[rich_sasha]

Russia has basically never had a democratic government, perhaps except during the 90s. There is no tradition of it. It’s current form of government is more like the fiefdoms of Tsarist Russia: the Tsar giveth and the Tsar giveth away.

Russian may want democracy (though do we know that they do?), but there’s more than just Putin in the way.

[rsynnott]

I mean, there was no tradition of democracy in Korea or China, but South Korea and Taiwan transitioned reasonably successfully to democracy in the 80s and 90s respectively. It has been done.

For that matter, a number of Soviet successor states are successfully functioning democracies.

[thow-58d4e8b]

Not sure about South Korea, but Taiwan's democracy is kind of a joke. Since the end of the WW2, the grand total of the number of parties holding power is...two - DPP and KMT.

There are no differences between them in foreign affairs. Both favor wage suppression policies. Both favor currency manipulation to suppress consumption in order to help exporters. None of them is doing anything about the worst housing crisis in the world, leading to a demographic suicide of the country - fertility rate is below 1.3 for 20 years and counting. In many way, it's a choice between Pepsi and Coca-cola

[klyrs]

So, it's a joke largely in the same way that democracy is a joke in the united states.

[rnk]

Agree, the above comment (2 above) was inaccurate, extremely misleading. Taiwan is absolutely a free and open democratic country as is Korea. It's pretty inconceivable that someone who is not a democratic or republic candidate would be elected president in the US or win congress. Korea has at least been successful at convicting previous leaders when they were taking bribes or doing other illegal stuff, including the leader of Samsung. The US could do a lot better there.

Before the KMT lost power I think it was reasonable to see Taiwan as a one party state, but no longer. You are a little ambiguous in the "two countries" do things, but I guess you mean Korea and Taiwan. Yeah, both countries are not paradises that have solved all issues, but they keep improving their freedom, industrial bases, and living standards for the average person. Is that true for the us - we should aspire to do that. Instead we have people arguing on school boards whether books that dare to discuss slavery or jim crow laws should be discussed at all. We aren't clearly moving to be a better society with that kind of stuff.

[klyrs]

Eh... my statement was deliberately ambivalent. I don't know anything about Taiwan politics, but the US brand of Democracy, specifically the 2-party system with first-past-the-post elections, is driving the citizenry towards a civil war while the oligarchy enriches themselves while otherwise maintaining the status quo.

[ozfive]

Absolutely and Americans are waking up to this fact now with a terrorist faction taking power in the Republican party.

[Applejinx]

But would this faction be as terrorist as they are without extensive Russian effort to ensure that they are? I'm skeptical.

Given that this is hardly unique to the US, I think Russia is reaping the whirlwind: they've been up to this sort of thing pretty much everywhere. This is not the WWIII. They have been waging the WWIII already, this whole time, in relatively novel ways, with a lot of success… until now.

And it's been the kind of success that is short-sighted: got their way again and again at the cost of building enormous hostility, which is now rebounding upon them. Russia made this bed and all of this is not that much of a surprise, really.

[dangerwill]

While I agree with thinking of the Russian influence campaign as just that, a hostile influence campaign, given the cultural distance and surprisingly small reach of identified Russian networks I think that the Republican Party's descent can't really be explained as Russian meddling.

The Republican Party has been the safe harbor for christian and white supremacists beginning with Reagan and the moral majority. The love of violence, "I got mine" attitudes, gleeful wastefulness, etc have been American ills long before ~2010s era Russian misinfo campaigns.

Also, speaking as an American who has had their worldview impacted by living in Europe for a while, it is beyond pathetic for liberal Americans to tell the world "Don't worry we aren't crazy! The Russians made us do the bad stuff!". As the richest country in the world, we have to take accountability.

[kmonsen]

It's not like Russia forced them, they at least took money and free PR support. Now it has created a monster than cannot be controlled.

I think more seriously the US is a limited democracy because neither party really works for the people. They both work for the donors, one just a lot more and transparent than the other.

[rnk]

The potential has been there to go way out crazy in the Republican party for a long time, remember Pat Buchanan? He was a legit threat, but didn't have the crazy wacko charisma that Trump has, that dictator tough guy thing down that appeals to so many conservatives apparently. The thing I suspect Russia did do was take advantage of facebook and q-anon type stuff.

[logicchains]

>Absolutely and Americans are waking up to this fact now with a terrorist faction taking power in the Republican party.

They're terrorists because they don't want to give the government absolute power? You're doing the same thing Republicans did to Middle Eastern countries in past decades, abuse the shit out of them then call them terrorists when they try to defend themselves.

