It's not dysfunction, either. It's functioning exactly as intended, by the people who spent years setting it up, and is delivering their goals. Top of which was abortion bans, which required spending years patiently stacking the Supreme Court.
That the goals are stupid and evil and incoherent is a separate problem.
What's changed now, compared to the past, it's that the people deciding that what's written there is bogus have started changing things a little bit faster compared to the usual, hence all the brouhaha. Also a reminder that the Slavery System was very much alive and all under this same US Constitution for more than half a century, which goes to show that's it's really just a piece of dead wood.
There's a huge difference between "I disagree with this legal rationale" and "this court is illegitimate." Like it or not, every Justice on the Court is there legitimately. One of them via bare-knuckle hardball politics, to be sure. But according to the rules.
(Thomas was appointed by GHW Bush, pre-dating the first Iraq war)
I think you get the hint. In despotias laws mean nothing really. USA is not there yet, but the process is very gradual, glacial even. But irreversible.
Edit: Here’s what a federal judge had to say in 2023: "The solution for these deficiencies lies with the legislature, not the executive or judicial branches. Congress, for any number of reasons, has decided not to pass DACA-like legislation ... The Executive Branch cannot usurp the power bestowed on Congress by the Constitution — even to fill a void." https://www.npr.org/2023/09/14/1199428038/federal-judge-agai...
> Also, as an aside, if the bad actors in government who were screeching about DACA's constitutionality put even a fraction of that effort into protecting the Constitution when the First and Fourth Amendments were on the line, that would be great.
This is actual whataboutism
Almost everywhere has immigration enforcement. Most of those will do the occasional raid on homes or workplaces. Very rarely do you see the kinds of conflict that ICE is (IMO intentionally) causing.
Also, as an aside, if the bad actors in government who were screeching about DACA's constitutionality put even a fraction of that effort into protecting the Constitution when the First and Fourth Amendments were on the line, that would be great.
This leads to constant messaging against whatever the underpinnings of a society happen to be.
So liberal democracy is in decline where it has been healthiest.
I have hope that liberal democracy will rise in regions where it is scarce. The Middle East first, then perhaps China, which we have all written off based on a couple decades (the blink of an eye, in the long run)
In the early 2000s I was anti-war, anti-intervention, pro free speech, pro freedom of equality, against politicians trying to legislate morality or speech in any way, and thought we should have a strong border but with good immigration opportunities to allow the best to come and make the country even better. I was a fairly text book liberal, perhaps a bit more left than average. I still hold, more or less, these same values - yet somehow in contemporary times that's deemed conservative, if not very conservative.
Why this happened is an interesting question, but it's ultimately irrelevant. It has happened. And so it's predictably going to have long-term consequences for the parties. Basically we keep using the same names for these ideologies, but the values they represent shift, and even flip flop, in dramatic ways over time frames that, in hindsight, seem extremely rapid. Yet paradoxically, it's not like there's any given year or election where you can officially say that issue [x] suddenly flipped.
.. no, I think that sounds pretty capital-L Liberal to me. I think you may have confused the views of a few incredibly online leftists for "contemporary times". Or we get into specific issues and find out what the extreme conservativism actually is.
You write about this in a negative tone ("outrageous views"). To go for the extremely low hanging fruit, what about when the establishment media tried to mostly ignore Epstein, and it was only the hard push from social media personalities that brought the topic back into the mainstream? What confidence does that leave in the establishment media, and that they are not bought and paid for by the 'ruling pedophile class'?
When the establishment media refuses to talk about certain topics, it gives up the control over the narrative on that topic. That is their conscious choice. It is obvious that individuals will rise to fill that gap. Why are you writing about it as if it's a bad thing?
Does a liberal democracy even exist without independent media? I think not.
Know that I would rather social media didn't exist, but putting all the blame for our dire political situation on it is very misguided.
IIRC, "Christianity" used to be very much tied to monarchy in Europe, as well as feudalism. Then it was used to justify slavery. Then apartheid. And now it's sometimes used to justify stripping minorities of their rights.
We are seeing a decline of American hegemony, accelerated by this current regime. And the ascendancy of a non-democratic superpower.
However, the largest chunk of GDP and growth still sits firmly in democratic countries and very consequential American elections are happening this year, and in 2028.
The real question is, will Europe find its spine?
Let’s hope they are (happening).
I would look more for voting place shenanigans, voter ID laws with only a weird subset of IDs allowed, radical gerrymandering, and stuff like that. Some of it will be blatantly partisan but also people are using justifications like "restoring trust in elections" to advocate for things that reduce the general franchise. They don't need to do a lot since a few percent is enough to swing the general balance of things.
Now that Babis is back in power with the backing of SPD and AUTO, it will also revert back into an Illiberal/Flawed Democracy.
Furthermore, all states on the cusp of EU membership (Albania, Montenegro) are also Illiberal/Flawed Democracies.
> largest chunk of GDP and growth still sits firmly in democratic countries
The only Full Democracies in the 10 largest GDPs are Germany, Japan, and the UK. Japan under Takaichi Sanae is pro-Trump and Germany is likely to see the AfD break it's cordon sanitare by 2029.
