On Wednesday, November 25, 2015 at 7:23:34 AM UTC-7, Martin Brown wrote:

But it doesn't. You can easily end up with an elected dictatorship even
if you start out with a democracy. You always need a system with checks
and balances so that no one party can ever grab absolute power.

It's a tradeoff.

Yes, the Parliamentary system can easily be subverted if a dictator is elected -
since the only check and balance is either an elected President, or the monarch.

The American system, therefore, has greater long-term survivability. But it
pays for that; states' rights allowed segregation to survive into the modern
era; it took the Supreme Court, through _Griswold vs. Connecticut_, to legalize
contraception; in Canada, we have patronage politics, but eventually the
negative feedback deals with it - in the U.S., they have pork-barrel politics,
which has positive feedback.

Thus, while Europeans have reason to shy bricks at the U.S. for being
backwards, it may perhaps be just as well that Americans endure the greater
imperfections of their political system at the moment - because, being the only
democracy with nuclear weapons, it is critically important that they _remain_
democratic.

Robert Heinlein was extremely optimistic to think that the rest of the world
would have been able to just ignore Nehemiah Scudder.

John Savard