[BuckRogers]

MAGA terrorism is not self defense. Not any more than southern rebellion was when they were losing at the ballot box as well.

[_dark_matter_]

I think they mean terrorists as in, literally committing acts of terror - like January 6, or Charlottesville.

[klyrs]

Defend themselves against what?

[coolso]

Wait, progressives and peaceful (but fiery and violent) protestors are considered Republican now?

[pcwalton]

South Korea and Taiwan currently have more functional democracies than the United States does. The Economist's Democracy Index classifies Taiwan and South Korea as full democracies, while the US is a flawed democracy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_Index

[rich_sasha]

Taiwan, I don’t really know about now, but I’m pretty sure it wasn’t an overnight adoption of democracy in the 1940s. It took time, a small few generations, to get to that point.

It might be similar in Russia, though I’d imagine the heavily entrenched establishment, with massive reliance on various police forces, lends itself less to rapid democratisation-though you never know.

[pcwalton]

It was a long and hard road toward democracy for the Taiwanese and it is both (a) very impressive and commendable on their part and (b) a definitive refutation to the "Asian values" nonsense that the CPC likes to use to justify autocracy.

[kmonsen]

Both Taiwan and South Korea were brutal dictatorships until late 70s or early 80s. Now they are real democracies as much as anyone is.

My personal opinion, South Korea deserves a big asterisk. They had a president that was trapped in a cult, and the large conglomerates still decide a lot.

[kmonsen]

https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/democracy...

Taiwan is #11 on the list, that is higher than the US and UK (obviously), and one spot ahead of Switzerland. If Taiwan was in Europe it would still be among the most democratic countries.

Sure it has flaws, but so does almost every country on the list. Heck, I'm Norwegian and Norway is #1 but I think it still has flaws. My main beef is some technicality called sperregrense, basically if your party is less than 4% it will get less representation than it deserves. This quite often decides the coalition in charge depending on which parties ends up at 3.9 or 4.0.

[Kina]

I think you're giving too much and too little credit here. Martial law only ended on the island on July 15, 1987 with opposition parties being officially outlawed up until 1991. There's a lot still to be done.

[rsynnott]

I mean, you could say that of quite a lot of two-party states. I'm not claiming that it's a particularly shining example of democracy, or anything, but it's clearly a democracy.

[oblio]

Well, you could say that for sure it can be done, because we didn't really have democracies before 1776, excluding some super short and unstable versions, and democracies with universal suffrage are even newer, after about 1900.

According to the Democracy Index, ~75 countries are full or flawed democracies, so 75 countries made the leap.

[rich_sasha]

Most strong democracies were born through a very long and drawn out process of democratisation. UK Houses of Parliament date back to 13th century; of course at that point there was no democracy, but a tradition of open debate on government is very old.

In fact in the UK it’s probably hard to pinpoint where real monarchy ended and democracy started. The monarch had less and less power over time, and an increasingly wide circle of privileged voters held more and more power.

Many struggling democracies had to make that leap much more quickly and often the failures of democracy are to do with the cultural remains of the previous systems.

[stormbrew]

> In fact in the UK it’s probably hard to pinpoint where real monarchy ended and democracy started.

I would put it more or less around Oliver Cromwell's tenure, even though the monarchy enjoyed some resurgence in power after the monarchy was restored it was short lived and the threat of parliament removing an unruly monarch, as they had done fairly decisively, became a real constraint on their power.

The struggles around that were also significant inspirations to French and American revolutions that followed.

[nickysielicki]

Poland would like a word: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Liberty

[thow-58d4e8b]

Russia in the 90s wasn't a true democracy either. US press liked to depict Yeltsin as a democrat because he was weak and subservient, but his methods of power were deeply autocratic. Yeltsin ordered artillery shelling of the parliament in 1993, killing 140 people. Had elections in 1996 been fair, they'd highly likely mean the return of the Communist Party to power, so he rigged them in all sorts of grotesque ways (naturally, western leaders praised him for it). As his incompetence grew more and more untenable, he threw the hot potato to Putin and resigned

[vkou]

This is largely accurate - and it's also worth mentioning that 90s Russia was an absolute hell-hole.

Whether people approve or disapprove of Putin, a lot of them remember what life was like before he became Tsar-for-life, and it isn't something that most of them want to tangle with again.

[paganel]

> perhaps except during the 90s.

And that proved to be one of the most disastrous decades in Russian history (I think only surpassed by the 1940s that saw them getting invaded by Hitler), so democracy doesn't have too much solid ground to stand on when it comes to Russia.