[martincmartin]

The country is in complete deadlock politically - all of the warlords from the civil war just became politicians and then systematically looted the country.

I always wonder why many democracies devolve into politicians just looting the government, whereas others become successful and relatively less corrupt.

[nonrandomstring]

Not the best or deepest account, but for the modern reader who can't spare time on Aristotle and a gamut of old beards [1] Acemoglu and Robinson's account is clear and interesting reading [2].

In the case of Lebanon, the story is that it's ethnic/religious diversity is too much for stability, it being constantly open to interference from its neighbours and super-powers playing proxy war games.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_political_philosophers

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_Nations_Fail

[suzzer99]

Plenty of places with high ethnic/religious diversity have thrived: Singapore, Istanbul, New York City, (increasingly) the capitals of Western Europe. Teotihuacan, the largest pyramid complex outside of Egypt, was a multi-cultural city where different religions, languages and ethnicities lived side by side for 1000 years. It can be done.

[nonrandomstring]

> Plenty of places with high ethnic/religious diversity have thrived:

What you say is true but besides the point. There's no argument to be made against ethnic/religious diversity. But there is a problem with foreign interference that stokes ethnic tension.

My own London is perhaps the most successful multi-cultural population in the world. We don't have RPG attacks on schools because we don't have superpowers spending millions on manipulating and arming the Hoxton Crips against the Hounslow Massive. And there's the important difference.

[bradwood]

> Hoxton Crips

LOL.

Not forgetting the Chelsea Gym Rats, the West End Wide Boys, the Hackney Pirates, the East End Geezahs, the Brixton Yardies, the Camden Punks, the Camberwell Carrots, etc

[suzzer99]

Yeah that is true.

[vineyardmike]

1. Singapore has an extremely controlling government and lots of accounts of an ethnic non-citizen “underclass” being exploited.

2. Turkey as a whole is questionable. They have rampant ethnic violence even if Istanbul is doing ok.

3. The US and Western Europe arent turkey but again, have various degrees of ethnic tension being played out. Whether that’s trump and all he stands for or France’s burka bans. They’re also generally more powerful so less susceptible to meddling.

[bergenty]

Every place has an underclass that gets exploited including homogenous countries. What’s your point?

[bergenty]

Pretty much all of the Roman Empire.

[jeffreygoesto]

Thank you for the links, especially the second! It made me shiver because I think we're increasingly tilting towards the extractive model...

[ClumsyPilot]

> I always wonder why many democracies devolve into politicians just looting

I am very concerned that US/UK appear to be decolving for the last 10 years. The standards of acceptable behaviour from politicians have definately gone down.

[Beltalowda]

I am somewhat optimistic about the UK situation; in the end, Boris was at least held accountable, and by his own party. It was too late, and he got away with far too much in my opinion, but in the end a line was drawn and was told to bugger off. Incidents with "colourful" PMs are not unheard off, e.g. Churchill was widely criticised for various antics which are not all that dissimilar to Boris' antics. This of course ended up being overshadowed by his status as the war PM.

In the US the situation is quite a bit more dire, and roots of the current situation are also quite a bit deeper and go back longer beyond just "this asshole got elected to office".

[blibble]

it's all from the property of parliamentary systems that the leader can be removed easily

presidental systems are really quite awful in practice

[Beltalowda]

I actually think that's a comparatively minor detail, and not all that important here. The biggest issue that has often been discussed is the first past the post constituencies/districts/states both systems share. Neither Trump nor Boris would have become President or PM without that, simply on account of voters having more options to cast a meaningful vote for (UK also does a little bit better than the US in this regard).

[blibble]

it's the important detail

in the UK the electorate don't pick the leader

the electorate vote for an MP, and the group of those that form the party alone select the leader (and they can dismiss them just as easily)

the party has power over the leader, which is absolutely not true in most presidential systems

(and as to your second point, yes, under some hypothetical system that doesn't exist it's possible things may be different)

[loonster]

May just be more obvious. Some of the scammers look to have been doing it for decades.

[daveslash]

True. But the politicians who are scammers (not all are) seem to be much more brazen about it. And I can't help but feel that the public failing to hold them accountable is exacerbating and accelerating the situation.

