Maybe one distinction here is that you mention this question: Under which office can a random maniac who somehow ends up in that position cause more chaos or seize power?
But there is another question: Which office in practice results in more powerful officeholders, holding the population itself constant?
The PM normally can be removed by simple majority vote of no confidence at any time. While somewhat infrequent, this occurs often enough — and is a plausible enough threat even when it does not occur — that it cannot really be called exceptional in the way that the successful removal of a president via impeachment would be
This isn’t because the president can’t pass legislation on his own, so without the support of Congress he’s a lame duck even without removal. And you ignore other elements:
There are more differences than you mention. The PM is less hindered by the independent judiciary than the president. The PM in a Westminster system also exerts greater control over the individual legislators via his party than in the American system. The PM can serve for an unlimited time, and call elections at strategic moments, while Trump is limited to two terms. All these things increase the power of the PM and the risk of oppressive rule in Westminster-style parliamentary systems.
It is precisely because of the gridlock created by a presidential system, with its “checks and balances”, that over time more power tends to be arrogated to the president in order to “get things done” that aren’t getting done otherwise, often without the political will to stand in the way of such arrogation when it occurs.
This is a recent historical trend and not a defining feature of the system itself.
The distinction between the two systems really only matters if the legislature opposes the seizure.
With this, you focus too narrowly on this specific minority-rule “seizure of power” scenario rather than the relative power of the offices more generally.
There are more differences than you mention. The PM is less hindered by the independent judiciary than the president. The PM in a Westminster system also exerts greater control over the individual legislators via his party than in the American system. The PM can serve for an unlimited time, and call elections at strategic moments, while Trump is limited to two terms. All these things increase the power of the PM and the risk of oppressive rule in Westminster-style parliamentary systems.
At the end of the day, the rule of a law is a Tinker Bell situation (it only survives if we believe in it). Long-term constitutional stability under a presidential system of government is also quite exceptional. The standard argument is that the US is the only successful case of long-run constitutional stability under a presidential argument (though, depending on how you define long-run, you might throw in Costa Rica today). We’re very lucky that we’ve believed for so long.
Can you explain your thinking here more and how it connects to the idea of constitutional risk?
The U.S. president holds a weaker office than the heads of government in most other countries. The Canadian and British PMs and the French presidents definitely seem stronger; the German Chancellor seems weaker, and maybe the Israeli and Italian and Japanese PMs? (These aren’t strong views). I most often hear from proponents of the parliamentary system that it is less gridlocked and more powerful/effective rather than less.
Right, my point was that I understood “institutional erosion” to mean “damage to norms that are central to our constitutional order.” I didn’t understand it to mean more literally reducing the funding or personnel of any government body. For example, if Congress passed an act tomorrow closing the Smithsonian, I wouldn’t consider that “institutional erosion” in the sense we’re talking about.
Likewise, if an administration legally wound down ICE, the Education Department, or whatever, that isn’t what I mean by “institutional erosion.” If the HHS secretary believes that vaccines cause autism, that’s also not what I mean. People sometimes use the term so loosely that they imply that it’s “institutional erosion” to do things that create tons of outrage from the prestige media, as if a core norm of our constitutional order is not to pass policy that contradicts that class.
Ah, maybe you were using a looser definition of “institution.” I think it’s fine for the government to move toward dismantling the Department of Education, for example, because I don’t think of it as a core “institution” in the sense we’re talking about.
Do you think it’s institutional erosion when Biden withdrew from Afghanistan, or if a Democratic president were to abolish ICE in 2029?
Is this meant to reply to my other comment? What is this referring to
@1a3orn Could you also elaborate on why you think the ideas marketplace has became more dysfunction over the last 10–20 years?
A few of these are, if somewhat unprecedented, not really institutional erosion, because they have a legitimate constitutional basis. The executive power is vested in the president and Congress shouldn’t be able to create “independent” executive agencies or prevent him from firing particular staff through legislation. The qualification of appointments is just opinion and not institutional erosion. The IG firing, if actually unprecedented and unreasonably politically motivated, is a better example, as is the unilateral USAID-related impoundment.
But this wouldn’t cause a constitutional crisis or anything by default: the president almost always follows court orders or court opinions.
There’s some complexity because historically the Supreme Court also tends to show restraint by not making rulings that it doesn’t expect people to follow.
