Item — HN Reader

I wonder which nations are truly "antifragile" to similar takeovers?

The U.S. seems especially vulnerable with its limiting two-party bias, among other factors.

I'd argue that the level of education of the general populace in (still) functioning democratic countries might be the prime mitigation factor.

Based on this, if I were placing bets on prediction markets, I'd wager that e.g. Finland would be among the last to succumb.

8 comments

It's more likely to be related to culture and political structure than education is my guess. Unless, maybe, we want to use a different definition for education than just degree attainment. For example, Finland has lower attainment rates for bachelor degree equivalents than the US. This would seem to disprove your point.

The real issue is the two party split and urbanized distribution. The way the voting works and the structure of the houses means that once you reach about 85% urbanization the rural areas won't matter. We can see this at many state levels that mimic national political structure. We have multiple nations within our county, with the biggest divide probably being between urban and rural. So all you have you have to do is promise the rural group who feels they are increasingly marginalized a candidate who will look out for their interest. The specifics of those promises don't really matter because in the 2 party system it's us vs them more than actual policy positions. You will find a much bigger difference looking at the urbanization based metrics than you will at the roughly 10pt difference in who people with bachelor degrees voted for.

Edit: why disagree?

> For example, Finland has lower attainment rates for bachelor degree equivalents than the US. This would seem to disprove your point.

In Finland, most university students go for a master's degree. A bachelor's degree is often seen as sort-of a safety valve, if it turns out you didn't have what it takes to complete the full master's degree. So you get at least some sort of degree from having been to university rather than just having your high school diploma as your highest official educational achievement.

Even if we look at just masters, Finland is only slightly ahead a 16% vs the US 12%. But using this sort or logic, then why not compare doctorate degrees, for which the US has 2% attainment vs Finland's 1%? To me it seems like drawing random line to fit the narrative when I don't see anything in the degree metrics that points to Finland being more educated. We could use different metrics, such as some sort of test, or test scores at the secondary level to say Finland has a better education or education system (we'd have to see the numbers to verify, but I wouldn't be surprised).

I have no interest in a one country vs. another country pissing match, just pointing out that (arbitrarily) selecting the bachelor degree as some kind of metric might be highly misleading, at least in the case of Finland.

Except we just looked at the numbers and showed it doesn't appear to be misleading. I was merely responding to the person stating they would bet that Finland would be the last democracy to decay due to education. But it seems the educational attainment is roughly equal. I also called out that other metrics might be better indicators, both if we were using education and if we were looking at other factors like culture.

My only issue with your comment is it seems to blame a two-party system. It is my understanding/belief though that a two-party system is just inevitable in the U.S. When a 3rd party has risen it acts only as a spoiler to the party it is most aligned with.

With increased granularity of representation, you can have more parties. Breaking The Two Party Doom Loop discussed details.

Our country has not increased the number of representatives sufficiently to allow local issues to reach national stage, so instead we all worry about national issues over local ones, for one example.

Most local issues shouldn't be handled nationally due to the diverse perspectives. That's pretty much the whole point of the (largely ignored) 10th amendment.

It's only as inevitable as the current voting system. If it changed to some kind of ranked choice, new parties would quickly gain representation.

To be sure. But here we are.

A third party has never had enough support to really be viable. Nor have we had multiple alternative parties with viable support. Right now it's all or nothing. If you had multiple new options with nuanced positions (even just filling the quadrants of social/fiscal conservative/liberal), then people could have real options. I admit this is unlikely under the current structure. However, it could take shape with structural changes to the voting process. Yes, even with some of its negatives, ranked choice might be one possible road to multiple mainstream parties.

> A third party has never had enough support to really be viable

The republicans were a third party. Granted the old Whig party was seeing significant troubles, but they still were a third party and thus prove you wrong. 3 parties are not viable, but third parties are.

Sure, I should have qualified in the past 100 years, or modern times, or whatever. The political environment, the modes of information, types of issues, and even the culture has drastically changed since the Republicans surpassed the Whigs. It's not really an applicable example to the modern scenarios.

Why does that make it inaccurate to blame the two party system? The two party system causes the problem, but that doesn't mean something else can't cause the two party system.

Yeah, not inaccurate ... maybe loaded? I wasn't really refuting the point, merely responding to why OP may have been getting downvotes. Sometimes words can suggest a bias and people may respond to that.