[thfuran]

I think that once you get to the point that "all politicians lie/cheat/steal" is a widely accepted truism, the system is pretty much doomed.

[wizofaus]

Perhaps but at least in Australia there's still a sense that politicians can't just get away with whatever they feel works for them. There's a big kerfuffle currently about the fact our previous prime minister secretly had himself sworn into multiple ministerial roles without consulting anyone else in his own party. The curious thing to me is that so far there's no evidence he did so for any personal gain or made improper use of ministerial privileges. But he's still rightfully being grilled over it and there's a decent chance he'll be forced to step down from his role as a member of the opposition. And the various YouTube videos mocking him have been hilarious (for anyone familiar with how he was in office the last 5 years).

[kamaal]

Because voting is just a small part of Democracy. Democracies need strong and independent, judicial, law making and executive branches.

Voting itself is an averaging process, and you get the average of what ordinary citizen wants. It is hard to make people want good things for themselves without proactive investments in education and developing a population with scientific temper.

[pjc50]

> Democracies need strong and independent, judicial, law making and executive branches.

Yes, absolutely, but they also depend on a strong civil society beyond government. You need a media that's interested in and capable of investigative reporting, a layer of trade unions and professional associations, and a social layer that integrates people. The units larger than extended family and smaller than the country. And they need to be somewhat independent, not all run by the Party, nor all aligned along ethnic or religious lines.

[literallyWTF]

You need people who believe their government is legitimate and that the mechanism of voting is valid.

You don’t see that anymore in America anymore for example, republicans across the nation believe that if there candidate loses, it must be voter fraud by either by one scheme or another. Shit, Trump himself still claims that he won the previous election.

[skippyboxedhero]

2016 forgotten already.

[amanaplanacanal]

Pretty sure everybody understood that trump won in 2016. There were questions about what happened during the campaign though .

[martincmartin]

In January 2017, several Democrats objected to the certification of Trump's win. See for example

https://www.newsweek.com/fact-check-did-democrats-object-mor...

[loonster]

There was obvious voter fraud in the 2020 election.

The only question that should be disputed is if it was enough to sway the election.

[amanaplanacanal]

There is likely some illegal voting in every election. The systems in place generally prevent any sort of wholesale vote manipulation though. It's rare when an election is close enough that a handful of votes could make the difference, and the 2020 presidential election certainly wasn't one of those.

[trebbble]

Evidence points to it mostly being small-scale and largely accidental (e.g. someone has two residences and forgets they voted in one place earlier in the year, votes in second place later in the year, accidentally commits voter fraud).

When people with the motivation, mandate, and access, plus often full support of an entire state government, to find as much fraud as they can, go looking for it, that's typically all they find. A handful of cases, mostly accidental, not part of a big conspiracy or effort to swing the election.

Like when Kobach, a guy who'd made his entire political identity "voter fraud is rampant and super-serious" got clearance to go on a big crusade in Kansas. 6 convictions, mostly accidental, none part of a coordinated effort, mixed R and D (IIRC the cases actually leaned R, but small sample size, so either way, not that meaningful)

Rhetoric that it's a big deal (that stupid D'Souza "documentary"), but when they have to put up or shut up (i.e. take their evidence to the courts) there's simply nothing (meaningful) there.

[guelo]

It's mind blowing to me that generally intelligent people believe the biggest sore loser in American history. It's a huge danger to the future of our democracy and you all don't care. It seriously makes me want to cry in despair for the future.

[loonster]

I feel your despair, but from the other side. I don't know how anyone could watch the surveillance videos of Fulton county and not conclude their was voter fraud. It's absolutely mind boggling.

[suzzer99]

No, there absolutely was not obvious voter fraud in 2020. That's the Big Lie.

[egberts1]

You were saying?

https://www.reddit.com/r/electionfraud/comments/v85iy4/mind_...

[nradov]

Separation between the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of government appears to be a good practice. However, the UK doesn't really have that: Parliament controls everything. And they seem to have a fairly stable and functional democracy.

