struggle. Culture is destiny: https://www.jstor.org/stable/20045923
A misconception. Most people who moved to Australia were not criminals. Contrast that with Germany, which turned itself into a genocide state through the influence of European culture.
Until Scott Morrison and the last three conservative governments undid some of that.
In Bangladesh, the government is putting leaders of the opposition party BNP in jail (https://learngerman.dw.com/en/bangladesh-court-sentences-opp...), and even then it’s the most functional government the country has had in decades.
I'm not even talking failed states here, I'm talking about respectable developing countries like Thailand and Turkey. The United States, despite its numerous obvious shortcomings, has it pretty good when it comes to political stability and democracy.
The US constitution is specifically designed not to have an exhaustive enumeration of rights. Its terseness is its primary asset as it's solely a restriction on government authority with supreme power wielded by the populace. Every worker's paradise that tries to list all freedoms operates from the opposite principle that they are granted by government authority.
That would be a waste of time. Stalin had no intention to do anything of that and everybody knew where dissension would send them: jail, gulags, torture and death.
That's not "a cultural thing", that's just cynism and propaganda. A cultural thing is when everybody wants to make it work but it never really works as intended. But that's more like the government with its full coercion power is against it!
That is sometimes the difference between stated preferences and revealed preferences.
A lot of people say they want democracy but when they’re faced with a democratic outcome they find repugnant they’re willing to look the other way when anti-democratic forces try to make changes.
It can absolutely happen here, too, if we elect clowns who explicitly want to break the working parts of the system. The ones that have no intentions of making it work (Except in a way that serves them).
Laws and constitutions are indeed just pieces of paper, and carry no power in themselves. It's culture that ultimately decides whether or not they actually apply, and to whom.
Main thing is I think there has to be some sort of cultivation of democracy (and some associated values), or it's just a facade or mob rule. It seems easier if the citizens are already middle-upper class for instance. We underestimate how much people need to be "primed" for democracy for it to flourish, it's also a more active process ideally that requires engagement, which isn't always so viable.
Indeed. Also that cultivation must be stronger than the forces that try to sabotage democracy and freedom. Now, most parties say they want democracy and freedom, but in many cases, it's a lie.
It’s a spectrum and different countries sit somewhere within this spectrum. In addition, modern democracies are relatively young and we have yet to fully figure it out.
For example in Germany, consider Weimer Repulic. It was a democracy and it failed and Nazis replaced it but now it’s Federal Republic and a relatively successful democracy. Such a wild ride. It’s hard to formulate. Now put it Next to Iran or China or US or Russia. Each have different conditions.
Some of these democracies have been caught in proxy wars and super powers. Some fell to bigots and despots. Some have oil and are targets of bigger players. Some are falling and others rising. It’s too soon to draw a clear conclusion I believe.
I believe it arises from an interaction between individuals and the surrounding culture and institutions.
Let's assume, a priori, that everyone is trying to maximize their "success". This doesn't necessarily mean purely selfish greed, but more an observation that there's a natural incentive to take care of ourselves and our own and that we will naturally try to figure out how to get there.
The "get there" part means navigating the social environment and institutions that surround us. We aren't living alone on a desert island where our options for survival are purely physical. Most of our interactions and choices are around other people and social systems. So when we seek success, we are pathfinding through the rules, norms, and ethics of the culture we're embedded in.
What kind of path do you take? In a culture with low corruption and high institutional trust, the most efficient way to acquire resources and stability is by playing the game honestly and cooperating in good faith with others. If we all do the right thing, we all win. Overall efficiency goes up and that benefits all of us.
In institutions with low trust and high corruption, playing by the rules and attempting to cooperate leaves you open to exploitation because your peers aren't doing that. You'll get screwed.
Now the fun part is the feedback loop between individuals and institutions. A culture is just the collective choices of all of the individuals in it, so every move we make in the game is also an act of defining the rules of that game.
