The USA is the one where they give their elected figurehead pardon powers - like a King in the old times - and the previous one used them to insulate friends who very obviously did crimes. Then in fact he promises to do the same again only more so if given the chance, but his political allies protect him from prosecution anyway. Wow. I mean, I guess Cromwell was worse, but it's not exactly an enviable choice.

The US governance model is unsound, it's been around for only a relatively brief period and it's crumbling. France's setup is better, but if there had been some way to not execute the King of France I think they'd be doing just fine with some guy in a fancy hat living in one of their palaces and somebody to represent France as an idea who isn't connected to a political executive.

It is hard to say if the US form of government is really less stable than any other democracy -- since the US has been around, many countries have undergone wild changes to the structure of their governments. The US system has changed as well, it is an ever-evolving process.

Not sure the US is crumbling, there are some alarming elements but then we've always had our fair share of dummies over here. Somehow we've stumbled our way into a pretty powerful position, but of course as the UK can attest, global power can evaporate quite quickly. Hypothetically, if we undergo a Rome style transition from representative government to empire, does that count as stable?

> France's setup is better, but if there had been some way to not execute the King of France I think they'd be doing just fine with some guy in a fancy hat living in one of their palaces and somebody to represent France as an idea who isn't connected to a political executive.

France deposed its last two kings and its last emperor without executing them so I think we can safely assume than no actually no one wants a king there.

That would be a wrong assumption. After the Second Empire fell, a return to the Bourbon monarchy was considered the way forward. The problem was that the idiot next in line was too inflexible with regards to flag designs, so the Third Republic was set up with a largely ceremonial president with an extremely long term (7 years), with the hope that when that term is up, the idiot would have died, and the next in line would be the liberal Phillipe d'Orléans, compte de Paris. But by the time the term was up, the composition of parliament and the general attitude had changed, so the shaky, unstable, supposedly temporary Third Republic survived.

Henri, compte de Chambord (the inflexible idiot, proud descendant of a line of either inflexible or too flexible idiots), is thus considered as the French Washington - without him the Republic wouldn't have been possible.

> That would be a wrong assumption. After the Second Empire fell, a return to the Bourbon monarchy was considered the way forward. The problem was that the idiot next in line was too inflexible with regards to flag designs, so the Third Republic was set up with a largely ceremonial president with an extremely long term (7 years)

No, that’s only Tiers and the other idiots of the French right who had already dishonoured France during the the semaine sanglante and was only elected by the part of France which wasn’t occupied by Prussia. The left was republican but the commune had temporary weakened it. There was no way a return to monarchy would have hold. The population wasn’t really in favour of it which is why the third kept going.

Their disagreement amongst the right went much further than the flag anyway. No one agreed about who should rule and under which constitution.

So is every other governence of every country in the world but its all we got and it's better than most.