> So anybody that will follow, regardless of the person's policies won't matter fully, as that person itself will be replaced 4-8 years later.
That is the fundamental problem. The only way out, is to make changes to the constitution to specifically prohibit the executive branch from having any of this power to arbitrarily change things on a whim. That is the only way international peer could in the future trust an agreement made with the USA.
As long as the US feels it is ok to sign an agreement and immediately violate it, nobody in their right mind will bother to negotiate any future agreements. Which is not a good state to be in.
It's not only the power structure, it's also the flawed democracy that allows gerrymandering and can only have 2 parties. It's the oligarch controlled media. It's the legalised corruption.
Very few “democracies”—a term that is more strained the more the structure of the political system structurally disenfranchises rather than represents views in the electorate—are as winner-take-all as the US, combining a strong Presidential system with FPTP voting, and basically none of any significance has as strong of a duopoly as the US.
That won't solve anything. Congress already has this power they just abdicated it to the Executive. The only fix is better voters electing better people into Congress. -- good luck with both of those. The US is cooked.
Trump is using a few very specific laws. Congress could replace them if it were functional, and not ossified by Senate rules sometime allowing even 1/3 + 1 vote bloc a blocking veto.
> So anybody that will follow, regardless of the person's policies won't matter fully, as that person itself will be replaced 4-8 years later.
There is only one chance the US has - they need to do what us Germans were forced to post-1945, rearchitect everything.
The US and UK are the only major countries that didn't undergo some sort of revolution, war or other reset of their constitution and legal systems and it shows everywhere.
If we Europeans (or anyone else) are supposed to ever trust the US again, we demand they properly fix their shit and prevent another madman's rise for good.
I fear this is just the beginning, I’ve seen nothing to say the voting American public are any less into divisive politics than they have been for the last decade
Americans absolutely love winner-takes-all narratives. They love it and they dread our "beta" democracies that cannot achieve anything.
They'd rather fall into Russian models of government where a single person can promise you the world and you give it the power to do so, rather than bother with things like "compromise" or "representation".
Re-electing somebody who openly attacked the institutions, instead of taking what happened on Jan 6th as a wake up call is the clear sign.
You do realise that Germany had a shiny new constitution, and then went on to elect that Austrian painter. And that's after the prior new and shiny constitution leading into ww1
Afghanistan had a new constitution and legal system when the US pulled out.
As a Brit, my take away is that having a nicely laid out constitution doesn't matter if you don't have the culture there to back it up. The US did manage to deal with one term of Trump, so that's something.
Germany came into being in 1871, and was in essence a monarchy until 1918. The Weimar Republic was its first attempt at a proper democracy, and it included an explicit "in case of emergency, we can revert back to totalitarianism" clause. It was a democracy with a giant built-in escape hatch - which as we all know was immediately used by a certain Austrian painter to turn it into a dictatorship.
Germany's first two constitutions quickly failed because they weren't democratic enough. The US constitution - despite its obvious flaws - has somehow managed to make it 250 years without causing huge issues, but it is now becoming quite clear that there should probably be a revision to prevent another giant mess like the current one from happening.
> The US did manage to deal with one term of Trump, so that's something.
Trump caused a lot of suffering and damage even in his first term, his second term (especially "thanks" to DOGE) was orders of magnitude worse.
A good democracy can survive one direct hit, maybe two, but anyone with a working brain cell left can clearly see the cracks in the foundation one needs to exploit to become President - and there will be such exploitation attempts, unless by a huge wonder the next President will be a Democrat, have a majority in both chambers of Congress and prosecutes everyone involved in the Trump administrations.
At least the timing of the turns is predictable... I imagine working with countries with snap elections is harder, especially when they have trouble forming a government.
Deliberative and hopefully self-stabilising. Real directional change happens over the span of a decade, not a few months. All arms of government (including non-kingship executive) brought to a rough consensus of choice and consequences.
