My read is that this is even further along in many places in Europe.
The nice thing about the HN Small World is that it can be efficiently searched.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hierarchical_navigable_small_w...
Quite often, and the answer is not many. It's why I've returned to a frankly elitist worldview, because this seems to be a historical pattern when power is diffused too widely. The lesson of our age may be that the Chinese political system, which seeks to restrit political competition within a small, carefully-selected group, is fitter than the American experiment.
Seems like it's just cultural norms all the way down. If people want to take advantage of the system, they can break these norms while pretending to be what they used to be.
I'll additionally note that China has famously not handled some of its major protests well and uh, calls in the military.
Agreed. I'm saying if we're accepting this as precedent, a Presidential republic is not a stable system. We either reject the military being called in to quell protests. Or we accept it as precedent and revise our system of government to remove that power from the madness of crowds.
This was supposedly a staunch conservative stance once upon a time. The last decade clearly shifted such mentality towards one not dissimilar to Russia. I guess the cold war never true ended.
Although I know quite a lot of (what I consider) well-educated Americans, it is also the only country from which I regularly meet the type of person who doesn't care at all about how society works (also, technology, history, art, etc).
You'll probably find that HN-person is the kind of person who values this kind of argument, but HN-world is quite small.
On multiple occasions, I've met Americans who simply care about might-makes-right. It's skin-deep, as soon as you ask them why they support this or that policy, it's because they are powerful and the rest of the world is not. I've literally met Americans who thought their tax money allowed them to summon troops, more than once. (This ended up backfiring as it turns out, they did not know how to get US Marines to arrive, big shocker.)
The same kind of thinking seems to be prevalent internally. You can trample the law, because you can. You see it even in ordinary US-made popular media. What happens what a character gets in trouble with the law? Well, then of course it depends on who has the most money to hire the best lawyers.
In the current case, I suspect the government will just do whatever it wants and there will be no legal reckoning.