[sandworm101]

This is why government by royal families doesn't work. When the state and the family are the same thing, the inevitable family crisis become a national crisis. A billion-dollar ransom that then sparks a trade war? This is a group of families fighting a petty grudge match against a background of slight religious differences, reminiscent of the worst of the Tudors.

[kurthr]

I think it only matters what type of people are in charge. Democracy won't protect your country, only whether those who have taken an oath to defend the rule of law, their country, and their vote, actually do. See recent events.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/trump-replaces-natio...

[ben_w]

While the type of person unavoidably makes some difference, it’s exaggeration to say it’s the only thing which matters. The structure of a government can require consensus. To use a named rather than implied current example, this is why the UK government spent the last two years paralysed over which Brexit to choose, either “hard” or “soft” — no consensus; and also why the process started at all despite the lack of specificity — 498/114 supermajority consensus in favour of some form of Brexit.

[dragonwriter]

> Democracy won't protect your country,

It may, but democracy goes beyond mere voting.

[dsfyu404ed]

Good systems are resilient to bad leaders. See the Roman Empire or England for example, neither has any shortage of bad emperors/kings and both avoided violent regime changes or subjugation by a foreign power for many hundreds of years (and counting in England's case)

[dragonwriter]

> See the Roman Empire or England for example, neither has any shortage of bad emperors/kings and both avoided violent regime changes or subjugation by a foreign power for many hundreds of years

Violent regime change was quite common in the Roman Empire as most people use that term, and even in ~thousand years of Byzantine history after the final East/West partition of the Empire it's hard to find a period of more than a couple hundred years without violent regime change; I'm also having trouble finding “many hundreds of years” consecutively without violent regime change in England. I mean “3” is typically the minimum value meant by “a few” and doesn't qualify as “many”, and the last change of government of the UK by armed invasions was 330 years ago, and that seems to be the longest stretch England or the UK seems to have had without violent regime change.

[dsfyu404ed]

I meant "violent" like "there was a war and plenty of destruction" not "the ruler got stabbed to death".

[makapuf]

I'll go further and say that if there is a system, it's precisely to be resilient to bad leaders. If leaders can effectively lead, why have a system over them ? e.g. a system that works when everyone acts out of good will is redundant.

[forapurpose]

> If leaders can effectively lead, why have a system over them ?

Do you mean, 'if the leader is perfect, why not give them absolute power?' The problems with that question seem obvious to me.

[dmix]

Which is why the OP proposed that (rhetorical) question... we have systems in place because we can't expect perfection, nor should the system require all actors to be acting in good faith to function.

So far I haven't seen any evidence that this has not been the case in the US (that the system of controls has failed or has been circumvented). Unless of course you take rhetoric at face value over measuring real-life actions and realistic outcomes, as is popular in partisan politics these days.

[dasil003]

Well there's also the question of knowledge transfer.

[forapurpose]

> I think it only matters what type of people are in charge. Democracy won't protect your country, only whether those who have taken an oath to defend the rule of law, their country, and their vote, actually do.

I think that citizens in a democracy have the power to protect themselves by voting and taking other political actions. The tools of democracy, unused, are insufficient.

At the same time there seems to be a very high correlation between the system of government and the quality of leaders. Trump is a problem but he stands out as an exception in U.S. history. The leaders of mature democracies seem much higher quality than those of other forms of governments, especially over time.

Also, institutions have a large effect. Their power isn't absolute, but the institutions in the US government are well-established and support the rule of law; they can't be changed overnight. Those institutions are protecting Americans from much worse (though they are also failing to do all they need to).

[dragonwriter]

> The leaders of mature democracies seem much higher quality than those of other forms of governments, especially over time.

The quality of leaders you must have for a mature (and thus taken for granted) democracy to survive as a democracy increases with maturity, so this is arguably simple survivorship bias: democracies that get poor leaders when the people have lost the immediate visceral understanding of the fragility and specialness of democratic institutions tend very strongly to stop being democracies.

> Also, institutions have a large effect. Their power isn't absolute, but the institutions in the US government are well-established and support the rule of law.

Do they? There are certainly many executive branch institutions that support the rule of the way things have traditionally been done in those institutions (which, particularly within the national security apparatus, may not reflect the law even when it also does not reflect the whim of the current chief executive. And even where they might (as I think a good argument can be made for the professional core, and even much of the subcabinet political leadership, of the DoJ and FBI) support the rule of law, they are extremely subject to disruption by the President via directed personnel change.

It's certainly not clear that legislative branch institutions support the rule of law at the present time; arguably, the legislative majority (at least in the House) has been openly aligned with the President against those institutions interested in the rule of law.

The judiciary is what's left, but this President has been making appointments there at a much higher rate than most recent ones (there's been attention to his second Supreme Court pick recently, but the pace of lower court appointments has been quite high.)

[forapurpose]

Could you cite some examples, especially of the first paragraph? I don't recall many (any?) mature democracies that changed to another system of government.

[josefresco]

petty grudge ... slight religious differences

Understatements of the century.

[dsfyu404ed]

>of the century.

How many more recursive understatements before we hit a base case?