All three parts are controlled by the same party, so of course it collapses to a unitary executive.

It's not dysfunction, either. It's functioning exactly as intended, by the people who spent years setting it up, and is delivering their goals. Top of which was abortion bans, which required spending years patiently stacking the Supreme Court.

That the goals are stupid and evil and incoherent is a separate problem.

You are forgetting about legislative branch too. Congress fist voluntarily "gifted" their right to the executive branch, in the form of the eCaNoMic ImErGenCy. And then Congress passed a measure which blocked every single member of Congress from legally questioning that "gift", in the form of legislation that whole year 2025 is one single calendar day, and thus a legal requirement of waiting 10 (or 15?) days before protest couldn't pass. Essentially Congress blatantly broke Constitution twice. At minimum.

The Supreme Court has told Trump to pound sand as often as it's upheld his policies. As dangerous as many of the things the Trump administration is doing are, there are other dangerous narratives out there, and the caricaturing of the Supreme Court is one of those.

There's a huge difference between "I disagree with this legal rationale" and "this court is illegitimate." Like it or not, every Justice on the Court is there legitimately. One of them via bare-knuckle hardball politics, to be sure. But according to the rules.

Who would have know it would be a disaster to base your system on the Roman Republic?!

The Constitution without the people willing to "respect" it is just a piece of dead wood, it has always been like that. That applies to all Constitution-like covenants, no matter the time and the geographical location.

What's changed now, compared to the past, it's that the people deciding that what's written there is bogus have started changing things a little bit faster compared to the usual, hence all the brouhaha. Also a reminder that the Slavery System was very much alive and all under this same US Constitution for more than half a century, which goes to show that's it's really just a piece of dead wood.

So do you oppose DACA? That was the executive deliberately refusing to enforce the law as passed by congress.

Edit: Here’s what a federal judge had to say in 2023: "The solution for these deficiencies lies with the legislature, not the executive or judicial branches. Congress, for any number of reasons, has decided not to pass DACA-like legislation ... The Executive Branch cannot usurp the power bestowed on Congress by the Constitution — even to fill a void." https://www.npr.org/2023/09/14/1199428038/federal-judge-agai...

> Also, as an aside, if the bad actors in government who were screeching about DACA's constitutionality put even a fraction of that effort into protecting the Constitution when the First and Fourth Amendments were on the line, that would be great.

This is actual whataboutism

> very consequential American elections are happening this year, and in 2028.

Let’s hope they are (happening).

Hungary isn't the only illiberal democracy within the EU - France, Italy, Slovakia, Romania, Poland, Cyprus, Malta, Slovenia, Latvia, Belgium, Lithuania, Croatia, and Bulgaria are all either Illiberal/Flawed Democracies or Hybrid Regimes according to the EIU ranking [0].

Now that Babis is back in power with the backing of SPD and AUTO, it will also revert back into an Illiberal/Flawed Democracy.

Furthermore, all states on the cusp of EU membership (Albania, Montenegro) are also Illiberal/Flawed Democracies.

> largest chunk of GDP and growth still sits firmly in democratic countries

The only Full Democracies in the 10 largest GDPs are Germany, Japan, and the UK. Japan under Takaichi Sanae is pro-Trump and Germany is likely to see the AfD break it's cordon sanitare by 2029.

[0] - https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/democracy-index-eiu

The European countries leaderships were each put in place by its responsible CIA compartment supporting liberal candidates/parties and undermining the competition. With the current conservative US admin they are supposed to interact with they don't know what to do and likely will do nothing.

What some do not see, and it may even be an age thing, is that over the past ~2 decades the definition of liberal has changed in a very substantial way.

In the early 2000s I was anti-war, anti-intervention, pro free speech, pro freedom of equality, against politicians trying to legislate morality or speech in any way, and thought we should have a strong border but with good immigration opportunities to allow the best to come and make the country even better. I was a fairly text book liberal, perhaps a bit more left than average. I still hold, more or less, these same values - yet somehow in contemporary times that's deemed conservative, if not very conservative.

Why this happened is an interesting question, but it's ultimately irrelevant. It has happened. And so it's predictably going to have long-term consequences for the parties. Basically we keep using the same names for these ideologies, but the values they represent shift, and even flip flop, in dramatic ways over time frames that, in hindsight, seem extremely rapid. Yet paradoxically, it's not like there's any given year or election where you can officially say that issue [x] suddenly flipped.