Don't know why the disagree, but this is a real problem and plagues the House of Representatives which then allows actually incompetent but loud candidates like Greene and Boebert to vote on important and serious legislation.

If these individuals are exceptions and the rest are competent, then there should be minimal impact beyond creating a side show. As a tiny minority, they wouldn't have any real sway in the bill construction within their party, especially if it has any chance of passing. The split between the parties is usually narrow, so the representatives with the most potential to influence passing legislation are the ones near the center margins as they may vote against party lines and provide a bigger base of support. The reps near the outside margins tend to have less influence. Even if they sway some stuff during the creation of the bill, it's stuff that likely has to get ripped out to find enough support to pass into a law.

But if things are passing by only 1 or 2 votes anyways, where anyone 1 persons vote is a major deciding factor, that's an indication of a bigger issue. Such a divide means that half the country feels they are getting screwed and there was little compromise to include their concerns.

    > If these individuals are exceptions and the rest are competent

I've got news for you, then!

Not exactly. The house of representatives should be much much larger than it is.

The same thing with the senate too. Current senate setup gives a lot of power to empty land.

"Current senate setup gives a lot of power to empty land."

That's the entire premise that got the smaller colonies to sign on. It's a feature, not a bug.

> It's more likely to be related to culture and political structure than education is my guess. Unless, maybe, we want to use a different definition for education than just degree attainment. For example, Finland has lower attainment rates for bachelor degree equivalents than the US. This would seem to disprove your point.

The university educated are the top. Politics is not about the top few percent, it's about the masses. At this the US education system is really bad, especially in poorer areas.

Overall, I believe the number was something like 46%+ had a college degree of an associate or higher. So it's not just the top few percent. But I do agree that many areas of the US, especially in specific subjects, are lacking. But that sort of ties back to my comment on culture since the voters and locals have some influence on what is taught or what is not.

Switzerland. Power is extremelly distributed between municipalities, cantons and, in the Federal Government, there are 7 equal ministers. The system is not only robust by definition, but encourage dialogue and citizens participation in politics at every level through popular vote, educating people during centuries.

Germany. The country was designed to be incredibly hard to takeover from the inside.

Central government is weak, even if AFD would takeover the chancellorship there are few measures that would immediately allow them to intervene in the federal states or „Länder“, much much less than in the US e.g. unless there is war there is no way to use the military to force compliance.

You would have to take over the country 17 times, and since the elections are not synchronised you would have to convince everybody all the time that this is good idea.

Individual German federal states could be taken over much easier, Thuringia probably will be the first in 2028.

The biggest weakness than is that the legal prosecution on German federal state level is under control of the executive and could be used to prosecute political adversaries. But if this goes to far the remaining parts of the country could vote to takeover the executive if there was a breach of the constitution.

Expanding on this, Vlad Vexler offers a broader framework here:

https://www.youtube.com/live/hgPGPZRQdaU?si=4W0z1vkk2bfnueJZ

His analysis complements the crucial discussions elsewhere in this thread about the economic details (reserve currency risks, the tariff math) and specific geopolitical impacts, by focusing on the political drivers; the nature of post-truth populism, underlying societal weaknesses, the challenge of maintaining civic coherence in the midst of it all, etc.

The allies tried to make Germany robust against this.

Doesn't matter how intelligent or educated or homogenous culturally the Finns are...if Russia were to decide to invade.

Domestic political antifragility means nothing if you're not anti-fragile in terms of the outside world.

It's called the anarchic global system for a reason. The only thing enforcing norms is power and the fear of it.

Antifragility would be the EU finally forming a real union. As someone living in Finland, I'm not holding my breath that happens in our lifetimes. If you take a sample of average, non-cosmopolitan Europeans, they can barely even communicate with each other in the same language. Let alone come to agreements on who's going to pay for each others bloated social welfare expectations.

The EU is the very definition of Fragility. While Finland has made far more rational decisions than its EU neighbors (having correctly prioritized energy security, military, and technology), it doesn't matter because size is more important.

Our diversity is not fragility. It makes things harder to arrange but it also keeps them fair. There is no chance of some president/party getting voted into office and making unilateral decisions that screw everybody. Like you know, the US. Or the UK with Brexit. In Europe the diversity keeps that from happening.

It also combats exceptionalism, that "Our nation is the greatest ever!" kinda stuff. Because in Europe we know we're not a nation but an alliance. That we need others to survive.