[0] - https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/democracy-index-eiu
Is Greek government really more functional than Polish/Czech one? My personal experience would say "nope".
And after having dealt with the experience of opening a large foreign office in Czechia, there absolutely is a democratic deficit (sure it's extremely efficient, but we just needed to keep a handful of decisionmakers and "phone a (now deceased) friend" in a non-democratic manner).
First, this is not my experience, and second, much like you I don't think that this is particularly relevant to the democratic character of the country.
I also would like to hear more about the democratic deficit you describe. Most problems around opening anything are caused by bureaucracy, which is obliged to follow norms produced by the lawmakers. Some of these norms are stupid, but that does not mean that they are undemocratic. Voters have the right to be stupid and to elect stupid representatives who produce stupid norms.
The core crux of "democratic character" is providing an even playing field as much as possible institutionally, organizationally, and politically. If functioning is subpar or requires "hacks" or misaligned institutions, it undermines democratic character itself.
Chest-thumping while ignoring the real degradation of institutions in a large portion of Europe is only going to put you back in the same position as the US.
> I also would like to hear more about the democratic deficit you describe
I'd rather not given the incumbent in power and how small the Cybersecurity FDI community in Czechia is. Maybe Vsquare, just not you.
Which of the five numbers that, averaged together, result in the total score, do you expect to lower and why?
I also expect the political culture score to start steadily dropping as SPD and AUTO's competition to "own" the far-right leads to the intensification of culture war discourse, and potentially forces ANO to start opportunistically shifting right as well.
I don't expect "functioning of government" scores to shift significantly either, as the same issues that persisted when I helped my former employer enter Czechia still remain.
Our PortCos will still continue to remain in CZ because once you build that network it makes everything so much easier (and because Israeli founders and operators continue to have a soft spot for CZ), but the manner if which we need to operate in Czechia and maintain closeness with the right people isn't that different from emerging markets.
And that I feel is the crux of the issue in Czechia and much of the CEE - once you know the right 20-30 people or their friends or colleagues, you get the red carpet. Otherwise, it's an uneven playing field.
"intensification of culture war discourse" Compared to what? There isn't much space left to increase the heat.
"potentially forces ANO to start opportunistically shifting right as well."
ANO is a pensioner's party and given our fertility rate, this is their goldmine. They don't really have to expand their electorate, it expands on its own.
"once you know the right 20-30 people or their friends or colleagues"
Isn't that why people fight to get into Ivy League universities or Ecole Normale Superieure? I am not sure if there is any single nation on Earth where personal connections are unimportant.
0 have ever threatened or supported any kind of violence against any person ever.
Social media posts on this topic are treated the same way as holding up a poster in public.
When they refer to liberalism or democratic values they mean neither. These are bywords for western hegemony, which is what they really care about.
This is what was under threat when they celebrated Romania's democratic first choice of president being denied.
A lot "CIA influence" isn't the CIA at all, but the US Government, usually State or DoD, projecting soft power.
I know this sounds pendantic. But whenever someone starts talking about the CIA like it's responsible for "supporting liberal candidates" - all seriousness leaves the room.
Nobody likes to admit their vote (or lack of) has consequences outside their little bubble.
From past personal experience, inter-service autonomy over policymaking is tightly guarded, and arguments always end up with the NSA (advisor, not the agency) where the president essentially becomes the tiebreaker.
Under the current administration, this rivalry has gotten much more intense due to the relatively hands-off management style that has been adopted.
The CIA and DEA switched positions repeatedly: one day the CIA wanted to support them to fight communism, and the DEA wanted to cut them off to stop the supply of drugs. When communism fell, the CIA saw the group as a liability who knew too much, while the the DEA wanted to pay them to destroy their drug labs and plant licit crops.
The group ended up destroying their drug labs, and focusing on money laundering, ransomware, and crypto-scams, which neither the CIA nor DEA cared about.
But the CIA is very consistent in following state department policies. They jealously guard their ability to delivery intelligence that conflicts with State Department priorities, but they don't have any strong priorities that conflict with those of State.
I'm sure things need to be ironed about by the NSA/NSC. That's normal. But the CIA isn't going fight the State department like they fight the DEA.
I'm open to correction on this. Maybe I'm just not understanding the situation.
It's much more gray simply because there are multiple agencies per department that can interpret and conduct intelligence operations.
The current administration also decided to adopt the private sector practice of letting "middle managers" conduct and implement what they want on their own and only disturb "upper management" if there are irreconcilable differences.
This is why policies change on a dime in the current administration.
I've observed that it's the messy process of democracy that has put the people in power. Sure, big countries (i.e, mostly Russia) would like to tilt governments their way, but it isn't succeeding. I can tell you though that local Facebook pages for newspapers are full of strange comments, seemingly Russian trolls (but I have no proof).
Why is it not democratic, you may ask? Because not a single one of us across the world had ever voted for or against any of the laws we must comply with (except for some lucky blokes in Switzerland). Laws were written and approved by a small number of individuals and not people.
