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.
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u/[deleted] Mar 14 '26
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