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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   26251 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 9, 2026

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You say America has institutional depth and continuity, and that the Founders drew on English Common Law and the whole Western tradition and I agree. I never said otherwise and I'd have been stupid to. The US Constitution is a remarkable document (worth reading even as a non-American), the Federalist Papers are some of the best political thinking ever committed to paper, and the early Republic was built by men who were as educated and sophisticated as anyone in Europe, there's no argument to that.

But I think you're collapsing a distinction that matters: there's a difference between having institutions and having the deep cultural substrate that makes those institutions self repairing. England didn't develop parliamentary norms because someone wrote a brilliant constitution. It developed them over centuries of messy, bloody, often accidental practice until they became so embedded in the culture that violating them felt viscerally wrong to enough people to make it politically suicidal. That's what I mean by institutional depth: not the documents, not the structures, but the thickness of the cultural root system underneath them.

And you've actually conceded the key point yourself when you say they're being hollowed out right now. My reply is simply: how fast and how easily? Because that speed is itself diagnostic. If American institutional culture had the depth it lacks, what's happening right now would be much harder to do. I agree that European institutions are under strain too, especially from the hard right and parties like AfD and Reform here in the UK but they're harder, the damage is slower and meeting more resistance at every level. See how Europe managed to co opt Meloni in Italy into a standard right wing European party from the far right. Orban's getting kicked out very soon as well just to give you another data point. Europe is able to deflect and absorb the attacks to its institutions in a way the US hasn't shown any signs of doing.

Instead what we're seeing over there is that a single administration with a sufficiently bloody minded approach can hollow out norms that were supposedly two and a half centuries deep in what, a year and a half? The US has a proper full constitution and an extremely strong supreme court which could block all this with ease but it has folded like a marzipan deckchair. That's not what deep roots look like. That's what a brilliant structure built on shallow cultural soil looks like when someone finally decides to test the foundations. It sinks at the first real challenge. Compare to the UK where we don't even have a written constitution and parliament is technically sovereign and a majority can do anything they want, including reinstating slavery if they so wish and yet our institutions mean that even a government with strong support from its MPs can't do whatever it wants (as Boris Johnson found out with Brexit).

To put it differently: the Constitution told Americans what their institutions should be. What it couldn't do, because no document can, is make Americans feel that violating those norms is unthinkable rather than merely illegal. The "we don't do that" instinct, the one that in a deeply rooted institutional culture makes norm-violation politically radioactive even when it's technically possible, that's the thing I'm saying is thinner in America than Americans believe. And I don't think that's a controversial observation at this point. You yourself seem to agree the hollowing is happening. We're just disagreeing about what it reveals.

So to your final challenge "you haven't described anything America doesn't have, just political decisions you don't like" I would say that I've described exactly the thing America is currently demonstrating it doesn't have enough of. The decisions I don't like are the evidence, not the argument.

And briefly, since I've already made this case and don't want to repeat myself: this is precisely why the leverage question matters. You don't extend unconditional trust to a partner whose institutional immune system is failing this visibly. You negotiate. That's not sneering, it's prudence.

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I think a lot of this is compelling, and it's true that Europe has been much more institutionally resilient and stable over recent years than the US has been.

I don't think that civilisational depth and the accumulation of norms is, however, the most parsimonious explanation for why this is the case. Australia, for example, is younger than America and has been more institutionally resilient over the past few decades of populist headwinds than Europe has largely been.

The real reason the US is falling faster towards institutional dysfunction is more prosaic: its institutions are not well designed. That unified party control across different branches of government would still let each branch effectively check the excesses of the others was a naive theory at best. Instead political will flows through the channels of least resistance and carves them deeper.

One of the Westminster system's better features, which has achieved its final perfected form in Australia, is explicitly not tying the political ambitions and fates of would-be political leaders to that of whoever sits in the chair at a given moment. If there's no real way to self-correct a year into the term, everyone is sink-or-swim through any insanity.

One of the Westminster system's better features, which has achieved its final perfected form in Australia, is by explicitly not tying the political ambitions and fates of would-be political leaders to that of whoever sits in the chair at a given moment. If there's no real way to self-correct a year into the term, everyone is sink-or-swim through any insanity.

Yeah, Starmer has turned out to be a bit of a dud here, so he's probably out after the May elections and there will be a new Labour PM and a new Labour government and life will continue in much the same way (or perhaps even better) for the 90% of Labour MPs who aren't very closely tied to Starmer. The Labour MPs themselves will be the ones to get rid of him and there's very little Starmer can do to hit back against them; can you imagine the republicans in the US House or Senate voting to get rid of Trump?

Australia, for example, is younger than America and has been more institutionally resilient over the past few decades of populist headwinds than Europe has largely been.

I suspect Australia and Europe are under different pressures though, are they not?

The real reason the US is falling faster towards institutional dysfunction and is more prosaic: its institutions are not well designed.

I am inclined both ways on this question. The US' institutions have arguably survived longer than the ones in most of Europe! If you think institutions have a natural lifespan it's logically possible that they are both stronger than most European ones and that they are just now reaching a point of decay after most of Europe's crashed and burned. But I digress: the Constitution as originally written envisioned a very strong Congress. (BurdensomeCount fingers the strong US Supreme Court but that's actually much more debatable an institution, at least when it comes to original intent.)

I'll just incorporate by reference an older comment I made with my thesis that a lot of Trump's supposed puncturing of norms is due to wielding the accumulated powers of the executive (often delegated by Congress) in the one hand and the inherent, original, sometimes neglected powers of the executive on the other. But what I don't really discuss in that comment is why Congress seems so dysfunctional.