I think in general when discussing these “Constitutional crisis” topics it helps to
Not think too much in terms of formalities but only in terms of norms
Look back in history for what it precedented or unprecedented, partly because this will also decouple the discussion from debates about current political questions/actors
It’s not helped that the word “alignment” is used in multiple ways
encouraging ICE to train its agents to round people up without proper warrants
What is this referring to? ICE doesn’t need a judicial warrant to arrest someone for a civil immigration violation
Likewise I would say that Yarvin is influenced by (roughly descending importance)
Older reactionaries: Caryle, de Maistre
Libertarians/Austrian schoolers: Rothbard, von Mises, Hoppe
Italian elite theorists: Mosca, Pareto
Also Burnham
Interesting Twitter post from some time ago (hard to find the original since Twitter search doesn’t work for Tweets over the Tweet limit but I think it’s from Ceb. K) about a book called The Generals about accountability culture.
On the day Germany invaded Poland, Marshall was appointed Army Chief of Staff. At the time, the US Army was smaller than Bulgaria’s—just 100,000 poorly-equipped and poorly-organized active personnel—and he bluntly described them as eg “not even third-rate.” By the end of World War II, he had grown it 100-fold, and modernized it far more than any other army.
Having served as General Pershing’s aide in World War I, he decided the most important priority was clearing out the dead weight and resorting far more freely to performance-based promotions, demotions, hiring, and firing. He immediately purged 200 senior generals and colonels to clear the way for fresh and aggressive commanders, and he gave generals the power to veto the division commanders he sent them, ensuring that only the most competent would lead in battle.
He wrote that the key traits to look for in combat commanders were: common sense, education, strength, cheer and optimism, energy, extreme loyalty, and determination. Further: “The requirement is for the dashing optimistic and resourceful type, quick to estimate, with relentless determination, and who possessed in addition a fund of sound common sense, which operated to prevent gross errors due to rapidity of decision and action.” The opposite type—the cautious planner, the worrier, the officer prone to hesitating or back-channeling—had to be rooted out like “a cancer.”
This continued and if anything escalated as we officially entered the war. Just two weeks after Pearl Harbor, the top two Pacific commanders were relieved. When U.S. forces suffered early defeats in North Africa, the senior tactical commander was immediately replaced. At Normandy, three division commanders were relieved. Etc. Of all the Army’s senior generals from the 1930s, only two became combat commanders in WWII. During the war, 10% of division commanders were relieved—even though he had already made the selection process stricter than ever. So leaders rose fast: even Eisenhower was still just a lieutenant colonel in Washington State in 1940.
Yet precisely because he made promotions and demotions so much more normal and performance-based, relief wasn’t career-ending. At least four generals were relieved in Europe and returned to command within a year. Some were even arrested, only to work their way back up and ultimately retire as generals. Two of the Joint Chiefs during WWII had even been court-martialed in their early careers. There were so many firings that you can sort through them for all kinds of bizarre coincidences and funny twists—eg the time a Marine general named Smith fired an Army general named Smith.
Here’s Eisenhower explaining why removal—not micromanagement—was the answer to failure: “The American doctrine has always been to assign a theater commander a mission, to provide him with a definite amount of force, and then to interfere as little as possible in the execution of his plans. If results obtained by the field commander become unsatisfactory, the proper procedure is not to advise, admonish, and harass him, but to replace him.” This is the essence of what our guys have always believed, from Elizabethan privateers and colonial corporations through Thiel and Moldbug.
Basically, in WWII, commanders had 60–90 days to succeed, be killed, or be relieved—and failure was seen as personal, not circumstantial. This allowed all kinds of extremely useful outsiders and wild men to finally take power. There are far too many examples to list, but eg consider Terry Allen or even Men of History like Patton and MacArthur if you think any of the guys working for Elon or Trump are too “crazy” (code for: unpredictable, aggressive, and personalist; hated by a conformist and cowardly and crumpling establishment). As a result, the best officers knew they weren’t safe unless they proved themselves constantly—and even if they were relieved, they could fight their way back.
But by Vietnam, the Army had fully abandoned the WWII model. Only one division commander was fired in the entire war (and not even the one responsible for My Lai). Westmoreland still made sure that commands were cycled through at least as fast, eg by setting up six-month command tours; and it wasn’t unheard of for grunts to cycle through more than six commanders in as many months—but if anything this just reduced the accountability and authority and individuality and cohesion of commands.