The people have discovered they can vote OPM to themselves and their pet causes. ICE now has a budget 4x the size of the marine corps. SS fund is on its way to bankruptcy. Corporations get all kinds of subsidies. Farmers get their own subsidies. And it goes on and on.
Meanwhile the national debt just keeps going up.
As each guy pays more OPM to the next guy he keeps asking more for more OPM for himself to cover the OPM he's losing to others. Eventually the portion of the economy that is one big circle jerk ratchets up and then if it goes on too long the whole thing collapses.
Corollary question: should it be? Eg, is "liberal democracy" really the best we can possibly do? My take is that the long-term goal should be a society based on Voluntaryism with no use of force for anything other than self-defense. But if we ever get there, it won't be soon, and in the near-term the collapse of liberal democracy is trending towards the full-on advent of fascism and totalitarianism.
So at least for now, I believe liberal democracy is something worth fighting to protect.
If a headline asks a yes/no question, the answer is "no".
> "Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...
> A 2016 study of a sample of academic journals (not news publications) (…) were more often answered "yes" in the body of the article rather than "no".
> A 2018 study of 2,585 articles in four academic journals in the field of ecology (…). Of the yes/no questions, 44 percent were answered "yes", 34 percent "maybe", and only 22 percent were answered "no".
> In 2015, a study of 26,000 articles from 13 news sites on the World Wide Web (…) divided into 20 percent "yes" answers, 17 percent "no" answers and 16 percent whose answers he could not determine.
You misread. Betteridge's law says it can be "no"...
I think though his "law" is referring to clickbait that imply a falsehood to get you to read it.
"New Research asks - Can your baby live entirely off of kelp?!" ... "wow can she? that's nuts! lemme read! oh. no."
That doesn’t make sense. Of course Betteridge didn’t mean “it can be answered with “no”, but also “yes””. The point is that you can answer “no” instead of reading the article.
Either way, I was responding to ultropolis’ assertion—not Betteridge’s—by citing the studies which already suggest it to be false.
It’s hard to beat the raw power of central control when you need something specific done sharpish at any cost.
See chinas quest for catching up with asml. Asml arose under the western order certainly but I don’t think the western order could will it into existence the way an autocratic government can. And that i think is going to become a big problem as progress speeds up and more of these pivotal junctures come up in quick succession
The only question is whether it'll hit the ground before the next US election.
Any emergency 'chute's available?
"Is liberal democracy, then, in terminal decline? The rise of Carney himself offers a glimmer of hope, fuelled as it was by a reaction against Trump. But electoral trends in Europe do not suggest a repeat. A broad-based recovery of the liberal order will probably depend on a turnaround in the underlying trends, and here the signs are less promising. Attempts to soften the impact of worsening demographics are routinely rejected by voters and parties on both left and right. And the most promising source of renewed economic dynamism — AI — is likely to worsen inequality and increase societal instability, further undermining faith in democracy and hastening the slide into a zero-sum world.
Events of the past year have shocked the democratic world out of its daze, but it is these more powerful and slow-moving forces that should be the lasting cause for concern. Trump may fade from view in a few years, but any expectation that the liberal order will snap back flies in the face of the evidence. The old system was one that worked under a particular set of conditions. Those conditions are no longer present."
Are the voters a joke to the people who write such articles?
Am I a joke to them?
Is there a browser addon which can mark links on HN as behind paywalls?
Some sub-reddits tag them as such.
Let’s just say they are so off books sometimes agents check in and never check out.
What happened to that redhead woman who gave that CIA insider chat on YouTube about how other cultures see us as the technologically superior invader way back when?
My sources say she was incinerated for learning the paths of true Power.
Also hilarious how even on this downward trajectory the liberal order's main propaganda entities (like the FT here) run with geeky and nerdy stuff like charts (?!), that will show 'em!! A true sign that they know nothing of the real (ideological world). Just the other day they (the FT, that is) were also running with that mantra of "Trump is invading Greenland only on account of him getting messed up by the Mercator map projection!!", which was straight West Wing [1 ]heavy-liberal territory. Like I've said, they know nothing of the real world.
As the White population continues to decline globally, so too will liberalism.
You cannot separate the ideology from race, at least not cleanly anyway, regardless of what Blank Slatism says.
>Comradeship breeds races... Where a race-ideal exists, as it does, supremely, in the Early period of a culture... the yearning of a ruling class towards this ideal, its will to be just so and not otherwise, operates (quite independently of the choosing of wives) towards actualizing this idea and eventually achieves it.
In other words, it's not necessarily that a non-white culture can't independently form and sustain a liberal democracy. But they'd need their own historical events mirroring that of the Magna Carta, the Enlightenment, etc. The seed needs to exist from the very beginning. The Global South doesn't have such preconditions culturally; unless you count colonialism, but as we've seen, that's not enough to transmit the race-ideal permanently, mimetically speaking. So you'll get a cargo cult of liberalism at best, but you won't get liberalism as such.
I don't think this is related to what's currently happening with Trump, however. That's a separate thing, more of a populist backlash by whites for various reasons.