There is a simple (although I think incomplete) theory as to why this might be the case: Congress has not grown with the nation. The House has been capped at 435 members for more than 100 years. This has not kept pace with either population growth or the growth of the government. Put it simply, in this theory, Congress is overworked and isolated - they aren't capable of conducting proper oversight of the massive, sprawling bureaucracy, and they are a smaller, more elite portion of the population. The one thing George Washington cared about was that the ratio of representatives to citizens not exceed 1:30,000, and we blew past 1:300,000 around 1940. Today we're at a worse than 1:760,000 ratio.

This seems like an odd thing to finger as a major problem, but network effects are very real. Of course, increasing the size of the House to, say, FOUR THOUSAND would also have implications for network effects: FOUR THOUSAND or FORTY THOUSAND representatives are, perhaps, too unwieldy to come to consensus on anything. So, to add some extra ammo to your argument: however well designed America's institutions were or weren't originally, we should not expect them to function the same, distorted as they are.

Unfortunately, for all of that, it does not seem that a leaner ratio (In Australia that ratio is about 1:125,000, on a quick Google, and something like a blessed 1:75,000 in the UK) is actually effective at getting the cultural or legal outcomes that I prize. A pity!

Hypothesis: in a modern society, law and regulation is simply too complex for an MP or congressman to learn in the time they have, much less meaningfully edit. That would be if democratic politics selected for autistic systems people to begin with, which it doesn’t.

These people *have * to delegate their power to professionals one way or the other. All that’s stopped is they no longer have the fig leaf of ‘approving’ the one page summary that the person with real power gives them.

law and regulation is simply too complex for an MP or congressman to learn in the time they have, much less meaningfully edit.

I think this is correct. But I am not sure it is entirely a feature of modern society alone, I am given to understand that older civilizations also managed to generate sprawling legal codes. It seems like an inherent risk of "writing" + "non-expiring laws."

modern society, law and regulation is simply too complex for an MP or congressman to learn in the time they have, much less meaningfully edit.

This is increasingly an idea that I am cooking. It used to be that politicians were often well-learned, with a strong elite knowledge, which provided a strong foundation for understanding the world and engaging in governments. But the modern world is just too complicated, politicians are now people-persons, coalition builders, cult of personality enjoyers, peacocks. There was a post a couple months back about how the James Bond archetype of a hyper-competent man is increasingly unrealistic, that I think touches on the same idea.

I love my country, but I’m a strong critic of our constitutional structure.

I believe the assumption was that Congress would be jealous of its own power, in the way that the House of Commons was jealous of its own power in comparison to the King and the Lords, but the issue is that the elected Presidency created a countervailing center of political legitimacy, and blame, that’s independent of and largely unaccountable to Congress. The framers thought impeachment would be a sufficient counterweight, but failed to take account of the fact that removing a President would be a traumatic and partisan exercise, more akin to revolution against a king than the removal of a minister.

After centuries of experience with elected assemblies, it’s now clearer that the means of survival for democratic parties is ensuring that blame for anything that goes wrong rests on the opposition, not in delivering results. As a result, all blame and accountability for anything that happens politically rests on the President, who is quite impotent to accomplish reform, while little to no power actually rests in individual Congressmen.

So people who want to wield power don’t go into Congress, and Presidents are eager to expand their power by any means necessary. The checks and balances fail. I suspect the American system is designed almost for an inverted Whig revolution, where the executive has every reason to accumulate power by taking it from the legislature.

I love my country, but I’m a strong critic of our constitutional structure.

What does it mean to love one's country if one does not love it's constitution?

Associating the constitution with the nation's identity seems a particularly American custom. For most people, the constitution has about as much emotional pull as the tax system. France changes their constitution every 20 years or so.

The view over the hilltops. The taste of Toad in the Hole. The ways and pastimes of a people.

A constitution is a very thin wrapper over the customs of centuries, which is why Britain never bothered with one.

You're contradicting yourself and backtracking on every point that you initially used as evidence that America lacks civilization. I will just repeat: America didn't spring out of a vacuum. We had institutional depth from the beginning (albeit many new institutions had to be invented) because even the earliest colonists were not tribes wandering into the New World across the Bering Sea.

I agree that European institutions are under strain too, especially from the hard right and parties like AfD and Reform here in the UK but they're harder, the damage is slower and meeting more resistance at every level.

I sincerely doubt this. Maybe not about Europe resisting right-wing Trump-like movements, but that's not the only kind of change we observe.

Instead what we're seeing over there is that a single administration with a sufficiently bloody minded approach can hollow out norms that were supposedly two and a half centuries deep in what, a year and a half? The US has a proper full constitution and an extremely strong supreme court which could block all this with ease but it has folded like a marzipan deckchair. That's not what deep roots look like. That's what a brilliant structure built on shallow cultural soil looks like when someone finally decides to test the foundations. It sinks at the first real challenge.

Trump is not the first, nor the worst, challenge American norms and institutions have faced. The Civil War was not even the first time the government faced a severe challenge to its credibility and stability (nor was it the last). I have argued with other Motters because I think the probability of Trump actually destroying the Republic is low, but non-zero, and my lowball estimate is higher than they think is realistic. But it's not the first time there has been a non-zero chance of the American experiment ending.

Europe has not exactly been a continuous steady state of reliable governance for the past two and half centuries either.

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