It simply can't work, somebody ultimately has to be in charge of a 15 person startup, it is literally impossible to run a country via committee
It simply can't work, somebody ultimately has to be in charge of a 15 person startup, it is literally impossible to run a country via committee
The exact opposite is true. The only consistently working, stable democracies do not have a single leader of the executive branch, e.g. Switzerland.
The CIA sponsored extensive studies on this and came to the conclusion that democracies with a strong presidential role are associated with a greater risk of failure. It's not really surprising, and it can be seen in the US right now.
>that democracies with a strong presidential role are associated with a greater risk of failure.
Matthew Yglesias wrote a prescient article about this roughly a decade ago:
https://archive.ph/B3mMG
> The only consistently working, stable democracies do not have a single leader of the executive branch, e.g. Switzerland.
That system had to develop organically over many generations to be successful (in the case of Switzerland it was 500+ years with only a few significant interruptions) . In a centralized country with no traditions of communal and local politics it can just result in chaos.
The system was introduced around 170 years ago and it was done very suddenly after a civil-religious war won by protestant liberals.
On the federal level yes but that only reduced the autonomy that the cantons had, it didn't introduce a fundamentally different system of government, most decisions were still taken on the local level.
The system we had in the US pre New Deal was much more like Switzerland. Decentralization works just fine out of the box. The problem is that human instinct tends towards power which requires more centralization to accumulate.
Liberalism is dead Switzerland is ground zero.
The US has not failed yet, only grown unpleasant for certain groups of people.
> The exact opposite is true. The only consistently working, stable democracies do not have a single leader of the executive branch, e.g. Switzerland.
That's correlation, not causation. Switzerland made enormous amounts of money from its banking secrecy system over many decades until the US pressured it to end it. And the trends are not looking good for Switzerland based on data. We'll see how stable it remains as the cost of living keeps rising, real wages decline, and unemployment goes up.
If you provide wealth and a good lifestyle to your citizens, then almost any system will be stable.
Yes and no. The US presidency is very different than the way it's reported on, but it is true that the executive branch is being more assertive to make up for the disfunction of the legislation. We're doing that intentionally and for good reason, to demonstrate to China that the US can act with speed as one small part of the overall deterrent against World War 3. The US is almost always hugely misunderstood, because there isn't any other country in the world that actually works exactly like the US does.
No one knows how the US works anymore because the current administration doesn't follow laws and just makes it all up as they go along. It turns out the court system is too slow to matter: illegal tariffs just move to new illegal justifications when the patently absurd ones are tossed out after more than a year of using tariffs to drive inflation and stroke Trump's ego.
How about ask AI for all the times all the US presidents did something that went against the constitution. I think you'll be shocked. The court system being a bit slow is part of the point, because we're in an environment where China wants to use the speed of democracy as a weakness. Since you're on HN maybe you understand the concept of slow journalism or the benefits of anything being slow. Most people agree with that, having things be a bit slower is a useful check against errors. We understand that, the US was literally founded on that. China does not care. In that environment, we have to make compromises.
Being less predictable makes it harder for our adversaries to calculate. We're still good people, but we're in bad times. You don't need to understand. Through most of history only a tiny number of people anywhere in the world truly understood what was going on and what was necessary to respond to the times. This is true in science as well. How many times in history was it only a few scientists that had a clearer picture? Everyone thinks their religion is _the_ religion. The same can apply to news and opinions.
If you think the US is about Trump's ego, you still don't understand.
The ancient Roman republic (i.e. pre-Caesar) did just fine run by the senate without any emperor (they were vehemently opposed to the idea of putting so much power in the hands of one individual).
One of the ways they made this work was by assigning temporary powers to elected/appointed individuals appropriate and sufficient to get their job done, whether that was provincial governor, tribunus plebis, consul or whatever. A notable title was that of "dictator" (where the modern word derives from) which gave sweeping temporary powers to a general sufficient to execute a war.
