Which is why U.S. foreign adversaries have been actively sowing chaos for a decade.
America for better or worse (mostly worse) has a two party system that in practice functions as mostly a uniparty prioritizing defense spending, entitlements, and the economy, with some lip service paid to red meat/blue meat issues to ensure power is maintained. This means you can reliably predict what American policy will be in any given moment for any given president.
Besides, EU member states have had much more iteration on their governments, policies, regulations, and parties. It's not uncommon for a European country to have 7 different parties. And unlike the US, EU's don't hold their constitutions in a such unchanging high regard. Ours is purposefully difficult to change. France, for example, on the other hand, has changed its constitution twenty-five times since circa 1958.
edit: I took out He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named because it seems even here on the board of Very Smart People ™ we can't help ourselves when we see that name and ignore the rest of the point someone tries to make.
You say this as though he isn't favored to win the next election and take over the presidency and all its policies in about six months.
Edit in response to the edit: I latched onto this because it's entirely relevant to the rest of your point. Trump is the Republican party today, and his foreign policy dictates the acceptable stances for the majority of Republicans in Congress. His foreign policy is absolutely terrifying to our allies.
I didn't latch on to Trump because he's a big name, I latched on to Trump because you deliberately glossed over him as though he weren't an enormous glaring example of how quickly our foreign policy can (and is likely to!) pivot.
My theory is that liberals were made mentally dull by the Warren court, that it created this unacknowledged model of government within their minds where all actual controversies are low level, and will eventually work their way up to the Supreme Court, who will simply dictate the consensus liberal opinion to be the law.
It's a world where Congress has no other function but to create regulatory agencies to which they appoint their campaign staff, thinktank creatures, friendly professors, lobbyists, and each other's friends and family. To fill in the gaps, the country is otherwise ruled through executive orders, and all resulting injustices from this system are to be straightened out by the Supreme Court. That world is very much gone, and nobody has adjusted because all of their theories on liberal governance come from a period during which this was close enough to true (although gradually less and less after Warren.) It is not now true. We (and liberals) can stop worshiping the members of the Supreme Court now, and simply treat them as smart, connected people writing opinions that we may or may not agree with, instead of some holy chamber of wizened elders.
It's profoundly anti-democratic. It's an exact counterpart to the theocrats on the conservative side, but not grounded in anything but current upper middle-class trends and a belief in Whig history to replace the belief in gods.
If we can't fix Congress, and get them to actually govern, there's no government worth saving. I'm not going to fight for the right of the president to unilaterally declare war, rule by executive order and Supreme Court dictates, or the actual functioning of the country to be delegated to unaccountable regulatory agencies. Doesn't spark joy.
edit: I think the existence of the Senate probably adds to the level of liberal cynicism about democracy. It should really be abolished or directly elected in a way unconnected with the states. We already have a geographically based body in the House. The Senate is clearly a distortion of democracy, like a sensory homunculus for representative government (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cortical_homunculus#Representa...)
> It's a world where Congress has no other function but to create regulatory agencies to which they appoint their campaign staff, thinktank creatures, friendly professors, lobbyists, and each other's friends and family.
And they call anything that takes power away from this unelected shadow government "anti-democratic."
To be confused about this at this point reveals either profound ignorance or extreme motivated reasoning.
That’s why it’s “not guilty” or “acquitted” as opposed to “innocent”
You’re free to take the position that the timeline, testimony, and transcripts from the call are overruled by your belief in Trump’s and the Senate GOP’s integrity, but that’s not the only reasonable interpretation of events.
One can absolutely draw their own conclusions separately from what the obvious sycophants in the Senate ruled. A finding of acquittal does not mean that the alleged acts didn’t happen, in any court case, never mind one as politically loaded as this one.
But while I do agree NATO allies should spend 2% or more on the militaries in a good faith effort, the spending value itself is kind of a dumb metric if for nothing other than they could just spend money and have poorly trained militaries anyway. It’s a rallying point to be angry about by people who didn’t know what NATO even was before Trump started complaining about it.
Going back to the awareness issue, the United States and allies across the world have been working to stop Russian aggression in Ukraine, and potentially elsewhere like the Baltic states or other formerly occupied Soviet Union states. Many of those in leadership in Europe and elsewhere are concerned about Trump because they do not, for good reason, trust him to act faithfully on the commitments that the United States has made in Europe.
Vladimir Putin believes that the United States and its influence should be degraded in Europe and that European states should instead be under the influence of Russia. This is a net negative for the United States obviously, and the concern here is that Donald Trump seems to either agree or find himself apathetic toward this because he doesn’t seem to understand that he’s being played for a fool to the detriment of the United States and European partners.
To try and paint a more clear picture, if the United States were to fail to honor its security commitments to Europe, it calls into question the ability of the United States to honor any strategic commitment. This pulls not just European countries closer to Russian influence, but causes the United States a massive headache in the Pacific as South Korea, Japan, and Taiwan (never mind the Philippines or others in South East Asia) stand to be sucked into the sphere of Chinese influence which means that the United States loses military, diplomatic, and economic capabilities and leverage.
You might say “so what?” and to that I’d say you’ll find our country worse off economically, higher prices for many goods, and whatever meager international influence exists today to cooperate on global or regional issues will be significantly degraded.