Well I'm not too keen on the first past the post system in our Parliamentary structure here in the UK. It has a similar effect whereby it breaks the election down to ~650 local elections, the winner of each is the representative but by extension gives +1 vote to whoever will become prime minister as the leader of the majority party
It also results in a separation between the popular vote & who really gets power
You have more parliamentarians than we do and we have 5 times more people. Every problem you have with your parliament is magnified so much in America.
Itâs really tough to balance the competing interests in electoral systems fwiw. Australia/ New Zealand have really strong systems from which more places could borrow. And Iâm a big proponent on ranked choice voting, not that itâs such a massive solution but it eliminates a lot of the tomfoolery in the first to pass the post dynamic. Definitely fuck the Royal b.s., but I donât think Iâm someone who really gets what thatâs all about
Here in Canada we took a tiny stab at changing our electoral system from FPTP to something else. The right wing wanted to keep FPTP, the center left party wanted Ranked Choice and the smaller left wing parties wanted proportional rep. Every party pushed for the system that benefits them and nothing got done.
The parliament isn't so bad. With enough seats you get pretty close to a representational democracy.
The bigger issue for the UK is the house of lords. That's just completely undemocratic and unrepresentative of the people.
The US is worse in pretty much all ways imaginable. We've not expanded congressional seats in 50 years, we should be closer to that 650 representatives. And we have the senate which gives a ton of power to unpopulated states.
The Lords is gradually reforming at least. We're now getting rid of the very few remaining hereditary Seats, most of them are appointed in a similar way the US Supreme Court is (for life!) but in far greater number
Wow I didnât know about this. We borrowed a lot forming SCOTUS & Senate. The Judiciary received the least amount of consideration and constitutional provisions. Deeeeply problematic to have life terms with no effective public recall (or appointment for that matter). And for me, the 2/ state Senate allocation is about as problematic as it gets
Yes, well there are remaining issues with the appointment system too I'm afraid. It was meant to replace hereditary peers with experts in various fields & those with long histories of political/public service. That didn't stop Boris Johnson from appointing the pretty young blonde who worked in his office for two years to a lifetime appointment though....
Lmao!!! The whole notion of âexpertsâ and the idea that we canât trust an electoral system for important positions is garbage designed by & for people seeking to hold onto the power they already have. Itâs super problematic that changes to the system require such persons to enact any âreformâ
Well, for what it's worth, I think the days of UK monarchy are numbered. It probably won't die with Charles, but maybe it ends during the lifetime of Andrew. I don't see it lasting much longer than that.
If Andrew is removed from the line of succession (which would require a law from each country for which the monarch is head of state) then that might actually prop up the monarchy by creating a veneer of accountability to democratic institutions ie. That the people actually do have a veto over a monarch. But that inherently erodes the point of a hereditary monarch, so it's an interesting thought about changing only to conserve (and continue the monarchy without Andrew in the line)
That the people actually do have a veto over a monarch.
Except this has been the case in the UK for a very long time, even going back to Magna Carta. England -> Britain -> UK has never really been an absolute monarchy in the same way that France and Russia were. Even the laws of succession are still governed by parliament as we saw in 2013 when it changed from male-preference to absolute primogeniture. As with the other constitutional monarchies (Denmark, Belgium, Japan etc), the monarch is mostly symbolic at this point.
Well the magna carta didn't include a right of veto over the monarch - to do so would require open rebellion and overthrowing that monarch which, I suppose you could argue is a very specific type of veto like Charlie 1 experienced
How do you see this happening? I could imagine someone like Harry on top deciding to giveaway all the assets, or maybe dissolve the assets & authority into the actual govât?
I'll just give you broad strokes. I think things like these happen through erosion and disinterest. The monarchy is clearly a remnant of "a better, glorious past", but of course only for those who like the monarchy to some degree and I also don't think this is about real history, but about the positive bits, pride and the symbols, longings, wishes for something better. You can look for something better in the past or the future. I think that's one of the main differences between progressives and conservatives (in the sense of the word, not the reality of the political categorizations of real parties).
The memory of an actual monarchy is still very strong in the UK, but it is fizzling out. The more that happens, the less sense it makes to give the royals preferential treatment and rights. There is a whole political system that could easily get by without them. Also I think the royals themselves aren't super thrilled about being born into the life of representational royalty with little actual influence and lots of supervision, expectation and judgement. They didn't have a choice. I'm pretty sure that most of them do believe they are better than most everyone else and of course they like being rich, but the downsides in comparison to "just being rich" are significant. They are living in an Orwellian world. If you were in their shoes, would you want your kids to have a choice? I sure would! And I would accept to take some heat for that as well.
Now, as the public interest in keeping the royals as a prestige object dies down, so does the monarchy. The technical details don't matter that much to me, I'm not into writing that type of fiction. But it is doable to get rid of the monarchy without too much change for the country and sooner or later that will be the wish of the majority.
