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I have not yet finished my paper on Britain and Japan. My current project is an attempt to go beyond the traditional separation of powers by proposing three add

• smcin 1y ago
  Ok but I already gave you my short version on UK vs Japan: In 7+ centuries Britain(/UK) the ruling class never had a revolution/civil war that lasted longer than a generation, hence the builtin default action is to continue with the monarchy and associated class system. This also avoids all the (enormous) internal and external turmoil I cited. (PS In the age of social media I don't think you can call a popular referendum 'democracy', Brexit being the very obvious example. It depends on how literate the electorate at large are, and how tight(/loose/nonexistent) the controls on media spending to manipulate them are.) Whereas in Japan, it was the US occupation post-WWII which intentionally decided to keep the monarchy for social cohesion, while reducing it to being titular, and abolishing the nobility. This was the US's (and MacArthur's) architecting, not Japan's. It's not like Japan had a referendum or parliamentary debate about the Showa Consitution [0]. And one intent was to prevent Japan fracturing internally, but to keep it from going imperialist again, and totally dependent on the US militarily. (Japan didn't even have provision for a constitutional referendum until a decade ago, and if it ever achieves the 2/3 support to have one, it'll more likely be about removing the Self-Defense Clause than abolishing/reducing the monarchy.) It would be an interesting what-if to conjecture how the US might have reshaped Britain in the 1940s, like Japan. Re your article, it's a strength not a weakness that the US doesn't have a national/federal referendum, most states have a pretty active ballot initiative system, so e.g. state taxation, legalizing marijuana etc. can be tried out and then we have statistics to inform federal (legislative) policy-making, plus there's less inertia to undoing bad decisions, like when Michigan nearly taxed itself out of existence and all its jobs and young people emigrated (internally). I wouldn't say the UK has a disciplined approach to referendums. You can't even tell what % of GDP was spent (by third-parties) on political/social-media influence campaigns during 2015/6 (Brexit referendum), not even now a decade later. Not just [1] but all the other campaigns and interest groups. [0]: Showa Constitution of 1946, seems pretty clear it was authored by the US not Japan [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitution_of_Japan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitution_of_Japan] [1]: "Arron Banks and the mystery Brexit campaign funds", FT 11/2018 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18382116 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18382116 Archive: https://archive.ph/V4aHb https://archive.ph/V4aHb
  • zywoo 1y ago
    Yes. Building on the separation of powers, I hypothesize that democracy’s legitimacy rests on three sources: a constitutional state, a ceremonial sovereign, and the popular referendum. These three must be tightly coupled in order to achieve the greatest stability of democracy. But the reasoning does not stop there. The most important additional constraint is that these three sources of legitimacy must never be coupled with the lower triad of separation of powers at the federal level. If they are, the result is destructive: for example, a monarch deciding executive affairs turns into dictatorship, while referendums deciding legislative matters become tyranny of the majority—the clearest case being Britain’s 51% vs. 49% Brexit vote. Only when the upper and lower dimensions remain uncoupled does democracy become highly resilient. I believe Britain has not done well in resisting this vertical coupling, while the United States has yet to fully develop the concept of a ceremonial sovereign. What I am sketching is a somewhat complex six-dimensional model of democratic tension. If it takes shape, it might provide an optimal solution to democracy, building on Lijphart’s two-dimensional model—but I have not yet reached a full conclusion. At present I am writing a comparative study of constitutional monarchy in Britain and Japan. I am deeply grateful for your help and inspiration. Recently I have been studying everything from Britain’s last royal veto in 1708, to modern European referendums, to the unique features of Japan’s constitutional text. This is time-consuming work, but thanks to AI, my efficiency has already improved greatly.
    • smcin 1y ago
      I don't follow your terminology or your reasoning. What you want to call "The Symbolic Sovereign" boils down to a (reasonably) independent judiciary/Supreme Court/High Court + (optionally) a constitutional monarch or ceremonial president, which the US does not have as a separate office (that gap gets filled by other nonprofits, watchdogs, civic bodies, activists like Leonard Leo, media organizations, churches, commentators like Jon Stewart, interest groups, lobbyists, authors). Couldn't we just call that "rule of law + an independent civil society + media"? But the US Supreme Court is(/used to be) credible not because it rarely took action, but because justices and their rulings (and the appointment process) were non-partisan. Pre-Citizens United (2010), anyway. Post-2013 the US now has unlimited untraceable dark money in politics, amplified by social media to inject influence into the political process. I think that renders it utterly irrelevant now whether a country has a popular referendum process (or else uses the executive or legislature to change things). Clearly this leaked into other countries. At least a-decade-and-a-half ago. If you have enough money you can now pervert/coopt any of these. The details are irrelevant (unless you're doing a post-mortem). Scott Galloway keeps warning about increasing inequality of wealth in US politics: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qEJ4hkpQW8E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qEJ4hkpQW8E You don't want to talk about social media + money replacing discourse, post-2010. I think that intentional omission alone invalidates everything else in your analysis. At least tell me why you disagree. Pointing out the Brexit vote was only 51-49 doesn't matter; with more spending it could have been made 60-40 but then the electorate might have smelled the rat that's been there for smelling for a long time. Why have 40+ years of UK referendum process not resulted in any referendum on anything constructive, e.g. renationalizing UK water, electricity and railways? How has that not happened, if the UK is a functioning democracy?