And remember that Finland didn't even bother joining NATO until Russia invaded Ukraine, if they thought it was so important to be together as a big bloc, this would have been the first step.

Ps: if the other countries in Europe didn't agree with Finland's smart decisions, how do you think these decisions would come to pass if Europe was one big country? Because the people wanting those would be in the minority. You would have very little input to the whole. And no chance to decide them yourself as you currently do.

“Diversity” is a nice positive spin on what is an extremely fragmented/disjointed/nonexistent energy policy, military strategy, technological cooperation, consumer markets, etc. Like I said, the average European cannot converse with his/her neighbor even at a 1st grade level in a common language. These are obviously not strengths in the context of the current international order, and to try to brush that away with platitudes is to live outside of reality.

If the EU had a cohesive strategy on these things, you can 100% guarantee Russia wouldn’t be starting wars along its borders. Russia is a small, weak economy compared to a theoretical unified EU (the irony of that phrase!)

Also, the reason Finland didn’t join NATO before is not because Finland felt they were so strong on their own. It’s because Finland didn’t want to piss off Russia in the slightest way and end up like Ukraine. An inability to make formal alignments comes from a position of weakness, not strength.

> “Diversity” is a nice positive spin on what is an extremely fragmented/disjointed/nonexistent energy policy, military strategy, technological cooperation, consumer markets, etc. Like I said, the average European cannot converse with his/her neighbor even at a 1st grade level in a common language. These are obviously not strengths in the context of the current international order, and to try to brush that away with platitudes is to live outside of reality.

I don't think we should be a geopolitical strongman like America though. The world has seen enough of America oil police. Blowing up half the middle east under the guise of 'freedom' and leaving power vacuums that caused nasties to bubble up like ISIS. Which hurt Europe a lot more than it did the US (think mass refugee exodus, attacks etc). They caused these problems.

I think it's great that Europe has more ideals than just money. We still care about all our citizens, not the top 0,01% that has all the money.

> If the EU had a cohesive strategy on these things, you can 100% guarantee Russia wouldn’t be starting wars along its borders. Russia is a small, weak economy compared to a theoretical unified EU (the irony of that phrase!)

Well especially because we don't have a good nuclear deterrent. And this is nothing new. Putin has been massacring ex-soviet states during all of his career. Checznia, Georgia etc. But nobody gave a crap in Europe. Part of this is that the EU had their designs on Ukraine also and this is why we suddenly care. I don't like this expansionist EU. Yes, I do think the Ukrainians should be helped and they should be free to choose who to align with. But it's a bit hypocritical that we didn't help the others before them.

For the nuclear deterrent we should have worked on that more but America was always against that and they assured they would protect us. Clearly now we can stop trusting them. Even after Trump I don't think relations will ever be the same because we know there can always be another Trump.

But with a deterrent we will be fine. Putin is not going to invade Poland if he knows Moscow will be nuked the same day.

> Also, the reason Finland didn’t join NATO before is not because Finland felt they were so strong on their own. It’s because Finland didn’t want to piss off Russia in the slightest way and end up like Ukraine. An inability to make formal alignments comes from a position of weakness, not strength.

So, in other words appeasement. Which is something that you are accusing the EU of now.

I just don't think you can expect the strongman EU to emerge and there are many people like myself that don't want that to happen.

Also, military blocs (NATO) and economic (EU) are very different things. After NATO we should just form a new military one.

You are right, but the problem with turning the EU into a real union is that it is very difficult and risky. The creation of new nations and new identities more often than not leads to violence - and they are often formed by war.

Yes, the EU is fragile, but I think trying to fix it that way would be worse.

I think 1) the rich democracies in Europe are unlikely to go to war with each other and 2) have good reason to unite against common threats so I think a military alliance is military alliance makes sense.

Yes, we already have NATO but the US is going to be ever more focused on China, and Russia is not the threat the Soviet union was so a new military alliance focused on Russia and securing the Atlantic (the latter in cooperation with the US) makes a lot of sense. Obviously different countries have different interests (the Atlantic is a lot more important to the UK than it is to most others) but also enough in common.

> made far more rational decisions than its EU neighbors (having correctly prioritized energy security, military, and technology

Because there is one objectively correct way to prioritize /s

I would argue everything else sits downstream from those things. It would be quite an understatement to say they are...somewhat important...in the continued existence of a country.

