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Notes -
Let's discuss democracy, and the decay and potential recovery of two anglo-origin democracies.
South Africa is clearly having a rough time at the moment. Anemic growth, mass joblessness, the spread of slums, ultraviolence on the streets.
The party largely responsible for this the ANC has a declining vote share but still commands the loyalty of a plurality of the electorate. In addition, most of the parties opposing the ANC are not exactly free marketer reformers of the type that might rapidly turn some of these issues around. Since Apartheid ended more than 20 years ago and these trends are deepening, it seems that the decay has not swayed most voters away from the policies that caused the issues.
A friend of mine said that he has full faith in the UK (Great Britain) to recover fully from its current woes, because one day voters will wake up and see that governance is terrible and getting worse, and they will vote for the opposition who will fix things.
Certainly, some of the parties in the Yookay are trying to fix things through structural economic and social reforms (Reform, Restore), but the plurality of voters including young voters favor parties that would either deepen or continue the issues (Greens, Labour, Muslim Indie Bloc)
Note: from the perspective of this poaster the main issues facing the UK are: Low Skill Immigration, Economic Stagnation, Integration of Non-European Migrants, Crime
So I ask the Motte: Do you believe that in anglo origin democracies that enough decay will have voters seek out parties with effective fixes for the issues, or merely cause voters to slowly rebel against the incumbents?
No. Things can always get worse without resistance. Look at Cuba, the situation is much, much worse now than many people - even those hostile to communism - imagine. The country has, since 1991, slowly gone from a moderately poor but functioning socialist country like the former Eastern Bloc or China at the time, to the poorest country in the region after Haiti. The people are starving, there’s no electricity, no medicine, no fuel. The economy has been collapsing for 35 years. There is extensive reporting that even the Chinese have strongly recommended pursuing China or Vietnam style capitalist reforms, but the regime leadership are, moreso than the Chinese or Vietnamese, die hard communists loyal to central planning as an economic theory.
This is true historically, too. There were empires that took centuries to collapse. In my opinion, the institutional inertia around immigration for the Anglo countries is too high to solve. The public don’t have the stomach for what is required. Look at Minneapolis; ICE would probably have to kill hundreds of thousands of American citizens to outweigh even a small part of the damage caused by massive third world immigration. The only thing that could save it would be some kind of sudden, deeply unexpected overthrow of democracy in a Western country, but there’s a 90% chance that only makes it worse. You only get one LKY in a century, if that.
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