I didn't say that... In fact I made almost no judgement on the quality of the changes...
But, if I had to discuss this subject: I would say that in a nuclear computer powered world, a political system originally designed for farmers and horses, on which we consistently hack workarounds, isn't the best choice.
And on the subject of the Fourth Republic, would you agree with me that this was a direct consequence of WWII and that in terms of "political time" it was changed very quickly?
I don't know about most of it being changed, but yeah, a number of things have been changed. The argument there is that you need to strike a balance between making changes too difficult and too easy, and of course there are arguments on both sides.
One point of comparison might be France, which is currently on its fifth attempt at a republic (with intervening reigns of terror, emperors, restored kings, anarchies, and Nazi collaborationist regimes), while we're still on our first one (or second, if you want to count the Articles of Confederation). Germany, Italy, Spain, etc. have all had multiple attempts as well.
Not really: people can point at the stability of the Fifth Republic and compare it against the previous regimes, which were quite the opposite. That creates a lot of inertia against scrapping a system of Republican government that currently fundamentally still works.
Well, the 5th French Republic is going well since the 50s, isn't it? As is the post-war BRD in Germany. Both used to have an Emperor at some point, Italy went from Kingdom to Facist regime to democracy. So yes, if the situation changes you can change your government form. Basing 21st Century politics on something written in the 18th century is... weird. Especially as it is more the interpretation of what the authors thought, and might think today, based on these writings. Just my outside opinion.
> "Historically speaking, competent and well-run monarchies outperform republics in almost all metrics except maybe military"
Gosh, this is an incredibly long discussion and I don't know where to start. I tried writing a reply and I'm just not accurately capturing it - my ability to articulate all the history I've read in a short summary isn't so good. Let me try, though.
First, yes, the United States is amazing, it was the most well-designed republic in history during the early years. There's been times when republican government was suspended and dictator/imperial leaders came to power. Since I don't want to make this overly political, without naming names I'll say there's been two American presidents that acted very much like dictator-type emperors. They took emergency powers, suspended civil rights including habeas corpus, drafted men into military service, seized industry, and conquered large tracks of land. Both of those guys were popular but quite brutal and oppressive to people who opposed them, including arresting people for peaceful protest. The first of these guys even arrested elected officials that didn't agree with his war! Both of them seemed poised to control the United States for a long time, but then they both died in office, and the next administrations quickly put more safeguards to make sure America didn't get a tradition of presidents doing whatever the heck they wanted.
It's a really strange case - these guys are generally seen as good guys, and were good guys in some ways, so history treats them favorably, but they were both very dictator/monarchy-like once coming into power, ignoring the Senate and Supreme Court. Prior to them, I think the early American federal government was one of the finest government designs in history, so yes that is pretty incredible. Though, the USA has been gradually sliding towards what tends to happen in republics with corruption, politics, factions, and all that.
Generally speaking, you get lots of politics, bureaucracy, waste in a republic, and lots of corruption once people come into power. There's corrupt monarchies, but a good monarch can almost completely end corruption and waste in a short time. I'm thinking of someone like Tokugawa Yoshimune -
It's very hard for a republic to get corruption, waste, and crime to zero, it almost never happens. It is very possible got a good monarch to clean house and get corruption, waste, and crime to zero.
Beyond that, my, where do I start? I'd recommend looking at comparable nations at comparable eras of history and see if republics or monarchies produced more art, science, architecture, trade, general happiness and health and prosperity, and things like that (admittedly difficult to measure). I'd read some thoughts by smart people on what happens in democracy through history, and monarchy. I'd look at the Federalist Papers to see how America was designed, I'd also strongly recommend Machiavelli's The Prince which has some analysis on the difference between monarchy and republics, and then I'd look at some of the Greek and Roman thoughts on the matter. The height of Rome came after Rome transitioned from a republic to an imperial monarchy, but this same transition sowed the seeds of its downfall with succession crises and the power of the Praetorian Guard. Likewise, the Ottomans and the Janissaries...
The most insightful eras for me is when there were a number of small states with similar resources and technology in a local era. The monarchic states in Renaissance Italy, the Greek city states, different eras of civil war in China and Japan... republicanism traditionally underperformed monarchy on average, but was less prone to catastrophically bad leadership, with the exception of rulers who came to power democratically but then seized power (that's what happened with the Chancellorship of Germany, there's been between 2 and 5 hardcore dictator American presidents depending on how you define it, etc). It's a large topic - if you have specific questions, I'll try my best to give a starting block of where to read and learn.
Judging ancient events with modern standards I find devious in its own right.
Let me reiterate, I am not advocating any kind of policy. I am just trying to discuss history and politics. Since I like to take maximum out of a debate I approached this one from an unpopular viewpoint.
And the best you can do is list some anecdotes then call me shallow and repugnant.
The question of government is one of the hard questions. Where there are no easy answers, but a lot of hard ones. Today it seems that our populist democracies are leading us towards totalitarian government - a lot like what happened to Rome between Octavian an Caesar.