So objectively, there is a correct way to prioritize those items if we're talking about being antifragile. People like to forget the Russian invasion of Ukraine actually started in 2014.

But again, the inability of the EU to agree on even a common set of values is why we never have to worry EU countries will start seriously integrating with each other. We will remain disjointed sitting ducks as we are in love with our early 1900s romantic ethno-nationalist movement stories of who we are.

You can look at countries that have remained democratically stable for a long time. The UK and Switzerland come to mind. I live in the UK and we have an odd system that I used to consider a bit of a gimmick for the tourists to take photos of but appreciate more these days. Basically the fact that we have a king but with severely curtailed powers delegated to the elected folk makes it very hard for one of them to appoint themselves effectively king, especially as the military all swear allegiance to the actual king (or queen).

It's partly effective because they system wasn't really designed but evolved out of a lot of bloody power battles, going back to at least 1215 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magna_Carta

I used to think it was silly but if you look at rival European powers they had Russia with Stalin, Hitler in Germany, Napoleon in France, Franco in Spain, Mussolini in Italy etc. The UK is one of the very few which avoided having a dictator.

[Edit - I was kind of talking about the wrong thing - avoiding dictators rather than Trump types]

The UK already had a populist takeover - Brexit.

With Brexit and now this I've been thinking that if someone out there is intentionally trying to dismantle the 5 Eyes they're doing a bang up job of it. Step 1 appeal to their nationalistic or even imperial senses to make sure they piss everyone else off, step 2 stoke some internal grievance politics, step 3 get them to unload an entire AR15 magazine into their leg (to paraphrase Dril).

It’s been known since the 2000s that it is in Russia’s best interests to weaken the UK-EU link. Russia was a major contributor to the Brexit cause, but it seems this topic quickly gets swept under the rug by British parties, red or blue.

Brexit and Trump are both proxy wars of subversion, with traitorous support from a cadre of extreme reactionaries in both countries spending huge sums on social and trad media to manipulate public opinion in a self-harming direction.

It's very impressive in its way.

Although the winners won't get to enjoy their victory for long, because climate change is going to roll right over everything over the next few decades.

I guess. I was thinking more of dictatorship rather than populists getting voted in. We may well get Farage voted in some time.

Oliver Cromwell doesn't count?

And all the kings? Henry VIII for a start.

The UK has a monarchy with severely curtailed official powers. But it's a front. The UK is effectively run by the Crown, and the aristocrats have huge land, property, and investment/financial empires, own all the main media outlets, and set policy through their clients in the political system.

The aristocrats are narcissistic, shockingly racist, and often rather stupid - good at tactics like manipulating elections and news cycles, but contemptuous of most of the population, and clueless about how to build an economy based on growth and invention instead of rent-seeking and extraction.

It would also help to have a population without a deep-seated beef going back to the civil war. You arguably have two separate 'America's split down that historical line that might not ever see eye-to-eye and, just like the US itself has installed dictators or favourable governments by funding disruption abroad, it is open to be exploited the same way.

It's not really split down the historical line of north and south. What you are actually seeing are urbanization rates, with more urbanization in the north east (this was true and a factor during the civil war too). You can look at the county level voting maps to see this exists in the north too. If you look at only state level maps, then you lose that precision. It's not a north vs south thing, it's and urban vs rural thing.

I think there might be something to it: if you look at the correlation between commitment to maga beliefs and affection for the confederate flag, my guess is it would be fairly high

Albion's rotten seed was never unified as one. Seeing the civil war as some unique historical genesis of the split-- instead of a national shotgun-wedding of sorts is completely backwards.

It wasn't much of a shotgun wedding. Yes, it was a common enemy/cause during the revolution, but then took years of debate for the constitution and years more for the bill of rights. Over time, we've forced more and more homogeneous (federal) laws. The more laws you pass, the more likely people are affected in the outgroups under the splits you mentioned and it compounds. All the concerns about states rights and small states being less powerful are still concerns for some groups of people today. We've essentially been eroding the initial status quo that had been agreed upon.

Personally I think calling it a shotgun wedding is one of my best metaphors of the week and perfectly evokes what I was going for. Contemporaries from like Lincoln's 2nd inaugural of course would call it finer things, like a national baptism etc. but shotgun wedding captures the borderer element, too. I like it and stand by it.