[pmyteh]

In theory Parliament controls everything, but in practice the executive controls everything (because they control Parliament). The separation of powers that does exist is largely because of 'leakage' in Ministers' control of events. They can straightforwardly change the law, for example, but you need to change it before you do the otherwise-unlawful thing, not afterward. If you don't, the courts will nullify your actions. You can dismiss 'independent' quango heads quite straightforwardly, but it's politically expensive (and somewhat time consuming) to do so too frequently. You control the Parliamentary timetable, but there are a few gaps in it for opposition day debates and private members' bills. That sort of thing.

We do have a stable and functional democracy, though it's rather brittle against a bad-faith executive. One prominent theory is the 'good chap' model of government, which holds basically that the system is set up such that 'reasonable chaps like us' can govern well and with few constraints, but the flipside is that Johnson's impact was limited by his government's lack of competence, not by institutional constraints. That might be liberating or terrifying, depending on your views about good government.

[bradwood]

The don't control monetary policy

[martincmartin]

So then the question becomes "why do many democracies not develop strong and independent, judicial, law making and executive branches, whereas others do?"

[watwut]

It might be other way round - if there are no independent, judicial, law making and executive branches and all the blah from the start, democracy has much lower chance of success. There will always be attempts to take hold of it and if the start is wrong, chance that someone will succeed is much higher.

[chadash]

We talk a lot about separation of powers, the constitution, etc. in the US, but until pretty recently, we failed to appreciate the fact that democracy is largely a cultural thing. It works because we believe it works.

Go and read the Soviet Constitution of 1936 (Stalin) [1]. It talks about freedom of speech, freedom of press, assembly, demonstrations. It actually goes much further than the US constitution. It talks about the right to rest and leisure. Old age care. Education.

We all know that the reality of life under Stalin didn't quite live up to this. A constitution is just a piece of paper. It doesn't mean anything unless it is enforced. That's why I think we focus too much on things like originalism vs living constitution... the reality is that we should be focused on maintaining our democratic institutions which no longer look as secure as they used to.

[1] http://www.departments.bucknell.edu/russian/const/1936toc.ht...

[rayiner]

I think this fact is more well recognized outside the west than inside it. Fareed Zakaria predicted the failure of the democracy experiments in iraq and afghanistan back in 2003: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Future_of_Freedom. Those predictions were widely shared among the Muslim diaspora in the U.S.

The british sent their criminals to Australia (a harsh island continent) and they turned it into a thriving liberal democracy. Meanwhile most democracies in the developing world struggle. Culture is destiny: https://www.jstor.org/stable/20045923

[random314]

> The british sent their criminals to Australia (a harsh island continent) and they turned it into a thriving liberal democracy.

A misconception. Most people who moved to Australia were not criminals. Contrast that with Germany, which turned itself into a genocide state through the influence of European culture.

[petre]

> turned it into a thriving liberal democracy

Until Scott Morrison and the last three conservative governments undid some of that.

[rayiner]

Most developing countries would be lucky to have the order and competency even of the Trump administration. We aren’t even talking about the same planet here in terms of what’s a functioning democracy.

In Bangladesh, the government is putting leaders of the opposition party BNP in jail (https://learngerman.dw.com/en/bangladesh-court-sentences-opp...), and even then it’s the most functional government the country has had in decades.

[mike00632]

The Trump administration literally attempted a coup.

[solveit]

In some countries they call that Tuesday... And the coups often succeed too, and also have military involvement, and aren't embarrassingly poorly executed.

I'm not even talking failed states here, I'm talking about respectable developing countries like Thailand and Turkey. The United States, despite its numerous obvious shortcomings, has it pretty good when it comes to political stability and democracy.

[rayiner]

We left Bangladesh when it was ruled by a military leader that came to power in a coup: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1982_Bangladesh_coup_d%27état. January 6 bears no resemblance to the coups I'm familiar with. More like a failed peasant rebellion.

[kevin_thibedeau]

> It actually goes much further than the US constitution.

The US constitution is specifically designed not to have an exhaustive enumeration of rights. Its terseness is its primary asset as it's solely a restriction on government authority with supreme power wielded by the populace. Every worker's paradise that tries to list all freedoms operates from the opposite principle that they are granted by government authority.