In Iraq and Afghanistan, no theater commander was removed for incompetence. The wars dragged on for two decades with no serious consequences for consistent aimless herdlike failure—just punishment for those who took risks, embarrassed politicians, or stuck out. The most famous firing of the War on Terror was probably Abu Ghraib— and that was for political reasons, not strategic ones. Brigadier General Janis Karpinski, an Army Reserve officer, was blamed, despite having no control over intelligence interrogators. She was a military police general with no combat arms experience—a convenient outsider who could take the fall while the real decision-makers escaped accountability. She was demoted from Brigadier General to Colonel, which was by then seen as an extreme punishment, while senior intelligence officials who designed the policies walked free.
Meanwhile, actual strategic failures—from Tommy Franks (who botched the plans for post-invasion Iraq) to Ricardo Sanchez (who oversaw the insurgency’s explosion in 2003-2004) and especially the people responsible for lying us into these wars—were never actually fired for their actual faults. McChrystal was fired in 2010, but only because of a Rolling Stone article where his aides openly mocked Obama officials. Petraeus resigned as CIA Director in 2012 due to a personal scandal, not operational incompetence. And everyone else realized that they could just stay on track and inside the herd and milk this waste forever.
That’s how our costly occupations wound up as their own worst enemy: cracking down on tribalism and corruption while systematically bribing and covering up for warlords; pushing democratization and centralization alongside incredibly unpopular and unproductive culture-war single-issue red-meat carve-outs; etc. We just hired contractors and administrators to use p-hacked poorly-considered low-effort largely-unread papers to tell us to cycle through increasingly deranged and kludgy and byzantine procedures, instead of ever cycling through personnel; commanders ran away from every risk, and lost out on every opportunity, and wound up marching in circles and shooting themselves in the foot, or else they got owned for trying to take ownership of some potentially coherent goal. Headless chicken syndrome, enforced by tall poppy syndrome.
But a bit of leadership can easily chase out all the resentful sniverling midwit losers once again. Forget about getting the procedures right, and focus on getting the personnel placed. As Carlyle wrote: “Find in any country the Ablest Man that exists there; raise him to the supreme place, and loyally reverence him: you have a perfect government for that country; no ballot-box, parliamentary eloquence, voting, constitution-building, or other machinery whatsoever can improve it a whit. It is in the perfect state; an ideal country.” Or, as Moldbug put it, back in 2009, when Steve Jobs was alive, and thus his company was too: “I can tell you exactly how decisions get made at Apple. First, Apple finds a man. Hires him, in fact. And having hired this man, it tells him: sir, this decision is yours.”
I think this post is very good (disclaimer: I am the author).
It promotes better writing and the advice is concise, clear, and accurate. I think reading the post is a good use of the 90 seconds it takes to read the post.
With respect to the LessWrong 2024 Review, the question is whether the post is too narrow or the topic too mundane.
These stories are very funny. If anyone wants to express themselves by borrowing some money at 15% interest, or a $1 million forward contract on Bitcoin, my DMs are open.
In college I played poker: first a $20 buy-in game in the freshman dorm, then sometimes a $200 buy-in game at a frat house or similar, and also a weekly $1 buy-in game with many non-poker-playing friends in the lounge of the Computer Science building.
Because the numbers were so small, we kept a ledger for the $1 game, but then it also served as a public leaderboard, generated more interest than the money among those with a competitive disposition. So the game could play tight even with the small buy-ins.
A similar principle might make sense here. People want to be ranked highly for their predictions, so if there were a suitable leaderboard then people could lower the stakes and make fewer nonsensical “bets on their beliefs,” while still disciplining the predictions.
I know there’s Metaculus and prediction markets—maybe they serve this purpose already.
I agree—added these links to my post
Why is (1) obviously false?
Yes, that’s a typo.
This is too historically contingent. Presidential systems have dominated the less stable American and African countries while European and Asian countries that have been more stable more often have parliaments. I’m not convinced that there is empirical evidence of this kind.
I agree that parliaments have a much more intuitive nature. Corporations are run with a sovereign board who appoints a dictatorial CEO, not with independent branches of power in a balance.
Why do you think it’s better to have term limits?