Mikhail Gorbachev has died

Republicans have long said that the federal government is structurally incompetent and unable to effectively administer a large country. They made a convincing argument with their performance in Iraq and Afghanistan, and I doubt Russia would have been much different.

That was a very different situation, those were states that were militarily invaded and then occupied by American forces, who were involved in reconstructing countries devastated by war.

Republicans? Man, some people just can't get past the "my party vs your party" mindset.

Yea, and most young democracies are very vulnerable. You can look at the Arab Spring for examples of failed democracies, and the early United States (it took us 20 years to get off the Articles of Confederation and work on the Constitution we use today).

Myanmar's another one. India's been restricting its people's rights lately.

Democracy takes a while to establish as a stable system and often fails.

Alexander the Great was granting (non-representative) democracies to cities in Asia Minor 2400 years ago, I wonder what he'd think of Erdogan.

I'm not sure the average Russian would have seen the situation much differently.

Look at the people today who decry chinese investment in the US economy? I'm not even saying those people are wrong.

All it takes is for one person or group in the country to poke us enough to the point where we feel the need to strengthen our security posture there (read: add more troops) and then some terrible situation like Abu Ghraib completely destroys any credibility we have with the local population and it just spirals into disaster.

I simply have no faith left in our government's ability to execute even a completely peaceful operation like the marshall plan (and similarly what we did in Japan).

Federalism is one of the core principles of the Republican party. I don't believe that's a controversial statement of fact, but I also didn't think vaccines or the shape of the Earth were controversial subjects, so I never know these days.

> Republicans have long said that the federal government is structurally incompetent and unable to effectively administer a large country.

To be fair, things probably work better when you don’t put people with that ideology in charge of said government.

It’s like picking a flat-Earther as an astronaut.

Pushing vaccines and forcing them onto people is (or they lose their jobs). Similarly, Democratic government forced many businesses to permanently close as they were deemed non-essential.

None of the people I know who voted Republican would come close to identifying themselves as federalists. In fact, it's an occasional discussion between some of us. It's almost like two parties aren't enough to describe the positions of everyone who is forced to identify with one of them.

As a child I was compelled to take vaccinations in order to attend school. My buddy in the military tells me he was "voluntold" to give blood for his fellow soldiers, nevermind all the vaccines they were required to take. Back then, vaccine denial was a loony left fringe thing, and now it seems to be a mainstream conservative position. Times change I suppose, but I do remember the old days.

The Thirteen Colonies had a long history of democratic self governance. The revolution was mostly an independence movement. The revolutionary part was the Republican federation.

This long history of democratic rule was not present in many modern attempts to establish democracies.

> We believe our constitutional system — limited government, separation of powers, federalism, and the rights of the people — must be preserved uncompromised for future generations.

That's from the preamble of the 2016 Republican platform (the most recent one since they declined to publish one in 2020 in lieu of just doing whatever Donald Trump said); literally their statement of values. But I've long believed that Republicans rely on voters who don't actually know what they're voting for, so your anecdote does strengthen that impression of mine.

What's your proposition then? How it's best to go forward from where we are, if you don't trust the current organization abilities?

The question here is - are Republicans actually those who they write in their documents they are? Or the Republicans are those who the majority of people considering themselves Republican and voting for them thinks?

Certain degrees of federalism are, I think, common across the political spectrum, not only describe Republicans.

Reading about successes fighting polio with vaccines, or just remembering a standard practice in American health system to routinely vaccinate people - with rather few exceptions - shows a big difference with COVID-related vaccine controversy. What's that different?..

Republicans have long said any government is bad. They want Big Business to be unrestrained, unregulated, pure democracy, at the expense of individual civil rights. I can't tell the difference between Republicans and anarchists, other than the sad fact that nearly all Republicans vote adversely to their personal economic interests to stifle economic opportunity, in order to keep the very richest the very richest, for that one future day when they are the richest of the richest. It makes no sense, because that day will never come because they are voting to stifle their own personal economic advancement for the sake of issues skew to economics, such as abortion and 2nd Amendment issues. Really... if you earn less than $325K/year, as nearly all Republicans do, it is insane to keep voting that way. If everyone always ignored all other issues, and voted solely in their personal economic interests, we'd never see another Republican elected until nearly everyone was rich.

> Republicans have long said any government is bad.

Most republicans are not anarcho-libertarians. Asserting that any government is bad is fringe even among libertarians, and most republicans aren't even libertarians.

> “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help.'"

-Ronald Reagan

Perhaps you know that Reagan didn't really mean it, but it seems like many people believed him anyway.

The biggest difference is Polio crippled kids and they were vaccinating kids, whereas COVID mostly kills grandparents and leaves most kids unscathed.

Also, now we have facebook.

> Perhaps you know that Reagan didn't really mean it

I think you surely know it too, Reagan was all too eager to use government power and his supporters were happy to see him do it.

federalism is an excuse to reduce regulation and continue stealing money from the lower classes

Reagan was sufficiently before my time that I have very limited opinions on what he actually wanted, though I would certainly tend to agree with that. I have no idea what modern Republicans actually want or believe. Obviously their elite class wants power above all, but the rank and file never seem to get much other than grievance.

"I'm not in favor of abolishing the government. I just want to shrink it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub." – Grover Norquist

One of the un-fun potential answers to the Fermi Paradox is “everyone invents something like Facebook eventually”.

It's really strange to me that there was a decade where every Republican had to pledge allegiance to this guy (which ended when he married a Muslim woman).

I used to find that drinking a lot helped but then my insides started to hurt. I'm thinking about maybe growing psilocybin mushrooms now.

Also Polio vaccines are much, much more effective and even amongst these groups (i.e. children for Polio and seniors for Covid) Covid is much less dangerous.

Doesn’t seem to have hurt Wolfowitz much (well, he didn’t marry but still).