[narag]

Go and read the Soviet Constitution of 1936 (Stalin) [1].

That would be a waste of time. Stalin had no intention to do anything of that and everybody knew where dissension would send them: jail, gulags, torture and death.

That's not "a cultural thing", that's just cynism and propaganda. A cultural thing is when everybody wants to make it work but it never really works as intended. But that's more like the government with its full coercion power is against it!

[JackFr]

> A cultural thing is when everybody wants to make it work but it never really works as intended.

That is sometimes the difference between stated preferences and revealed preferences.

A lot of people say they want democracy but when they’re faced with a democratic outcome they find repugnant they’re willing to look the other way when anti-democratic forces try to make changes.

[vkou]

Government is part of culture, as there's a feedback loop where culture shapes it, and is shaped by it.

It can absolutely happen here, too, if we elect clowns who explicitly want to break the working parts of the system. The ones that have no intentions of making it work (Except in a way that serves them).

Laws and constitutions are indeed just pieces of paper, and carry no power in themselves. It's culture that ultimately decides whether or not they actually apply, and to whom.

[watwut]

The Stalin was in power, because of party victory in war. Not much to do with culture, they won and a lot to do with who wins the fight. The winner of war then driven the culture, sure, but the deciding thing was about power.

[shagmin]

This is a topic I find interesting. Out of any society in the world, in some form or another there always emerges some de facto leaders. And in some places in the modern world they will adopt democracy only so much as they know they can "win" elections and harness goodwill from other democracies. In some places being directly involved with the government is the only way to live with some luxury.

Main thing is I think there has to be some sort of cultivation of democracy (and some associated values), or it's just a facade or mob rule. It seems easier if the citizens are already middle-upper class for instance. We underestimate how much people need to be "primed" for democracy for it to flourish, it's also a more active process ideally that requires engagement, which isn't always so viable.

[narag]

Main thing is I think there has to be some sort of cultivation of democracy (and some associated values)

Indeed. Also that cultivation must be stronger than the forces that try to sabotage democracy and freedom. Now, most parties say they want democracy and freedom, but in many cases, it's a lie.

[geraneum]

Million dollar question. I don’t think it’s as clear cut as just these two very distinct groups.

It’s a spectrum and different countries sit somewhere within this spectrum. In addition, modern democracies are relatively young and we have yet to fully figure it out.

For example in Germany, consider Weimer Repulic. It was a democracy and it failed and Nazis replaced it but now it’s Federal Republic and a relatively successful democracy. Such a wild ride. It’s hard to formulate. Now put it Next to Iran or China or US or Russia. Each have different conditions.

Some of these democracies have been caught in proxy wars and super powers. Some fell to bigots and despots. Some have oil and are targets of bigger players. Some are falling and others rising. It’s too soon to draw a clear conclusion I believe.

[JoeAltmaier]

Free elections != democracy. Also respect for institutions and equality before the law. Any part of that weakened, it can go off the rails.

[munificent]

I think about this all the time.

I believe it arises from an interaction between individuals and the surrounding culture and institutions.

Let's assume, a priori, that everyone is trying to maximize their "success". This doesn't necessarily mean purely selfish greed, but more an observation that there's a natural incentive to take care of ourselves and our own and that we will naturally try to figure out how to get there.

The "get there" part means navigating the social environment and institutions that surround us. We aren't living alone on a desert island where our options for survival are purely physical. Most of our interactions and choices are around other people and social systems. So when we seek success, we are pathfinding through the rules, norms, and ethics of the culture we're embedded in.

What kind of path do you take? In a culture with low corruption and high institutional trust, the most efficient way to acquire resources and stability is by playing the game honestly and cooperating in good faith with others. If we all do the right thing, we all win. Overall efficiency goes up and that benefits all of us.

In institutions with low trust and high corruption, playing by the rules and attempting to cooperate leaves you open to exploitation because your peers aren't doing that. You'll get screwed.

Now the fun part is the feedback loop between individuals and institutions. A culture is just the collective choices of all of the individuals in it, so every move we make in the game is also an act of defining the rules of that game.

