historical thoughts

[swan_tower]

I'm randomly on Wikipedia, reading the entry on the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, and it's sparking some interesting thoughts.

I suspect Americans have a hard time grokking the UK system of government because to us, it looks kind of haphazard. The government of the United States was designed; if you sit down with the Constitution and read the first three or four Articles, you know more or less how we work. The UK Constitution isn't even a document; it's a collection of documents and conventions and general force of habit, accumulated over the centuries. You could graphically represent the difference by putting maps of Washington, D.C. and central London next to each other. One of these was planned; the other happened by accident.

So you can't easily say who the first Prime Minister was, because nobody ever sat down and created the office. Walpole kind of was, in terms of the power he held, but people fought about the term for over a hundred years, and apparently no two lists of PMs are alike, because the criteria for inclusion vary. It's interesting to me, though, that the office grew out of the Treasury. I suspect -- and this is probably me re-inventing the wheel of some Marxist branch of historical study -- that you can view the growth of modern democracy as a process wherein the root of political power shifted from control of armed force to the control of money. (And there's probably an interesting comparison in there somewhere, between the West and Third World military dictatorships. I'm beginning to feel like I ought to have majored in history after all.)

It makes me realize, too -- given the season we're in right now, over here in the U.S. -- how amazingly stable our government has been. I don't hold with whatever dude it is who declared that history's over, that we've arrived at the final, triumphant form of government; democracy on this scale is still the new kid on the political block, and might not have as much staying power as that guy thinks. There are dynasties that lasted longer than the United States of America. But when I compare the succession of U.S. presidents with that of monarchies or Prime Ministers, it's kind of impressively . . . boring. In a good way. The biggest weirdnesses we have are: FDR with his four terms; Grover Cleveland with his non-consecutive terms; a small handful of male relatives who occupied the same office. A couple of assassinations and deaths in office, whereupon their successors picked up and kept going. And the Civil War, but even then, all that happened politically was that part of the country seceded and formed its own country. I don't think we've ever had, say, two rival Presidents running around, both claiming their Cabinet and Congress are the real ones. Or anything to even approach the Wars of the Roses.

(Yes, most of my comparisons are to British history. For obvious reasons. But I've studied other countries, too.)

(Okay, my brain just offered up Emperor Norton. Who is entertaining, but not exactly mainstream American history.)

So, yeah. As contentious as our elections have been lately, and as freaked out as some people are by the possibility of a black man* leading our country, on the whole? We still have an awfully rational and stable thing going on over here.

I have other, unrelated political thoughts to post, but it occurs to me that if I put them here, one half of the post or the other will probably get all the attention in the comments, so I'll save it for a separate entry later on.


*By which we signify a half-Kenyan black, half-Kansas white guy born in Hawaii and raised partly in Indonesia. Don't you love how modern American society still boils everything down to one-word reductionist evaluations of skin shade?

Comments

[querldox.livejournal.com]

Offhand, I can think of a few cases where we were close to having a President and an Anti-President;

1) 1800: Originally, electors voted for two candidates each, and the overall winner became President and the runner-up became Vice-President. However, political parties and tickets quickly moved into play, resulting in parties putting up two candidates, although it was known which was the "real" Presidential candidate and which was the Vice-. However, the electors voted for both candidates of a party, resulting in a tie between Jefferson and Burr. While it did take 36 ballots in the House to elect Jefferson, Burr is reported to have not tried to win the Presidency.

2) 1876: While Tilden won the popular vote, he was one electoral vote shy, with 20 votes in four states being disputed. Basically, a deal was cut that made Hayes the President, but his administration stayed under a cloud because of it.

3) 1960: There's reasonable evidence that Nixon was robbed due to vote fraud led by LBJ in Texas and Mayor Daley in Illinois/Chicago. Supposedly Nixon declined to strongly challenge this since it'd damage the office of the Presidency for whoever won.

4) 2000: As Al Gore puts it "I used to think that you either won or lost an election, but it turns out there's this little known third possible result". This one was so close that I personally consider it a statistical tie, but again Gore did not go rogue when his opponent was declared the winner. I sometimes wonder what might have happened if this had occurred in 2004 instead, when it'd become clearer just how awful a President Bush is.

[fhtagn.livejournal.com]

From my point of view as a Scot, the American system of government appears utterly impenetrable and deliberately obfuscated. The British system, however, seems simple and a reasonably elegent and transparent solution. I suspect that it may be a matter of familiarity more than anything else.

[d-c-m.livejournal.com]

I suspect Americans have a hard time grokking the UK system of government because to us

You used "grokking".

I love you. :)

[querldox.livejournal.com]

One other example just occurred to me.

1824: The united Democratic-Republican single party was breaking down, and four serious candidates ran for President. Andrew Jackson won both a plurality of the popular vote (albeit with four states not having a popular vote) and the electoral vote, but without a majority the election again went to the House. With the possible help of House Speaker Henry Clay, who was also one of the four candidates, John Quincy Adams was elected. Clay was then made Secretary of State, something that, to say the least, didn't sit well with Jackson. Still, he bided his time until the next election when he won.