What I am trying to bring forward here is that successful republics have strived for maximal democracy, yet had to build in safeguards against populism and mob rule.
We can debate whether this was an important feature or not, but calling me names is not helping your point.
You haven't given an examples of what you are talking about so I'm not sure you should switch on the self righteousness just yet.
Glamorizing historical figures is ridiculous and if you look at the replies, no one thinks the current system is perfect or even close. Even so, the amount of decentralization and the relative success of that structure in government was an enormous leap from the state of governments at the time.
Yes as well as the republic itself. It's a garbage system designed to keep power out of the grasp of the commons, which only has merit in relation to even worse systems like monarchies or fascism.
The French are on their fifth attempt at a republic. Some of them ended...badly.
The Germans are on their second or third (depending on how you count... I don't consider DDR to have been a real republic). The first one ended...badly.
The United States is still on its first republic. If it weren't for some degree of independence for the individual states the United States would never have been formed in the first place, and, if it had been, there would likely have been many civil wars, not just one.
It's almost like a bunch of highly educated and intelligent individuals spent several years studying the failure modes of previous republics and then designing a system that would be robust against those failure modes.
This has to be the longest comment I've ever seen on HN. I don't mean that as an insult, simply an observation. Wow! It's obvious you care about this subject, as do I. And for practical reasons.
If I asked you whether you'd rather be ruled by Stalin and the Bolsheviks, or by Teddy Roosevelt
I'd rather be ruled by a system, not a person. We are a nation of laws, remember? I would rather not be ruled by any one person no matter how great they were. Remember "Give me Liberty, or Give Me Death!" "Live Free or Die!" Come now, these issues were prevalent and were widely discussed during the United States' founding. It's not like any of them are new.
As for your Gibbon quote, let's not start playing who's got the best authority. Plato said that philosophers should rule, and that art should mostly be eliminated. Lots of people working with the best information they had at the time made lots of statements. I think Gibbon was completely smoking crack, and I'm not going to take 7 paragraphs to prove it. After all, I don't think it will convince you anyway.
You're making a case based on incomplete stories. Sure, early democracies without proper checks and balances did all sorts of heinous things. But Germany became productive, Iraq will become productive. These things are simply a matter of time. Aristocracies stagnate. Democracies evolve. Since we've started with mostly autocratic systems and moved towards democracies, any change to the negative has to be viewed in a much longer focus.
As to WWI, you're surly not telling me that Tsarist Russia was democratic, are you? Or that the rise of populist feelings and movements didn't drastically affect the outcome and aftermath? Or that the Germany-France war in 1870 didn't set the stage for the larger conflict to follow, right?
It just seems amazingly blind to assert that the evolution of what works and what doesn't be predicated on some Utopian view of inherited rule. In fact, it's circular logic at its best. If a nation doesn't do well, then it's the leader's fault. If it does well, then it must have had a good leader. You're stuck never being able to figure out that some systems work with bad leaders. That's a major advance in thought that The Enlightenment brought, and it's one that you seemed to have missed.
There are always lessons in history, even accounting for the differences between an agrarian and digital society. Private militaries have proven to be rather fickle when it comes to rights v. might.
Monarchy was an improvement on despotism, maybe constitutional republics were an improvement on democracy, etc etc etc. The organisational units could be considered destroyed, or they could be considered reconstituted, the point is that the functions handled by the OUs in question went to another ostensibly more efficient instance thereof. This is much easier if the new OU does not rely on its underlying infrastructure from the old OU.
Things should improve somewhat is a pretty hard ask for something that doesn't sound like a good idea, letalone in theory. Of course, it's an open question as to what the end result of all of this will actually be, and maybe it will indeed be the worst catastrophic case of making the largest cause of non natural death in the past century even worse, but you'll excuse me if I find that hard to believe and think clearing that particular hurdle ought to be pretty easy.
That was basically the original conceptualization. It didn't work too well and was modified. IIRC, that political configuration has a history of failure whenever tried. (Maybe someone who is more of student of political history can elaborate. Not my strong point.)
> There's a scale between 100% direct democracy and 100% dictatorship/plutocracy. I think most of the current republics are significantly closer to the latter than the first, as besides voting once every 4 years in most countries, there isn't much the population can do to help shape political decisions (other than protests and media scandals, but those don't really have much to do with direct democracy).
This is by design. Bodies politic which begin as "100% direct democracy" tend to transform themselves into "100% dictatorship" with alarming regularity.
That this is a common historical pattern was already old hat in Plato's time.
I made no argument about whether they were better or worse than their contemporaries.
However, I do think that by modern standards, all governments were terrible back then. Most of history is like that. It's mostly about cruelty and suffering.
But, if I had to discuss this subject: I would say that in a nuclear computer powered world, a political system originally designed for farmers and horses, on which we consistently hack workarounds, isn't the best choice.
And on the subject of the Fourth Republic, would you agree with me that this was a direct consequence of WWII and that in terms of "political time" it was changed very quickly?
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