The greater trust we have in each other, the more efficient the system gets and the better it is for everyone. But by that exact same token, the easier the system becomes to exploit and the more attractive it becomes to bad actors. The optimally efficient society is also the perfect honeypot. So as we seek greater trust and efficiency, we also directly incentivize deceipt and corruption.

Going in the other way, as a society gets more corrupt, it becomes less and less efficient. It's hard to get anything done when every single action requires several rounds of negotiation at gunpoint because everyone is presumed to be an adversary. So as a society becomes less trusting, it loses the ability to compete against other more efficient, trustworthy societies.

What I think you see is that as a larger society's institutional trust falls, within that society new pockets of trusted cooperating subcultures arise. Since those are more efficient than the larger society, they tend to grow and outcompete. But people in those pockets don't trust outside of that subculture, so you end up with the inefficiencies of mistrust and adversarial interactions at the boundaries between these groups.

Eventually a group might win and continue to grow, but the bigger it gets, the harder it is to maintain cohesion and trust across all of it. So eventually its overall trust fades but then new pockets of trust appear inside it.

This sort of slow boiling foam of fading trust and growing bubbles of cohesion is, I think, fundamental to human sociology.

[selimthegrim]

I believe you have rediscovered ‘asabiyya. Ibn Khaldun must be smiling down at you.

[munificent]

Ah, thank you for introducing me to this term! The Wikipedia article is fascinating.

[guykdm]

"Lebanese" is a modern invention. Lebanon is a contrived post colonial state with no historical foundations. Those most usually fail horribly.

[babarock]

As a Lebanese, I find what you're saying both slightly offensive and slightly true. Lebanon, as a culture distinct from other middle easterners has existed for a very long time. Lebanon as an independent state has been invented in 1920, however there were multiple previous attempts historically to get independance.

We had high levels of autonomy under the Ottoman rule: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Lebanon_Mutasarrifate

Some historical figures have reached levels of influence that would qualify as "independent lebanon" (if people were so good at administrative bookkeeping back in the 1600s): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fakhr_al-Din_II

The modern state of Lebanon fails in part because it's a "contrieved post colonial state", you're right. But claiming it has no historical foundations is misguided. It's wrong. Colonials hijacked a very legit idea, and turned it into a failed state. It's different.

[Theodores]

I think that there are many national identities that are similar. Poland is an example.

Regarding the article, before and after pictures of Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria to name a few places are the same.

Prosperous sovereign nations outside Western Europe and North America are bad for business.

[rr888]

> Poland is an example

Poland has been around over a thousand years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christianization_of_Poland

[Theodores]

I think you were a little bit trigger happy with that.

Show me where Poland was on the map before the Western powers drew it on the map after WW1.

Much like Lebanon which has cultural heritage going back, so does Poland. But maps might not reflect that.

[sportslife]

Most of the maps in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Poland or clicking around https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingdom_of_Poland suggest Poland has borders about as stable as any country.

Sure parts of what is now Russia have been part of Poland before, but the center is surprising stable.

[rr888]

Take your pick https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingdom_of_Poland

[nine_k]

I wonder why prosperous sovereign nations in South Asia are not bad for business.

Maybe because they don't have the oil.

[rayiner]

The resource curse is probably part of it. But another part is that the Ottoman Empire conquered all of these middle eastern societies at varying levels of development, and the european powers that inherited those colonies were faced with complex sectarian conflict that didn't exist in asia. With the separation of British India into Bangladesh, Pakistan, and India, you've solved 90% of the sectarian conflict that exists in the region. In Lebanon, by contrast, history has left you with Christians, Shia, and Sunni all living in the same place, such that you have a constitutional structure where christians and muslims are each guaranteed half the seats in the legislature, and other roles such as president and prime minister are divided by religion.

[tlear]

They had centralized fully functional states that maintained economy that could supply cities as large or larger than Europe.

Japan was not made by Meiji, it was transformed but foundation of the "miracle" was there. During sengoku it created and armed with locally built firearms armies that dwarfed that of any European state of the time in one generation.. from bows to hundred thousands of muskets

Culture >> everything. In 1945 Beirut was a paradise compared to burned to the ground Tokyo and every other major city. In few decades it had built dams like Kurobe, challenged and beat American car manufacturers.. resources, colonialism.. right. Whoever was running the place knew how to do it, they do not know now and very unlikely to learn in the next 100 years.

