[HdS84]

I studied political sciences twenty years ago - even then it was established consensus that presidential democracies are vulnerable to authoritarian takeover. The position has too much power, is easily abused and there are not enough checks on that position. The US escaped that problem for a long time due to strong cultural norms - but you abolished them (i.e. gatekeeping the presidential nominees and replacing that with a televised drama) and working checks (but again, now party in congress and president march in lockstep). FPTP and gerrymandering just exacerbate that problem and entrench a very unhealthy "the winner takes it all without need for compromise" culture.

You need electoral reform post haste - but I do not seed even a start to that discussion, so I think you are hosed. Might not be Dictator Trump, but maybe Vance or some other guy who succeeds in this game.

And all who cry "if the democrats win everything will be ok again!!!!" - not it won't. The democrats are too slow to recognize the problem and even if they eventually do, there are no majorities to change the system. And finally: Democracy needs at least two parties - democrats cannot be expected to keep branches of the government forever. You need a sane and democratic second party. Republicans ain't it - but the current system gives them success, so why change?!

[Amezarak]

> I studied political sciences twenty years ago - even then it was established consensus that presidential democracies are vulnerable to authoritarian takeover.

Democracies are vulnerable to "authoritarian takeover" has been known and understood for 2500 years.

> The position has too much power, is easily abused and there are not enough checks on that position.

In most parliamentary democracies, the Prime Minister is much more powerful than the US President. This is particularly the case since the PM is PM by virtue of his party having the legislative majority.

> And all who cry "if the democrats win everything will be ok again!!!!" - not it won't.

A better argument would be that this isn't a partisan issue. The last President declared a Constitutional Amendment by fiat and attempted to do (good) things like student loan relief with blatantly illegal authoritarian methods due to the perpetual Congressional gridlock.

[tialaramex]

> In most parliamentary democracies, the Prime Minister is much more powerful than the US President. This is particularly the case since the PM is PM by virtue of his party having the legislative majority.

This is a grave misunderstanding. A legislative majority isn't a static historical fact like Trump's electoral majority, it's dynamic - those are identifiable people not just a statistic.

Liz Truss was the UK's Prime Minister for less than two months. What changed in two months? Probably most of the idiots who actually voted for her didn't change their minds, but that doesn't matter, her fellow Tory MPs feared the worst from the outset and were proven correct. If she hadn't left she'd have been kicked out, she's known to have actually asked if there's some way she can cling on and been told basically "No" because there isn't.

Ultimately, if they can't get rid of her any other way, her backbench only needs to affirm a simple motion, "That This House Has No Confidence In His Majesty's Government" and it's all over. It would never come to that, but that's the backstop.

[Amezarak]

Congress can also agree to remove the President. Indeed it would take only a few Rs to flip to do so.

We see PMs easily enacting massive legislative reforms and even Constitutional changes that are nigh impossible in the US, that was not a particularly controversial statement.

[tialaramex]

> We see PMs easily enacting massive legislative reforms and even Constitutional changes that are nigh impossible in the US

I'm responding to this part separately because it's a very different issue. The existence of "superior law" in the form of a written constitution, is very silly. There need be only a single law, the law of the land - and the legislature must be able to change it - and only them, otherwise why have a legislature at all?

These are only man's laws, they're no different than the laws of Football ("soccer") for example, they are not facts about the world like Mother Nature's Laws - and so to hold some of these laws superior to others is a waste of everybody's time. The resulting paralysis in the US is not something to be praised, it's just another rusted joint, a lost degree of flexibility and so a point of weakness.

In reality, the supposed "impossible" constitutional changes in the US simply enable learned helplessness. Democratic representatives weep that alas much as they wish otherwise they "cannot" fix obvious problems because change is "impossible" and then of course somebody who actually does want to change things just does and says (as we might expect remembering these are only man's laws) if you don't like it too fucking bad.

[Amezarak]

> There need be only a single law, the law of the land - and the legislature must be able to change it - and only them, otherwise why have a legislature at all?

