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The world is full of younger democracies and very few contiguous older ones. Depending on how you want to measure it, the United States is the worlds oldest dem
by wonderwonder 4y ago
The world is full of younger democracies and very few contiguous older ones. Depending on how you want to measure it, the United States is the worlds oldest democracy based on an original constitution or set of rules. The longevity of the US constitutional democracy is in most part because of what an incredible job the original writers of the constitution did in drafting it as well as the massive effort and agreement required to change it. The same large scale leadership problems that exist today existed then. The key to a long term democracy is slow change, not fast.
Many of the world's young democracies exist because of America; notably those formed out of the collapse of USSR. All of Europe's democracies exist because of the US role in WW2. Same as the current governments in Japan and Taiwan. Don't get me wrong I am not arguing America is perfect, there have been plenty of egregiously harmful moves, including what's currently happening in Iran, Afghanistan and Iraq. Although Iraq is technically a young democracy now because of the United States.
- 7sidedmarble 4y ago> All of Europe's democracies exist because of the US role in WW2. Can you explain what you mean by this? Continental Europe's relationship with republicanism and democracy dates back to the same roots as what spawned the ideas that led to the US's formation, and that is the European Enlightenment.
- wonderwonder 4y agoYes, you are right, my point is more straight forward in that without the usa stepping in to win ww2, all of Europe would be part of the Reich.
- jleyank 4y agoStepping in? Blame Japan for us entry and all of the downstream effects. Hitler was being careful to not give fdr an opening.
- wonderwonder 4y agoDoesn't really matter why it happened only that it did and because of that Europe and Japan are democracies.
- thechao 4y agoThis is the "if you were occupied by a foreign aggressor, it breaks the contiguity of government"-argument. Obviously, there is some truth to this argument; but, honestly, we'd need to address each constituent state in Europe to determine its factuality.
- tdeck 4y agoThe phrase "depending on how you want to measure it" is doing a lot of work in this post, the rest is American exceptionalism. San Marino has a constitution that edates back to 1600. Iceland has had a parliament for 1,000 years. Even leaving aside the fact that many of the world's democracies were deposed by the US government in the 20th century, the US has neither a notably long-lived nor notably democratic system of government. What it has is a huge military budget, and that enables it to seed governments in the way that it chooses.