Comment by tim333 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tim333 | Hacker News Reader

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You can look at countries that have remained democratically stable for a long time. The UK and Switzerland come to mind. I live in the UK and we have an odd system that I used to consider a bit of a gimmick for the tourists to take photos of but appreciate more these days. Basically the fact that we have a king but with severely curtailed powers delegated to the elected folk makes it very hard for one of them to appoint themselves effectively king, especially as the military all swear allegiance to the actual king (or queen).

It's partly effective because they system wasn't really designed but evolved out of a lot of bloody power battles, going back to at least 1215 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magna_Carta

I used to think it was silly but if you look at rival European powers they had Russia with Stalin, Hitler in Germany, Napoleon in France, Franco in Spain, Mussolini in Italy etc. The UK is one of the very few which avoided having a dictator.

[Edit - I was kind of talking about the wrong thing - avoiding dictators rather than Trump types]

The UK already had a populist takeover - Brexit.

I guess. I was thinking more of dictatorship rather than populists getting voted in. We may well get Farage voted in some time.

With Brexit and now this I've been thinking that if someone out there is intentionally trying to dismantle the 5 Eyes they're doing a bang up job of it. Step 1 appeal to their nationalistic or even imperial senses to make sure they piss everyone else off, step 2 stoke some internal grievance politics, step 3 get them to unload an entire AR15 magazine into their leg (to paraphrase Dril).

Brexit and Trump are both proxy wars of subversion, with traitorous support from a cadre of extreme reactionaries in both countries spending huge sums on social and trad media to manipulate public opinion in a self-harming direction.

It's very impressive in its way.

Although the winners won't get to enjoy their victory for long, because climate change is going to roll right over everything over the next few decades.

Yes, extreme reactionaries like the United Auto Workers union who showed up in some quantity at the tariff show last night.

The reality is "left wing" parties have completely abandoned their traditional working class demographic - both through encouraging manufacturing to be offshored and allowing in mass unskilled labor to compete with them. During the Bush era I thought working class folks were voting against their self interest when they voted Republican. That's not the case anymore.

It's convenient to try to play this off as some kind of foreign influence thing, but the Democrats did this to themselves.

While there is a lot of good thoughts about what the democrat party did wrong to lose the last election. I feel your comment places all the blame on them. They did not force republicans to go down this road. This is not the inevitable outcome of a broken democrat party. The republicans went down this road, and so did their voters. They chose this, many times. There were many opportunities for the republican party to rid itself of this ideology but they chose power.

So yes, the democrat party has had many failings over the past decade if not more, but that doesn't make this a binary choice between Trumpian policies and democrat failings.

It’s been known since the 2000s that it is in Russia’s best interests to weaken the UK-EU link. Russia was a major contributor to the Brexit cause, but it seems this topic quickly gets swept under the rug by British parties, red or blue.

That is because both were manipulated and ashamed of it. Russia is too sophisticated to play just one side. They have centuries of experience playing various ethnicities within russia against each other to maintain control. In the 2016 US election, Russia would have had a strong plan either way, what the alternative would have been and if would have succeeded, who knows, but it is note worthy how many members of the US administration, including its head, were formerly democrats.

Oliver Cromwell doesn't count?

And all the kings? Henry VIII for a start.

The UK has a monarchy with severely curtailed official powers. But it's a front. The UK is effectively run by the Crown, and the aristocrats have huge land, property, and investment/financial empires, own all the main media outlets, and set policy through their clients in the political system.

The aristocrats are narcissistic, shockingly racist, and often rather stupid - good at tactics like manipulating elections and news cycles, but contemptuous of most of the population, and clueless about how to build an economy based on growth and invention instead of rent-seeking and extraction.

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