The legislature can change the US Constitution. The federal Congress proposes an amendment with a 2/3rds yes-vote, then it must be ratified by legislatures of 3/4ths of the states.

The reason to make some laws harder to change than others is to protect civil rights. In the US, it is very difficult to legally infringe on the right to free speech, for example. In the UK, it is simply a matter of a majority vote in Parliament.

> Democratic representatives weep that alas much as they wish otherwise they "cannot" fix obvious problems because change is "impossible" and then of course somebody who actually does want to change things just does and says (as we might expect remembering these are only man's laws) if you don't like it too fucking bad.

Passing Constitutional amendments is perfectly feasible and has been done many times. It just can't be done without majority political support and the will to do so. They've been passed and "repealed" before, with Prohibition, for example.

A lot of kvetching in the US system (on both sides) comes from people whose ideas are simply not very popular and would like to change the rules so they win. In a democratic society, you need majorities of the population to agree. For larger changes, you preferable want larger majorities.

[bigger_cheese]

>We see PMs easily enacting massive legislative reforms and even Constitutional changes that are nigh impossible in the US

I don't know about UK but in Australia we need a Referendum (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Referendums_in_Australia) to change the constitution and those have been historically extremely difficult to pass (only 8/45). The PM absolutely cannot alter the Constitution.

[Amezarak]

Yeah, it’s dangerous to generalize parliamentary systems too broadly. That isn’t the case in all of them. But as you can see in his comments, he thinks that having “constitutional” laws above other laws is also a bad idea.

[tialaramex]

Congress could, in theory, begin an arduous process (weeks? months?) in which eventually, if they succeed, again in theory it removes the President and... puts in his place his chosen replacement. It has never successfully done this, so from there we're in uncharted waters but it's hardly obvious that it is an effective procedure.

In contrast the Westminster Parliament routinely disposes of Prime Ministers who lose its confidence, it's already happened once in my lifetime and it's not some multi-week procedure in which there's some performance of a judicial process, just a simple question: Does this Government retain the Confidence of the House?

Margaret Thatcher decided on this course of action on a Monday, on Wednesday morning she rose to say, "Mr. Speaker, I beg to move, 'That this House has no confidence in Her Majesty's Government.'" and by the next morning the Callaghan minority government had fallen.

[Amezarak]

The length of time the process takes is entirely under the control of Congress. It could be done in a day if they wanted. The longer time periods seen with Clinton and Trump were to attempt to gin up the political support to follow through.

[tialaramex]

I was concerned with facts, whereas you seem focused on a fantasy about how you wish things were. But your fantasy doesn't matter at all. US-style Presidential Republics are a known bad design, the US nation building projects stopped doing this themselves because it doesn't work, the United States itself is just a slower decay, it's not an exception.

The problem wasn't the Crown, that's the big takeaway. Giving the same power to a guy who doesn't have a hat doesn't fix the problem. You need to hold this much power in commission, that's the lesson that gave us the present British arrangement - the Lord High Treasurer was much too powerful, so his power was given to a commission, today its First Lord though not nearly as powerful as the Lord Treasurer, is too powerful, that's the Prime Minister you gestured at - the formal office is "First Lord of the Treasury", with the Chancellor being Second Lord, and the whips taking subsidiary parts of the commission. If you ask me we should further re-divide this power.

But just giving all that power to one man (and in the US it has always been a man) is even worse. The US President has powers that a King had, which made sense in the 18th century but stands out today - that's why Trump can corruptly pardon people for example.

[ty6853]

We escaped them because the tenth amendment and judiciary constrained federal powers in non war time to activity summing up to like 2% of the GDP and they needed an amendment to do anything outside of a little box. POTUS was fairly low stakes office in peace time, lower stakes to most than their governor and state legislators.

We tossed that all aside in the 1930s via threatening to pack the Supreme court. Federal powers are now everything because interstate commerce is now everything and without a functional 10A and with delegation to executive agencies POTUS approaches God level.