> Social media incentivizes small 'creators' to espouse outrageous views that mainstream media does not, and that seem vitally important

You write about this in a negative tone ("outrageous views"). To go for the extremely low hanging fruit, what about when the establishment media tried to mostly ignore Epstein, and it was only the hard push from social media personalities that brought the topic back into the mainstream? What confidence does that leave in the establishment media, and that they are not bought and paid for by the 'ruling pedophile class'?

When the establishment media refuses to talk about certain topics, it gives up the control over the narrative on that topic. That is their conscious choice. It is obvious that individuals will rise to fill that gap. Why are you writing about it as if it's a bad thing?

Does a liberal democracy even exist without independent media? I think not.

Unfortunately I think the social media thing is key. At this point I'm convinced that we need a ban, at least before elections. That probably seems unrealistic but these novel entertainment options have proven to be so toxic to democracy that I don't think there's an alternative.

People on HN got to stop blaming social media for everything wrong in society. "Small creators" are no more outrageous than the morons parading on Fox News 24/7. The 20th century had its fair share of fascism too, all without social media, why is that? Because the issue isn't actually social media, it's media control by an oligarchical class that pours billions into propping up right wing populism, because it serves their interest better. Liberal democracy can't exist when half the country has been propagandized away from reality.

Know that I would rather social media didn't exist, but putting all the blame for our dire political situation on it is very misguided.

Liberal democracy is rooted in Christian ethics. It does not make sense to a Muslim culture or the Chinese culture.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...

> "Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no."

mandatory reference to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...

Ultropolis's Law of Headlines, they call it.

I think it's drifting further from even that.

The people have discovered they can vote OPM to themselves and their pet causes. ICE now has a budget 4x the size of the marine corps. SS fund is on its way to bankruptcy. Corporations get all kinds of subsidies. Farmers get their own subsidies. And it goes on and on.

Meanwhile the national debt just keeps going up.

As each guy pays more OPM to the next guy he keeps asking more for more OPM for himself to cover the OPM he's losing to others. Eventually the portion of the economy that is one big circle jerk ratchets up and then if it goes on too long the whole thing collapses.

The article's argument follows your track of logic but is much more pessimistic:

"Is liberal democracy, then, in terminal decline? The rise of Carney himself offers a glimmer of hope, fuelled as it was by a reaction against Trump. But electoral trends in Europe do not suggest a repeat. A broad-based recovery of the liberal order will probably depend on a turnaround in the underlying trends, and here the signs are less promising. Attempts to soften the impact of worsening demographics are routinely rejected by voters and parties on both left and right. And the most promising source of renewed economic dynamism — AI — is likely to worsen inequality and increase societal instability, further undermining faith in democracy and hastening the slide into a zero-sum world.

Events of the past year have shocked the democratic world out of its daze, but it is these more powerful and slow-moving forces that should be the lasting cause for concern. Trump may fade from view in a few years, but any expectation that the liberal order will snap back flies in the face of the evidence. The old system was one that worked under a particular set of conditions. Those conditions are no longer present."

The paradox is that, because it earns a decent amount of money from readers, the FT provides generally sound content. Free media tends to be ideological advertising for whoever's funding it.

This sounds like something out of the Warhammer universe.

Can you elaborate on this? Surely you don’t mean only white people can form/sustain liberal democracies…

And yet here we have a whole bunch of white guys tearing up the Constitution.

Sad but true. White (western European) culture built these institutions and nonwhite cultures will have a hard time upholding them in their current form, if they even wanted to.

I don't think this is related to what's currently happening with Trump, however. That's a separate thing, more of a populist backlash by whites for various reasons.

It is interesting to note Liberia has(had) a similar constitution, although they seem to have done better at preserving freedom, and overall a quite different result in what they've got. You can build a house without code psychopaths condemning it because you broke some silly rule, you can raise your children mostly as you see fit without fascist CPS agents who pretend to be the ultimate parent scrutinizing you, they do not have much of any functioning immigration police, not much of any enforcement on the "war on drugs", the government is overall a pretty low % of GDP, and they only have 10% the amount of prisoners per capita as the US.