Quote Originally Posted by Montmorency View Post
I think you mean it the other way around, unless you want a stronger monarchy.



It's in the image captioning, but these survey materials are from 2020. So for example the numbers would be higher for the US today. I don't know about the rest, but I doubt they've diminished for the UK. You seem confident that they have or are, but the long-term discontent the Conservatives are sowing makes that estimation a gamble. I didn't expect half the British public condemning fundamental aspects of the existing system to be a cause for optimism.

The substance of your judgement on the relevance of Labour politics is difficult for me to judge objectively - would 39% vote share be qualitatively less relevant than a 42% share? - but this expectation



would bely your confidence that Britain is inherently resilient to social upheaval. It's also a troubling outgrowth of a certain political Americanism, namely that it is up to the center-left to take responsibility for the center-right's flaws. You probably said this on the basis of the parliamentary opposition's traditional role being to devise optical and electoral penalties against ruling parties, but to go beyond that and invert the responsibility for good government just reproduces American pathologies.



TBH I think one thing that has become clear is that simple FPTP is one of the worst available electoral systems, including all the others. If stability is the highest priority, it's clear that ditching FPTP would alone offer considerable inoculation to the French, British, and American polities. Notwithstanding all the other problems - that is, FPTP alone is such a major and singular source of dysfunction that removing it would support the lifespan of almost any political system.
The other constitutional aspects might be workable as long as the other constitutional aspects were functional. The problem amongst all this is how pretty much all the constitution is based on custom, and not legally actionable. This didn't used to be a problem in the past when custom alone was enough to force action. It's a problem now that we have a government that decides that custom means nothing, and only the law, which it leans hard on, can force it into action. And this government depends on its support not caring about the custom-based constitution either. And as one of its former peers observed, even this isn't enough, as it gathers up loose strands of power where it does not already control things.

Both the government and its support can most accurately be described as Trumpian.