[mapt]

There's no government as effective at instituting necessary changes as a benevolent autocracy, nor any so effective at destruction as a malevolent one.

If our democracy is sufficiently broken, if supermajority voter policy preferences continue to be dismissed by both parties, it might be that we just cannot survive under the old Constitutional order. The Right's open move towards a post-democratic future, and the proceduralist Center's continued failure to fully utilize their popular mandate to fix things that need fixing, implicitly authorizes a Left to develop that is more obsessed with expression of the popular will and with good governance, than it is with a 250 year old bureaucratic structure and "norms". Norms of restraint are a consensual exercise, and cannot persist unilaterally.

The way things are going, the trajectory, make even most 20th century hereditary monarchies look pretty decent. Especially ones that devolve most power to parliamentary bodies.

[roywiggins]

> There's no government as effective at instituting necessary changes as a benevolent autocracy

Autocracies have lots of issues around eg building a sufficiently capable bureaucracy that isn't too corrupt to do things. It can make it harder, not easier. Democracy can lean on democratic legitimacy, constitutional traditions, and a history of allowing power transitions without anyone losing their heads or launching a civil war over it. Those are all really useful things that autocracies have to cope without. It's not like it's easy mode.

[mapt]

All of those can be mooted by the sort of dysfunction currently on offer.

Almost every bill for the past 15 years has been filibustered. More than half the Supreme Court is part of an organized partisan conspiracy, and a third has worked specifically fighting election laws to advantage their guy. The DHS stands as a rogue paramilitary that can be deployed when politically convenient as de facto martial law, the DOJ openly persecuting ethnically defined political opponents and daring Congress to do anything about it, when they're not trying to charge Congresspeople with crimes. People are being disappeared into concentration camps. We are unilaterally withdrawing from the military and economic empire that has served us since the 1940's, in the name of ethnic hatreds and Hitlerian brinksmanship. The economy now has more to do with the Fed chair than any pathetic exchange of goods and services we can string together.

This doesn't end well, and it's broken enough already that a return to Biden/Obama/Clinton type leadership couldn't possibly hope to fix it unless they can lock down leadership for the next couple generations; More damage can be done in a month than they can fix in four years. "Just win every election from now until the end of time" isn't a real strategy.

I don't know what comes next, but if we choose to burn the house down today rather than practice good maintenance, the next homeowner cannot succeed by employing good maintenance.

Similarly, if the neighbor burns your house down deliberately because he hates you, and you start the rebuild process without doing anything about your neighbor's existence, you shouldn't be surprised if you end up with more ashes.

[godelski]

  > There's no government as effective at instituting necessary changes as a benevolent autocracy

This is untrue.

The world is so complex that a single person or group can adapt and develop fast enough. We've seen what happens to planned economies. Their ineffectiveness is not due to malevolence.

Distribution of power not only serves as a protection to autocratic takeover but allows the system to be more flexible. The concentration of power can make some things more efficient but you trade flexibility.