It's not just democracies. I can't think of a system of governance that's stable over centuries. Oppressive regimes tend to implode once amassed suffering reaches a peak of rebellion, or evolve into something more benign (and potentially get conquered then). Even Rome, the long-lasting empire, wasn't ruled the same way throughout its history.

I think that's what GP meant when they wrote that "we could end up in a super-stable oppressive regime". Because the oppressive regimes so far weren't oppressive for long.

Whenever I get into this, I come back to the political genius in the 4th century who turned the Roman Empire into the Roman Catholic Church.

Rome continued to rule the world for a ~15 centuries. There is still a sizable chunk of the global population that obeys Rome, even though they are not ruled by anything like the Roman Empire.

Realising that the military empire wasn't going to work any more, and changing Rome's historically laisse-faire attitude to religion into an effective method of rule... that's genius at work.

The millenary histories of the Egyptian and Chinese empires disagree. Yes, dynasties came and went, but those polities endured for thousands of years—indeed one could argue that the ongoing governance of China by the Communist Party is just the latest dynastic swing.

Chinese dynasties got overthrown pretty regularly every two or three hundred years, with a good amount of divided kingdoms, or foreign invaders ruling over much of China, thrown in between.

Oh, also switching dynasties frequently resulted in the entire previous royal family being summarily executed.

For a brief(?) summary: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynasties_in_Chinese_history

And cultural knowledge:

Burning of books and burying of scholars, Qin dynasty, 213 BCE

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burning_of_books_and_burying_o...

Xianyang Palace Archives

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xianyang#History

I think we’re talking about forms of government and not geographical countries. China definitely doesn’t fit here since it’s governing bodies have shifted so drastically in the last few hundred years. I don’t know much about the specifics of ancient Egyptian government but I imagine it would vary with the dynasty if not with the individual ruler. Traditional monarchies are based on the whims of a ruling elite, family, and individual after all. They have no constitution to provide continuity and all law, secular and religious, is superseded by royal decree.

I'll have to read up on Egypt and pre-XX-century China. How oppressive were these dynasties typically? What did the life look like for a regular subject?

We'll probably never know, unfortunately. The literate classes in ancient societies rarely wrote about the lives of subsistence farmers, who were the vast majority of the population, so while some details can be reconstructed it's very hard to speculate about how oppressed a typical farmer would have felt.

The Vatican has almost a couple of millennia of continuance, but I'm not sure I'd want to say continual stability per se.

Yes, for any "couple of" smaller two. And more than once it was not clear whether the Vatican was still relevant at all.

The Vatican is also not the same size and breadth as the US or China.

The Vatican as a country, I would agree. The Vatican as the Catholic Church, does seem to be on-par with those, at least in terms of head count.

Compared to today's bureaucracy, taxes, etc, they were free as birds...

That’s quite plausible. It may be that the only super-stable form of government is a high tech invasive AI powered surveillance state that knows everything about everybody and brooks no dissent. China is very hard at work building exactly that right now. In which case, in the long term were probably in trouble.

The AIs might not need to take over, we might actively hand ourselves over to them.

> democracies are inherently unstable. Athenian lasted 200 years and got swallowed up by Macedonian autocracy. Roman lasted 500 years and got overthrown by the army.

The Roman Republic learned from Athens’ democracy. Even late Republicans like Sulla and Cicero and Caesar recognised the Republic’s overuse of checks and balances, as well as its lack of a state army. Caesar almost uniquely recognised Rome’s broken voting system. Unfortunately, they were too late.

America’s founders were not. The lessons of the Republic gave us our strong executive and state-funded armed forces. Our Constitutional amendment process is sclerotic, but there is nothing to suggest our Republic is inherently flawed in the way Athens or Rome were.

> Our Constitutional amendment process is sclerotic, but there is nothing to suggest our Republic is inherently flawed in the way Athens or Rome were.

Analyses abound about [what's wrong with American democracy](https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Essay:Problems_with_the_curren...). The nail in the coffin though, will be the first part of your sentence. The American Constitution is notoriously hard to amend, which means that it is just too easy to maintain as it is by those who benefit from the status quo. We can already see this by how the will of the majority is routinely ignored through unequal representation. My opinion is that this is not sustainable and will have to be resolved through unlawful means, exactly because of the unflexibility of the law.

> Roman lasted 500 years and got overthrown by the army

Byzantium (and the rest of the Eastern Roman Empire) disagrees [0]. They lasted until 1453 - incidentally only 50 years before Columbus sailed.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byzantine_Empire

Look, I love the Roman Empire just as much as anyone (and get more than a little miffed whenever someone denies that the Eastern Roman empire was legitimately Roman), but it was in no way a democracy.

It's funny -and not counter to your point- but several of the succession struggles that plagued the Eastern Empire are characterized as "almost elections", by historians. Since its inception, the empire never had an official succession system and hence every new ruler was contested. Constantinople was so easily defendable that a popular usurper had great chances of making himself with the throne if he could take control of the capital. More than once, pretenders rose to power by popular acclaim at the hippodrome.

That's actually kind of a fair point. Another thing to consider is that if you consider only the military (which wouldn't have been that weird for a pre-enlightenment democracy), there are quite a few times during the empire that approached democracy (relative to the time period).

I guess, really, I meant to imply some sort of a modern interpretation of democracy, wherein a single city (or military) voting for the entire empire wouldn't exactly cut it.

The parent is talking about the Roman Republic, not the Roman Empire. The Roman Empire and its continuation the Eastern Roman (Byzantine) Empire were not democracies.

> They lasted until 1453 - incidentally only 50 years before Columbus sailed

Sidenote: incidentally not coincidentally. The closure of the Silk Road and other important East-West land routes as a result of the Ottoman conquest was one of the important spurs that kicked off the Age of Discovery, as everyone scrambled to find new routes.

in context, I think they are referring to the republic.

Most things have finite lifespans. The benchmark for a form of government is certainly not that it should be eternal and continuous.

Look at some cities in Europe. Many have waxed and waned, some even many times. They have been parts of different countries and empires. Many have influenced the world greatly for the better.

Lasting 250 years is remarkable stability.

Not if compared to 3000 years of Egypt.

Divide by 30 dynasties, though.

And they were overrun by the Sea Peoples, who set up their own dynasty. Overrun by Kush, who set up their own dynasty. Overrun by Persia, who set up their own dynasty. Overrun by Macedonia. Overrun by Rome. Each of those was an end of an established government.

I am intrigued, can you refer me to where Polands parliament voted for the empires to devide the country?

Well, it's not like there was much choice. It was formality at this point, with foreign armies already inside the country.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partition_Sejm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Partition_of_Poland