[kergonath]

Come on, there are plenty of healthy democracies in which all votes have the same weight, it’s trivial to demonstrate how wrong you are.

“One person, one vote” might have been radical 300 years ago, but it really should not be controversial in the 21st century.

[Turing_Machine]

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.

[kergonath]

Europe has been under stresses that are not really comparable with what the US underwent in 2 centuries. The only really existential crisis was the civil war, whereas most European countries have been invaded a couple of times, and almost all of them had battles on their soil.

It is true that some compromises were needed because of its federalist character. In this it is much closer to Germany than to France.

> 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.

I am not really disagreeing with you here, but what makes you think that this was not the case in other countries? Were there no highly educated and intelligent people in Europe for 2 centuries?

There was a lot of cross-pollination between France and the US at the time of the revolution, several people were involved in both. The American constitution is built on enlightenment values that were quite widely shared and Europe was not short in political thinkers either. A lot of them also benefitted from the American example.

What ended most of the French republics were coups d’états and wars. As in “the enemy is a 2 hours drive away from the capital”, not “let’s bomb another country on the other side of the world”. It’s not because of its immutable constitution that these things did not happen in the US.

In short, I think smugness is unwarranted, and the US is not immune to coups d’états, even if its geography precludes almost any wartime occupation. Also, philosophers in the 18th century were not super-human. Their work is not perfect. The lack of evolution leads to fossilisation and a shift of power towards the Supreme Court. This is a serious threat to the separation of powers, and should be taken seriously.

There are other failure modes that have been made clear in the last 2 centuries, Americans would be wise not to dismiss them and learn from others, as other learnt from them.

[Turing_Machine]

> Were there no highly educated and intelligent people in Europe for 2 centuries?

Their mistake was generally adding Rousseau and Marx into the mix, rather than stopping with Locke.

> As in “the enemy is a 2 hours drive away from the capital”, not “let’s bomb another country on the other side of the world”. It’s not because of its immutable constitution that these things did not happen in the US.

Err... before Canada became quasi-independent, the United States had a very long border with the British Empire, which was (in)famous for its penchant for grabbing territory. They even burned Washington DC at one point.

The story was the same with Mexico. In the early years of the United States, Mexico was part of the Spanish Empire, another entity noted for wars of conquest on the grand scale. And yes, after Mexican independence, the United States launched a war of conquest of its own across that border. But it could have gone the other way in the early days.

The French (another colonial power) also had massive holdings in North America.

Sorry, the "United States didn't have any war-like neighbors" theory doesn't hold.

[ryrymcfly]

I feel like the failure avoidance systems have been eroding steadily now for almost 5 decades.

Just pick a criteria on which to judge a societal system and you'll find the us near the middle bottom of the pack.

[synergy20]

Tax and Law and Republic are the three to hold the society in order with enough individual rights for the long run.

The only way I can agree on pure majority vote is that you need to qualify for it, e.g. only those who contributed to the society(taxpayers,social works, housewives raising kids,etc) can vote(disabled can vote no matter what). Voting right should be earned.

[kergonath]

> Voting right should be earned.

The problem you run into is that someone has to define how it should be earned. Several criteria have been tried (wealth, tax paid, military service, etc), and all of them have been found inadequate in one or several respects.

Several revolutions have been fought over this. Still, assuming that a perfect criterion would exist, what would be yours?

[ryrymcfly]

Mine would be qualified service to society. 2 years of public service, with no option to bypass. Service being tailored for your particular skills and abilities.

[kergonath]

This is already much more sensible than paying above a threshold in taxes, or owning a certain surface area of land, or coming from the right families. We'd have to define "public service" in such a way that absolutely everyone could perform it, including for example disabled people. Otherwise, it's just a requirement to have been fit (and male, in most cases) at some point in your life.

[diggernet]

I am unaware of any definition of the phrase "public service" which requires physical fitness or masculinity. We are not talking about military service here.

The dictionary definition I pulled up quickly is:

   1. Employment within a governmental system
   2. A service performed for the benefit of the public

I cannot imagine how #2 could be any more inclusive than it already is. If anything, the current definition is overbroad, to where almost anything could be spun as public service.