alt Hacker NewsYou do realise that Germany had a shiny new constitution, and then went on to elect that Austrian painter. And that's after the prior new and shiny constitution leading into ww1
Afghanistan had a new constitution and legal system when the US pulled out.
As a Brit, my take away is that having a nicely laid out constitution doesn't matter if you don't have the culture there to back it up. The US did manage to deal with one term of Trump, so that's something.
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> The US did manage to deal with one term of Trump, so that's something.
Trump caused a lot of suffering and damage even in his first term, his second term (especially "thanks" to DOGE) was orders of magnitude worse.
A good democracy can survive one direct hit, maybe two, but anyone with a working brain cell left can clearly see the cracks in the foundation one needs to exploit to become President - and there will be such exploitation attempts, unless by a huge wonder the next President will be a Democrat, have a majority in both chambers of Congress and prosecutes everyone involved in the Trump administrations.
Germany came into being in 1871, and was in essence a monarchy until 1918. The Weimar Republic was its first attempt at a proper democracy, and it included an explicit "in case of emergency, we can revert back to totalitarianism" clause. It was a democracy with a giant built-in escape hatch - which as we all know was immediately used by a certain Austrian painter to turn it into a dictatorship.
Germany's first two constitutions quickly failed because they weren't democratic enough. The US constitution - despite its obvious flaws - has somehow managed to make it 250 years without causing huge issues, but it is now becoming quite clear that there should probably be a revision to prevent another giant mess like the current one from happening.