Julius Caesar famously abused this system, effectively becoming the first emperor (despite no such position existing) by assuming the title of "dictator perpetuo" (perpetual dictator), although that did not end well for him. His successor, Augustus (whose adopted name later became the name of the office of emperor) initiated a more acceptable version of this by simultaneously holding multiple "elected" positions thereby having the power of them all.
The Roman Republic was incredibly decentralized with more people working for the administration of the city of Rome than for the Roman state itself at the time of Caesar's conquest of Gaul. Extreme executive power existed, but not at the level of the imperial administration. Provincial governors had near absolute power and generals had control over their armies to a degree well beyond what any general today has. They were basically private mercenaries with the generals, not the state, being in charge of payroll for the soldiers. Local territories had near 100% control of their own affairs so long as they did not do anything to interfere with the tribute flowing to Rome.
This became more centralized over time and as it did more executive power was needed at the top level. Augustus centralized the army under state control. Emperors in the late empire had nearly dictatorial authority and a massive state bureaucracy under their control.
> The ancient Roman republic (i.e. pre-Caesar) did just fine run by the senate without any emperor
If you don't count the 80 years of off and on civil wars and political and social upheavals.
> and sufficient to get their job done
Well they were extremely successful military, internal politics were a mixed bag and it slowly turned into chaos and constant gridlock as soon as they ran out of external enemies to fight.
Rome had an arcane deeply adversarial political system which basically relied different powerful men in the elite competing and keeping each other in check while trying to amass as much wealth and political power they could get away with (Ceasar was hardly an aberration besides just being way more successful than countless aristocrats playing the same game).
> effectively becoming the first emperor (despite no such position existing) by assuming the title of "dictator perpetuo" (perpetual dictator),
Sula did that first, in many ways Caesar just emulated him (of course the decision to not murder all of this potential enemies came back to bite him)
Sulla even managed to resign and survive, which I think is even more impressive.
Civil war. Social upheavals. Gridlock. Oligarchs.
Didn't the U.S. also have all those problems, despite having a president?
There was an assertion made in an ancestor comment that a committee without a leader can't function, but that doesn't seem proven by those problems in Roman history under their Senate, since the U.S. with a president had the same kinds of problems.
I assume other factors are at play, oligarchs for example. And I question the downside risk of having a strong presidency, cult of personality for example.
I agree that the term "did just fine" is subjective.
And they won't, system in Serbia is still the same - they will form ministries and prime minister leading them.
They will choose who will that be by a committee, but after that they have to function as usual.
Nice example of Poe's Law. I genuinely can't tell if this is a sincere comment written by someone who spent too much time in the start-up bubble, or a satirical comment on that type of person said by someone who very much aware that start-ups are just one of many ways humans can organize themselves and who knows that parliamentary politics is nothing like that for very good reasons.
But I do find it hilarious that apparently everyone assumes it to be the former, and that is quite telling about how most of this site's visitors think the other visitors of this site look at the world.
No it comes from spending a lot of time in my home country (the UK), which despite nominally being a parliamentary democracy is very clearly run by a small number of (largely unelected) people at the top.
The same as every company I've ever worked for, large or small.
Some systems obfuscate it more than others, but at the end of the day somebody has to have the executive power to make a decision when the chips are down, or you just have chaos
Switzerland effectively runs via committee
"effectively" is doing some heavy work in this sentence
A country is not a business. The goals are different. The levers and constraints are different.
The constitution will necessitate a certain structure so it's not like "it can't work". It is working and then at some point soon the structure will be reified and some will be given more power and different portfolios than others.
It worked really well so far.
I mean ... most countries are run by some sort of committee hierarchy / supervisor chain. Having consulted at many different levels of govt. over here in Europe, I can tell you there are way more committee decisions than Executive directives.
In many cases, the executives / politicians / directors just rubber stamp what a working group / committee has decided.
Also, see the Tomato guys: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qqUBdX1d3ok