[xeromal]

This point is often made for the middle east but a lot of the borders and ideals put in place that caused these disasters were put in place before oil really even mattered.

[Theodores]

Sovereignty is different if you have U.S. bases on your soil. Any country with a U.S. base is a vassal state, independent and therefore sovereign in name only.

Those prosperous states in South Asia, outside mainland China, do seem to have lots of American troops stationed in them.

[lesuorac]

They did have rubber though.

[eldaisfish]

One could make the same argument for a country like India. There is no "India" in the sense of an ethno-linguisic grouping. India is more akin to the European Union but even more diverse. The Indian state has survived for seventy five years now.

Just as the French and British dismembered the Ottoman empire to create modern Lebanon, so too did the British dismember the Indian empire to create India and Pakistan.

[rayiner]

I don't think that is especially accurate. India has a lot of ethno-linguistic diversity, but has hundreds of years of centralized administrative rule even before the British: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mughal_Empire. That's longer than Germany or Italy have had centralized governance.

[Apocryphon]

Funnily enough, the Mughals were initially foreign conquerors, just like the British with their Raj. But then ancient Germania was also somewhat unified by the foreign Romans, so perhaps it's same as it ever was.

I always wonder why the Maurya Empire doesn't get brought up as a pan-Indian empire, it was local to the area and conquered almost the entirety of the subcontinent.

[xyzzyz]

Human history is a story of repeated conquest, population admixture and/or replacement. Almost all “indigenous people” in present or past are just descendants of the most recent conquerors. Hardly any peoples have legitimate claim to land on the virtue of being there first, it’s almost universally on the basis of conquest instead. It always has been thus.

[Apocryphon]

Yes, but it's interesting to note the difference between when a large region is united through conquest by locals, or an outside power further away. Italy, in comparison to the above two examples, was united by the local Romans. (Though of course, "local" is incredibly relative. The difference between northern and southern Italy has been vast even unto modernity, never mind during antiquity.)

Now, I'm not sure what the difference of living under Maurya vs. Mughal vs. British rule was for its inhabitants, these are widely different polities from completely different time periods, but it's still a distinction. Though I suppose more of a retroactive one imposed by our modern bias, when we can point at India, Italy, and Germany and say, "ah, that patch of land is naturally meant to be united by someone."

[rayiner]

But there is a difference between conquerors that intermarried (European colonists to Latin america) and ones that didn’t (Mughals and British). Modern Indians have very little Mughal ancestry.

[bhupy]

India and Pakistan didn't split up because of the British, they split up because Jinnah and the Muslim League wanted it. Pakistan was born out of a sustained bottom-up movement.

The reason the British get blamed for a lot of the Indo-Pak issues is that, absent an indigenous Indian/Pakistani civil service bureaucracy, the British were tasked with executing the plan originally conceived by the Two-Nation Theorists, and they totally botched that execution.

[kamaal]

This argument can be made for any country on earth.

Pick up a globe, close your eyes and randomly put your finger anywhere and you will see the point under question was under different (political)boundaries every 300 years or so.

Boundaries of any country are just limits to which a certain political administration extends its powers to. They keep changing for various reasons, every few decades.

[bragr]

I'm not sure India is the best example right now as it is being consumed by Hindu nationalism to the detriment of minorities.

[cocoland2]

Sadly it is pretty much the story of the world with a few rare exceptions. Far right movements ethnic/religion/political have engulfed almost every place , amplified by social media and re-amplified by media. Note that Hindus get shot in their homes in Indian state of Kashmir too , the latest being 1 day ago.This eye for an eye will take anyone anywhere.

[detritus]

'Dismembered the carcass of the Ottoman Empire' surely? Maybe my sense of history in this regard is flawed, but the Ottoman Empire was much to blame for its own demise.

[flerchin]

What would we call the city-state around Beirut then?

[csomar]

All systems will have a tendency toward corruption. Democracy is really a facade and a political tool and not what runs a country. The bureaucrats in the government are what run a country; and they hold most of the cards. (and they are also very difficult to change or replace).