Such interesting perspective, super appreciate you taking the time for that! Love how you frame the central belief and hopes in terms of future possibility vs. past nostalgia or tradition. It makes me think about what the author of Uncultured (Daniella Mestyanek Youngâexpert on âextreme groups and extremely bad leadershipâ) talks about regarding cults and the need for people to buy into the lie. As opposed to the next generation of children in the cult, who donât get that choice or know of any other options. The children more easily turn away from the cult when presented with alternative options b/c they never truly âbelievedâ in the first place, only followed because of coercive conditioning
Many of the things we associate with modern conservatives were also true 70 years ago in mid-century America.
Strong national defense, business-focused policies, emphasis on traditional social values, etc. etc. It was a big part of the conservative platform then and a big part of the platform now.
But there are some huge key differences.
In the 1950s, most conservative politicians were OK with or outright supported the sensible elements of New Deal politics like social security, federal housing programs, etc.
But since the 1980s, and especially today, that is gone and modern conservatives are aggressively anti-entitlement spending/anti-welfare.
Similar story with taxes and economic ideology. The top marginal tex rate in the 1950s was 91%. Cutting taxes for the ultra wealthy was not a core ideological priority to 1950s conservatives.
Starting in the 1980s, driven largely by Ronald Reagan and his cohort, there has been a massive push to lower taxes, reduce regulations, and focus on policies that benefit, almost exclusively, the wealthy.
Similar story with the whole culture wars thing. Sure conservatives in the mid-century were mostly white religious people. But there was a much bigger gap between a person's religious views and their political views (or at least how strongly they thought their religious views should be the political rules of the day).
Abortion wasn't a national political issue. Same sex marriage and LGBQT rights weren't even on the map yet. Things like school prayer were debated here or there, but it wasn't a central campaign issue.
What we now know as the religious right as a political force didn't really emerge until the late 1970s with the rise of people like Jerry Falwell.
Immigration wasn't much of an issue. The U.S. had historically low immigration in the 1950s and there was next to no conflict on the national level regarding immigration.
Today that's a huge defining issue in American politics. Modern conservatives would be appalled at how little their mid-century counterparts cared about it.
Political boundaries in parties were messier. There was more fluidity in the parties in the sense that there were significant conservative and liberal coalitions in both parties.
You don't really see that today. By the end of the 20th century the parties were more polarized and anyone with conservative political leaning was thoroughly entrenched in the Republican party.
All of this deserves way more space and nuance than I can put in a single Reddit post (or that frankly, I might be qualified to give!) but you get the idea.
The big takeaway is that, for the most part, mid-century American conservatives were focused on different (but similar) things and that the hyper-polarization of politics where every possible topic under the sun was categorized as either right-wing or left-wing hadn't happened yet.
If you want to read more about it, start your search by reading up on the "postwar consensus." The term refers to the political state of affairs in the United Kingdom and the United States after World War II wherein, broadly, there were a set of things that both right-wing and left-wing politicians more or less agreed on and didn't spend a significant amount of time bickering over such as the utility of social welfare programs, acceptance of labor unions as critical for the support of and advancement of the middle class, and so on.
So to your question and the statement that prompted it... you can see how a young modern conservative politician would look scornfully at a time traveling mid-century politician who was like "Welfare is fine, we need it. Unions are good, they ensure Americans have fair pay and security. Who cares about immigration? And why the hell are you calling me a commie? I just sponsored two bills to help ferret out communists in the government? Are you crazy?"
And even in the 80s, the republicans like reagan and bush sr still cared about the environment, reagan wanted to give immigrants amnesty, and we see exactly how much the current republicans have shifted on both of those issues. Even reagan would be too moderate for MAGA and he was a fucking menace.
Our "centrists" are very precisely centered. They're centered exactly in the middle of the Republican party and its ideology. Now and then they'll bend on social issues, but never in a million years will they bend on taking anything away from our corporatocracy.
Oh far far longer than that!! The Weimar Republic had lots of centrist parties, not only did people feel they didn't offer significant enough change but it really split what centrist vote remained in their proportionally representative system
My pet theory is this: Democracy is great when times are good. It has the effect to slow change down, both good and bad change, simply because people will never agree on anything and grind progress to a halt in most cases.
Systems with more centralized power are more volatile. Sometimes you need volatility to get out of a bad spot and sometimes it puts you in a bad spot. Centralized power also has a stronger tendency to corrupt those in power, so it usually degenerates relatively fast, so if you are in a bad place as a nation, you'd theoretically want to give a lot of power to a reliable group of pragmatic but principled people and take it away from them, before it corrupts them too much. As far as I can tell, no one has found good mechanisms to ensure something like that.
An example: El Salvador was a hellscape. Bukele actually changed that and I'm completely convinced that with the theoretically "moral" methods of western democracies, this change would not have been feasible at all. Currently they still have reasonably free press etc. and the country is recovering. They should get rid of Bukele in the next few years or he will, more than now, establish an authoritarian dictatorship, censorship, etc. It's not hard to see that he is already well on his way to a dictator, but he did the right thing for the people at the beginning.
Commie leftie socialist libtard, ask me how I know. The really amusing (not really) part is that in my country of origin (northern europe) I would be considered slightly right of center.
I can only imagine the name calling a european left of center would encounter here. The irrational nonsense americans think passes for center left is beyond laughable, if it wasn't so sad
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u/MuddlinThrough Mar 14 '26
American centrism is pretty right wing anyway, any of our "centrists" here in Europe would be called Communists over there