This may have had the most potential to have resulted in a national crisis due to Jackson's military standing, unique among the other disputed elections. He probably could've raised his own army, had he wanted to.

[dsgood.livejournal.com]

The US Federal Government was planned, but it hasn't run strictly according to the specifications.

Things which I suspect helped make the US more stable: 1) Comparative prosperity. 2) Having borders with only two countries.

[mindstalk.livejournal.com]

Yeah, we've been stable. OTOH, most countries I know of that took us as a model haven't been. AFAIK, all those Latin American countries imitated the Constitution on independence, and almost all fell into strongman governments, with Costa Rica as the exception. Africa might provide more data but I don't know the history. One could ask whether the problem is presidential systems or Latin American culture, but still. By contrasts, parliamentary systems seem to have done well, modulo Weimar Germany and probably some African cases. of course, there we're talking Europe and India and British colonies, and younger than the American states. But still... there's a common idea that it's safer to separate the high-mana role of a monarch or elected head of state from the power of the head of government, such that even though a strong PM can be like an elected dictator, they lack the legitimacy to pull a real coup or permanent aggregation of power.

I wonder how many dynasties of power lasted longer, especially peacefully, than the US. Egypt had 30+ dynasties over 3000 years. Chinese dynasties sometimes last longer, though that can obscure succession fights. Some European families have been around for a while but I'm not sure about peaceful transfer of power. Japan has a looong record but then they haven't had real power for most of 1000 years. On the flip side, we had a Civil War, so our peaceful record is marred. Still managed to have elections in 1864, though! *That's* impressive.

Catholic Church probably rules, for being an institution with some power lasting a long time, and even that has Avignon and such.

Francis Fukuyama is the The End of History guy.

But I think there's a familiarity and filtering effect. UK isn't that hard to outline: there are districts that elect members to a Parliament and a majority vote in Parliament can do whatever it fucking wants. There's a queen and House of Lords but they just slow things down these days. The equivalent of our Speaker of the House -- leader of a somewhat stable majority -- is PM and forms the government and can do whatever she wants until mandatory elections after five years or the majority dissolves, forcing elections.

The scary thing for an American is that the "after five years" bit is just another Act of Parliament, so theoretically changeable.

On the flip side, our Constitution won't tell you how our Electoral College really works, or about Senate filibusters, so you're missing key practical details, and then there's tons of stuff done that is unconstitutional by a strict reading. Like the Air Force, let alone the war on drugs. (We passed an amendment to ban alcohol, but not the other stuff?) The fact that the Supreme Court can strike down unconstitutional laws isn't spelled out but was made up by John Marshall and accepted as making sense. The fact that almost anything goes (like drug bans) under the commerce clause is, well, bloody odd.

And even the stuff which works and is clear may not make *sense* absent knowledge of our history, or even with it. California and Wyoming having the same Senate vote despite 100x the population? Electoral college weighting? DC not getting in Congress, despite "no taxation without representation", but getting to vote for President? Pretty funny democracy we've got here. And then there's what happens if no one gets a majority in the EC: goes to the House... with voting by state delegation, not by Representative. This is like old D&D. "Roll d20! d00! d6!" "What about this case?" "d4!" "...why?" "I felt like it!"

So we've got a lot of weirdness and custom -- "case law" -- ourselves, while the British system could be simplified as "democratically elected Parliament is supreme", while it'd take longer to describe the normal function of our system.

[mindstalk.livejournal.com]

More thoughts on the systems compared:

I already mentioned the dangerous 'mana' in our system, but yeah, I think the presidential elections thing makes things personal to an unhealthy degree. "But we need to be able to scrutinize someone who'll have so much power for 4 years." "Maybe we shouldn't give someone so much power for 4 guaranteed years, then." Vs. a parliament with PR where you seem to vote for a party and its policies to a much higher degree, though I'm sure awareness of the party leaders plays a role. Of course, with multiple partiies and stronger party discipline, you can actually talk about a party having policies...

And, taking potshots at American assumptions: we tend to talk proudly about "checks and balances" as a good thing. But who and what is being checked and balanced? The populace vs. state governments thing made sense at the time, even if it's obsolete now, but that gives us the House and Senate. Why *does* the President, who needn't even have a majority of the popular vote, have veto power over a bill that's managed to pass the House and Senate, and why is such veto power a good thing?

Of course, if we look at what the Founders said, and the the Roman model they looked to, much of what is being checked is democracy. Give "the people" a voice (not that 1787 suffrage was universal even among white males), but check and encumber it with wealth and power. Which a radical might say is giving the people the illusion of power, but making it as difficult as possible to use it. We have a blend of monarch, aristocracy, and democracy, but why is that good, vs. democracy? Well, the Founders didn't trust democracy, that's why. Which is odd if you look at it straight on.

But Athens had a good run until the Macedonians conquered it, while it's Rome that fell into civil war and dictatorship...