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Comment by casey2 | Hacker News Reader

Why do people keep repeating this nonsense? 2008? Every "recession" for the last 50 years? Nobody was under the impression that the US was economically stable. Go press max on the 10 year bond yields and tell me what you see. The "crash" puts it to where it was not even a year ago. For 10-year bonds.

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The main point is during every recession for the last 50 years, the US government has never missed a loan payment on its debt, even during recessions. It has a near perfect credit score.

Compared to literally every other economy in the planet, the US is economically stable.

Was

Compared to every other developed democracy in the planet, the US is politically unstable with its two party democracy.

Trump is just a product of this right-vs-left volatile maximalism, represented as woke-vs-maga, which is fully on-track to get worse. Try guessing who will be the next woke maximalist and maga maximalist candidate, and what Executive Orders it leads to, which the US is pretty much ruled by at this stage.

Good luck with flip-flopping maga and woke Executive law as a country.

I'm not sure where you've seen left maximalism in the government so far. You get a choice between right and "let's not disturb the status quo" centrish party. There were barely any strong left-ish opinions for quite a while. That whole idea of a conflict seems really artificial, looking at the news from the outside. Let's hear about the left once someone actually manages to force through things like: more residential buildings overriding nimbys, progressive tax without trivial loopholes, wealth tax, kill gerrymandering, federal level build-out of trainlines, etc.

> Compared to every other developed democracy in the planet, the US is politically unstable with its two party democracy.

I don't think this holds up to any sort of scrutiny. Brexit, plenty of other examples across the world

    > the US is politically unstable with its two party democracy

How about Netherlands and Belgium? With the exception of PM Rutte (NL) in the last 8 years, normally Netherlands has a relatively unstable democracy, compared to Germany or France. Their gov'ts collapse relatively quickly, then call elections. (To be clear, [Semi-]Presidential systems like France, US, and Brazil don't have the concept of "calling elections", so they are perceived as more stable.) And don't even get me started about Belgium: Their political system is a mess. It is like 2.1 countries in one: The French speaking side, the Dutch/Flemish speaking side, and a tiny German speaking minority. At some point (2011?), the went more than 500 days (FIVE HUNDRED DAYS!) without an elected gov't, while they were negotiating to form a new one. And both NL and BE and facing serious challenges with newly powerful hard right parties (Hello Geert Wilders!). This "woke-vs-maga" story isn't only in the US. Many highly developed nations in Europe are struggling with similar divisions in their political systems.

Somewhat tangential: I see two serious flaws with the US democratic system: (1) The supreme court is too powerful. If you look at many other highly developed, democratic nations, their supreme court (or equivalent) is much less powerful, and they are no worse for it. I have seen that in both semi-presidential and parliamentary systems. (2) The US president is too powerful.

But the country is polarized. So this woke/MAGA maximalist seesaw is what you’d expect if democracy was working.

The two-party angle really has very little to do with it, because there’s not that many “true moderates” in the electorate. Research shows that the “center” is comprised of people with a heterodox mix of views, but they’re not particularly mushy about any specific view.

Well I can accept that argument, it's interesting, but I think I want to disagree. I'm not American, I'm French and I live in China, and in both countries I know so well, the population seem to have many spectrums: young vs old, moderates vs angry, rich vs poor, nature-driven vs success-driven, tired vs energetic etc. So with all those dimensions, France ended up with 12 parties at the presidential election, from royalists to anarchists, going through greens, communists, centrists etc. China ended up with one.

France embraced the chaos and made it a point of pride, while China finds it absolutely terrifying and unproductive - but my point is that the population is exactly the same, scarily similar, in all its funny diversity, but the system is not a mirror of it, just an awkward model built on compromises: France wants to maximize representability and China wants to maximize order.

The US system is pragmatic: need to win, need to give the people a feeling of choice but not give them any sort of real power of structural change, and they split on a strange line, for most of the world, that I have even trouble to describe myself. I think Trump pleases people there because he pretends to be a structure reformist, which sounds fresh.

It's not the people who can't be diverse politically exactly, it's more complex.

Trump is a new experience for America, but you don’t have to go back far pretty much anywhere else to have similar examples.

Trump is notable because he is unusual for the US.

Parent is saying two party systems produce this and next will be even worse.

The 2 party system has existed for the vast majority of the time the country has been around. Now isn't even the most polarized period of it (though it's certainly up near the top). It's not always worse the next round but it's not always better the next round either.

Duh. The US has been this way literally since it was founded, and the poster is moving the goalposts since we were talking economy eh?

As a card-carrying Whig party member I take offense to this. US has had periods of 3 parties, where the 3rd party ousts the 1st or 2nd eventually and we're back to two party, though that's more 1800s.

This is a product of duopolistic parties AND social media algorithms. Outrage. Outrage gets clicks, gets money, gets votes.

I also wish to remember that the Libertarian party exists haha

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