The greater trust we have in each other, the more efficient the system gets and the better it is for everyone. But by that exact same token, the easier the system becomes to exploit and the more attractive it becomes to bad actors. The optimally efficient society is also the perfect honeypot. So as we seek greater trust and efficiency, we also directly incentivize deceipt and corruption.
Going in the other way, as a society gets more corrupt, it becomes less and less efficient. It's hard to get anything done when every single action requires several rounds of negotiation at gunpoint because everyone is presumed to be an adversary. So as a society becomes less trusting, it loses the ability to compete against other more efficient, trustworthy societies.
What I think you see is that as a larger society's institutional trust falls, within that society new pockets of trusted cooperating subcultures arise. Since those are more efficient than the larger society, they tend to grow and outcompete. But people in those pockets don't trust outside of that subculture, so you end up with the inefficiencies of mistrust and adversarial interactions at the boundaries between these groups.
Eventually a group might win and continue to grow, but the bigger it gets, the harder it is to maintain cohesion and trust across all of it. So eventually its overall trust fades but then new pockets of trust appear inside it.
This sort of slow boiling foam of fading trust and growing bubbles of cohesion is, I think, fundamental to human sociology.
We had high levels of autonomy under the Ottoman rule: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Lebanon_Mutasarrifate
Some historical figures have reached levels of influence that would qualify as "independent lebanon" (if people were so good at administrative bookkeeping back in the 1600s): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fakhr_al-Din_II
The modern state of Lebanon fails in part because it's a "contrieved post colonial state", you're right. But claiming it has no historical foundations is misguided. It's wrong. Colonials hijacked a very legit idea, and turned it into a failed state. It's different.
Regarding the article, before and after pictures of Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria to name a few places are the same.
Prosperous sovereign nations outside Western Europe and North America are bad for business.
Poland has been around over a thousand years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christianization_of_Poland
Show me where Poland was on the map before the Western powers drew it on the map after WW1.
Much like Lebanon which has cultural heritage going back, so does Poland. But maps might not reflect that.
Sure parts of what is now Russia have been part of Poland before, but the center is surprising stable.
Maybe because they don't have the oil.
Japan was not made by Meiji, it was transformed but foundation of the "miracle" was there. During sengoku it created and armed with locally built firearms armies that dwarfed that of any European state of the time in one generation.. from bows to hundred thousands of muskets
Culture >> everything. In 1945 Beirut was a paradise compared to burned to the ground Tokyo and every other major city. In few decades it had built dams like Kurobe, challenged and beat American car manufacturers.. resources, colonialism.. right. Whoever was running the place knew how to do it, they do not know now and very unlikely to learn in the next 100 years.
Those prosperous states in South Asia, outside mainland China, do seem to have lots of American troops stationed in them.
Just as the French and British dismembered the Ottoman empire to create modern Lebanon, so too did the British dismember the Indian empire to create India and Pakistan.
I always wonder why the Maurya Empire doesn't get brought up as a pan-Indian empire, it was local to the area and conquered almost the entirety of the subcontinent.
Now, I'm not sure what the difference of living under Maurya vs. Mughal vs. British rule was for its inhabitants, these are widely different polities from completely different time periods, but it's still a distinction. Though I suppose more of a retroactive one imposed by our modern bias, when we can point at India, Italy, and Germany and say, "ah, that patch of land is naturally meant to be united by someone."
- Signed, one of your mythical people with “very little Mughal ancestry” whose family founded Shahjahanpur.
The reason the British get blamed for a lot of the Indo-Pak issues is that, absent an indigenous Indian/Pakistani civil service bureaucracy, the British were tasked with executing the plan originally conceived by the Two-Nation Theorists, and they totally botched that execution.
Pick up a globe, close your eyes and randomly put your finger anywhere and you will see the point under question was under different (political)boundaries every 300 years or so.
Boundaries of any country are just limits to which a certain political administration extends its powers to. They keep changing for various reasons, every few decades.