Assuming you’re not a US-ian, you might not know: the US doesn’t have any concept of a recall or no-confidence vote like other countries do. Once the election is over, there’s nothing the population can legally do about it except protest (which a decent chunk are doing). It’s up to the Democrats because they’re the ones that were elected by the population to provide a check to the Republicans.
Look, the US is running on a pre-alpha build of representative democracy. We should’ve updated the system centuries ago, but at this point memory leaks are so out of control and a ton of the cache is mis-addressed, so there’s serious questions about whether the thing needs to just be shut down and rebooted in safe mode.
I didn’t say we were. I said we were running pre-alpha software. Not because that’s all that was available at the time, but because we chose to believe that we were exceptional enough to handle writing our own constitution without learning from those who came before.
Neither of those were modern democrocies. Hell, one could argue that the word democracy doesn’t actually apply to modern democracies since we are not using the Greek definition of the word.
We are technically using the Six Nations definition of the word.
In 1776 Switzerland was not even called Switzerland, it was The Old Swiss Confederacy, and not even a single unified country. They didn’t abandon the sovereignty of the individual cantons until 1848 when they adopted their constitution. I wouldn’t call the canton situation a modern democracy.
I’ll give you The Six Nations.
I don’t know enough about the others to say specifically, but I suspect that much like Switzerland, they didn’t reform their governments from a fuedal state to a modern state until the mid to late 1800s much like the rest of Europe.
Iceland has one of the oldest parliaments. It didn’t become a democracy until 1944. San Marino vested sovereignty in the people (the definition of democracy) in 1974.
Ok. By that definition the us isn’t a democracy either. If you don’t count imperfect democracies and then only count your own imperfect democracy as a democracy then yeah. You’re the first. Congrats.
C’mon, now, Iceland was under the Danish king until 1944. That’s clearly a monarchy. As for San Marino, the point is that they were tweaking bedrock fundamentals of their system as recently as 1974. It’s not been the same one in use for hundreds of years.
That’s not clear to me at all. Canada, Australia, the UK, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Lichtenstein, the Netherlands, Belgium, and more are all currently monarchies still today. Are they not democracies?
I would say that they are democracies today, but the closest thing to a clear binary distinction between democracy and not is where sovereignty is vested. I’m most familiar with the history of the UK; nobody would say that it became a democracy once King John signed the Magna Carta, and agreed to share sovereignty with the aristocracy, but we would call it a democracy today. It is technically a hybrid system, in which sovereignty is split between the king and the people. The king approves all acts of Parliament, but it’s a formality, and the king approves whatever acts the popularly-elected Parliament passes. It was a bit-by-bit transformation from monarchy to democracy. (And it is continuing its transformation in 2026 with the abolition of the last hereditary seats in the House of Lords.)
I get that it’s righteous to shit on the United States — because we mostly deserve it — but in this case it really was the first modern nation-state explicitly founded on pure, popular sovereignty. (As in, no monarch or aristocracy, not that everybody could vote.)
Assuming you’re not a US-ian, you might not know: the US doesn’t have any concept of a recall or no-confidence vote like other countries do. Once the election is over, there’s nothing the population can legally do about it except protest (which a decent chunk are doing). It’s up to the Democrats because they’re the ones that were elected by the population to provide a check to the Republicans.
Look, the US is running on a pre-alpha build of representative democracy. We should’ve updated the system centuries ago, but at this point memory leaks are so out of control and a ton of the cache is mis-addressed, so there’s serious questions about whether the thing needs to just be shut down and rebooted in safe mode.
You guys weren’t even the first modern democracy please shut the fuck up.
I didn’t say we were. I said we were running pre-alpha software. Not because that’s all that was available at the time, but because we chose to believe that we were exceptional enough to handle writing our own constitution without learning from those who came before.
Nobody claimed we were
The guy who said “were operating on an alpha build” did
Does not sound very modern to me.
What country implemented democracy before 1776?
Greece. Republic of Rome, to name just two.
Neither of those were modern democrocies. Hell, one could argue that the word democracy doesn’t actually apply to modern democracies since we are not using the Greek definition of the word.
We are technically using the Six Nations definition of the word.
Switzerland, Iceland, the Iroquois Confederacy, polish-lithiuanian Commonwealth, san marino
In 1776 Switzerland was not even called Switzerland, it was The Old Swiss Confederacy, and not even a single unified country. They didn’t abandon the sovereignty of the individual cantons until 1848 when they adopted their constitution. I wouldn’t call the canton situation a modern democracy.
I’ll give you The Six Nations.
I don’t know enough about the others to say specifically, but I suspect that much like Switzerland, they didn’t reform their governments from a fuedal state to a modern state until the mid to late 1800s much like the rest of Europe.
Iceland has one of the oldest parliaments. It didn’t become a democracy until 1944. San Marino vested sovereignty in the people (the definition of democracy) in 1974.
Ok. By that definition the us isn’t a democracy either. If you don’t count imperfect democracies and then only count your own imperfect democracy as a democracy then yeah. You’re the first. Congrats.
Who votes for president again?
C’mon, now, Iceland was under the Danish king until 1944. That’s clearly a monarchy. As for San Marino, the point is that they were tweaking bedrock fundamentals of their system as recently as 1974. It’s not been the same one in use for hundreds of years.
That’s not clear to me at all. Canada, Australia, the UK, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Lichtenstein, the Netherlands, Belgium, and more are all currently monarchies still today. Are they not democracies?
I would say that they are democracies today, but the closest thing to a clear binary distinction between democracy and not is where sovereignty is vested. I’m most familiar with the history of the UK; nobody would say that it became a democracy once King John signed the Magna Carta, and agreed to share sovereignty with the aristocracy, but we would call it a democracy today. It is technically a hybrid system, in which sovereignty is split between the king and the people. The king approves all acts of Parliament, but it’s a formality, and the king approves whatever acts the popularly-elected Parliament passes. It was a bit-by-bit transformation from monarchy to democracy. (And it is continuing its transformation in 2026 with the abolition of the last hereditary seats in the House of Lords.)
I get that it’s righteous to shit on the United States — because we mostly deserve it — but in this case it really was the first modern nation-state explicitly founded on pure, popular sovereignty. (As in, no monarch or aristocracy, not that everybody could vote.)