You might think. The UK would be the most prominent example and in fact has been a much more predictable and consistent trading and negotiating partner than the USA
> The UK would be the most prominent example and in fact has been a much more predictable and consistent trading and negotiating partner than the USA
European here: Oh hell no. The Brexit breakup drama was years of chaos with each of the braindead Prime Ministers somehow managing to make things worse.
The EU-UK negotiations were mired in issues of EU maximalism; attempting to force each PM to agree a worse deal knowing not agreeing to it would cause short term pain for that PMs political situation. Its quite the thing that the UK managed to hold on as much as it did.
The UK was on the back foot in all negotiations having been forced into the Brexit outcome.
For all the nonsense printed in the UK and Continental presses, the UK had a surprisingly consistent position through the entire thing with clear threads of staff and policies still running to today.
The EU position was consistent from even before the referendum: Either in or out of the single market, no cherry picking.
Each PM in the UK's neverending parade gained power by telling their electorate "I have this genius plan that'll totally let us cherry pick" only to be deflated when the EU held to its clearly stated position.
The problem with Brexit was that the Brits wanted something that was never on the table, they voted for Brexit under false pretenses and then got mad when they couldn't get what they wanted.
There were no real negotiations, and there were never going to be. This has always been painfully obvious to anyone with even the slightest interest in EU foreign relations. The options on the table have always been the same:
You can be like Norway and join the EEA: full access to the single market, but having to make a financial contribution, accepting most EU laws, and with free movement of people. You get an exemption on some laws, but you don't get a say in any of the rules of the single market.
You can be like Switzerland and join the EFTA: partial access to the single market (notably not the banking sector), still have to contribute, only have to follow EU laws when it comes to trade, and still free movement of people.
You can be like Turkey: a customs union meaning no tariffs apply to EU trade, but you have to apply EU tariffs on all other trades and have no say over them.
You can be like Canada: a comprehensive free-trade deal which covers the majority of goods, but it means having to follow EU standards and requirements without having a say in them, and it probably won't cover services.
The EU was never going to give every Briton a magical gold-shitting unicorn, no matter how much the UK was going to plead and beg for it. It was more than happy to negotiate a deal on any of the options like those above, but it was up to the UK to decide what Brexit was going to look like.
But the Brexiteers promised the voters they could have their cake and eat it - "Brexit means Brexit", after all. Everyone invented their own personal idea of a Brexit, and the various interpretations were always going to be fundamentally incompatibly with each other! The negotiations went so horrible because the UK had absolutely no idea what it wanted, and any option was going to be wildly unpopular as it did both too much and too little at once. And all of that is before you take Northern Ireland into consideration, where the wrong move would result in a literal civil war...
Brexit wasn't a negotiation. It was a therapy session to help the UK find itself.
Cameron stepped down after he shat the bed, every PM was a Tory.
And yeah, the position was consistent. Before it was 'we could have all the benefits of being in the EU, with none of the down sides'. We could have soft Brexit, or the less popular hard Brexit.
Teresa Mays position was "Brexit means Brexit" and non of the others had a clue either. Because they promised everything to everyone. In the event we got a harder Brexit than the hardest Brexit discussed before the vote.
So if you want to say the UK was consistent, I say fuck you to the civil servants that consistently ignored the conversation prior to the vote.
That is the one change, and it hasn't resulted in the thing people actually were voting for (but couldn't): less immigration. Because the state says we must just import 750k people a year, so that's that.
Made by the people rather than the politicians- the mainline politicians all thought it would/wanted it to fail- they just thought they’d get a boost from catering to a disaffected minority.
You didn’t say it and it may not occur to you, but you are correct, the UK is among the many sham democracies, which is arguably the primary objective of “democracies”; an illusion supported by a concept called choice supportive bias, i.e., if you believe the outcome of something was due to your own action, choice, or agency you’re prone to accept it, defend it, not question it, and ignore its detrimental effects.
It’s a rather diabolical form of control, democracy. “You have fake choices and you like … nay, you love what you choose”, quite literally. You have to love it, because you have to believe it’s true. And that’s where they latched onto your mind.
So anybody that will follow, regardless of the person's policies won't matter fully, as that person itself will be replaced 4-8 years later.