What did the US do right with their Presidential Democracy that prevented it from bouncing between Presidential Democracy and Military Dictatorship like in Brazil?

27 comments

  2. I think a lot of it is cultural rather than structural. We have built a culture around the constitution to the point that any serious talk about overthrowing it is unthinkable, and would be met with armed resistance from the majority of the country.
    For some reason, Brazil and other Latin American countries have not been able to build that culture around their political systems.

  3. George Washington set the standard here. He could have been military dictator and turned down the chance. The military has made submitting to elected officials its mantra ever since.

  4. I don’t know much about Brazil besides it having several Juntas coup eachother like leap frog. My guess is our original constitution had the perfect amount of flexibility to be effective while having a balance of power that works both in ideology and in reality kind of. Also helps that we have alot of resources that help prevent putting us in extreme poverty that makes people desperate enough to install a dictator.

  5. George Washington chose not to run for a third term and stepped down at the end of his second, setting the two term precedent that has been followed ever since, with one exception.

  6. Started with a culture that was already well-acquainted with democracy because the individual colonies and cities had a lot of democratic parts to their governments.

  7. Former British colonies tend to be more stable than former French or Spanish colonies, and America happens to be the only major former British colony with a presidential system (and realistically, is more stable than even France’s presidential system).

    I reckon it’s a fluke, and now the country is mature enough that a strongman president running roughshod over the state institutions would cause civil conflict. Parliamentarian countries are more stable overall, but America has the benefit of being the first modern democracy and a culture of: ‘we do it this way because we’ve always done it this way’ leading politicians, while other presidential countries with civil strife are generally only a few decades old or less.

  8. The major thing I have to say would be the balance of power, as much as we want to say its the opposite, none of the branches of our government have power over the other, they all get checked by each other and it would take a massive cooperation to even be as corrupt as we play it out to be. Thats part of why the system was designed as it is, no member is appointed by a higher power, no one party can take full control for a substantial amount of time, and baring a coup, you not gonna see anyone trying to userp the process.

  9. We are very lucky in that the people in the military on January 6 2021 had a strong moral compass. It’s drilled into the army’s brain that they are loyal to the constitution, not any single individual.

  10. Read *Why Nations Fail* by Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson.

    They discuss quite a bit about the developmental history of Spanish and Anglophone colonies.
    Supposedly the difference comes down to modes of resource extraction imposed by the British and Spanish crowns. The Brits opted for a decentralized incentive-based colonization scheme that required colonists to go willingly and act self-sufficiently. They also failed to subjugate the natives and mostly had to work alongside them during early colonization (note: this is *relative* to what Spain did). In contrast Spain brutally subjugated much of Mesoamerica and resource extraction would be a top-down affair, tightly controlled by the crown. They set about digging up as much gold as possible and kicking it up to the guys in charge.

    Supposedly these two developmental pathways fostered two very different political cultures in Spanish vs. Anglo colonies which would have political ramifications down the line.

    (It’s a lot more detailed than that—this is just what I can remember off the top of my head.)

  11. For one, the US did not have the US helping and financing a coup d’état and the CIA training the military on torture.

    Edit: You can downvote as you like it does not make it less true.

  12. In the context of Brazil, the second Brazilian military dictatorship was backed by the US as there was paranoia about Brazil becoming Cuba 2.0 (concerns that were unfounded, Jango [the Brazilian president at the time] was a hardly a communist).

    It helps when you’re a powerful country; it keeps powerful nations meddling in your affairs to a minimum.

  15. The fact that until fairly recently in it’s history the US has not maintained large standing armies during peace time has probably helped.

  17. Easy. The British colonies had a thriving middle-class, encouraged by the British crown. It was this middle-class that created the foundation for American democracy.

    The Spanish and Portuguese colonies, on the other hand, had virtually no middle class. A tiny, extremely wealthy elite subjugated an enormous illiterate lower class.

    And, of course, the English colonies had a large percentage of landowners. The Spanish and Portuguese colonies had virtually no landowners, as the land was owned by the elites.

    The Americans thus a strong incentive to maintain the status quo after independence. The Spanish and Portuguese, on the other hand, had the overwhelming majority of the population not vested in the system or literate enough to properly participate in democratic systems.

  18. Well, it’s part structures of how the colonies turned nations were set up. Portuguese and Spanish former colonies were super centralized to the motherland and didn’t have much in the way of autonomy or democratic practices or some rule. The colonies that would become the US, however, had long since established local control of their affairs with not much oversight from England until after the French and Indian War (which didn’t make the colonists happy, to say the least), so they were more ready for stuff like independence without civil war (at least compared to Latin America)

    It’s also partially established precedent. George Washington was no longer active military and the military was kept under strict civilian control, while active military strongmen got into power way too easily in various Latin American countries and that meant civilian government didn’t have much in the way of control.

    Washington also dutifully quit and went home after 2 terms, and John Adams after him gave up the presidency to Thomas Jefferson (mostly in a “let’s see you do better” way, since they absolutely hated each other and Jefferson, Adams’ VP thanks to how elections worked before the 12th Amendment, constantly talked ahit about Adams and his policies). Simon Bolivar, for example, couldn’t leave well enough alone, doing stuff like calling for constitutional rewrites and not staying home whenever the nation was doing things he didn’t approve of, before eventually being chased out and dying of TB in disgrace.

    To be specific to Brazil, the only reason why it’s a republic is because Emperor Pedro II got couped and exiled by angry former slave owners and that’s not exactly a great start to peaceful transitions of power

  19. There are three very powerful provisions in the Constitution that keep the US from sliding into dictatorship (and will keep Trump from being a dictator as well).

    1. The military swears its loyalty to the Constitution, not to the President. This makes it hugely difficult for a president to command the military to do illegal acts.

    2. Ultimate power rests with Congress, especially the power of the purse and the power to declare war. This limits the ability of the president to bend the government to his will.

    3. We have a federalist system where states have enormous power and states conduct federal elections. This limits the ability of a dictator/president or overzealous Congress from exacting its will.

  21. Cultural differences. Unfortunately we’re learning that’s not enough. We’re falling apart because we’re learning a lot of what we take for granted is simply based on “precedent,” rather than law.

  22. An extremely unpoliticized military and easy revolving door from military service into a political career. There is also the extreme democratic tradition that is ingrained in our culture. We’re suspicious of authority in all ways and you can’t do any political move with out someone noticing.

  23. Part of it is our founding fathers, like George Washington setting the tone.

    But a large part of it is that we’re a federation of semi-sovereign states, each of which has its own laws (if you’re arrested for murder in California, it’s because you violated *California’s* laws against murder), each state has its own governmental system, even its own military. (The National Guard.)

    And until the Civil War, the Federal Government was relatively weak, and mostly funded (of all things) by a tax on alcohol. (Which is why we still treat moonshiners like they’re traitors.)

    So even if, say, we elected a President who declared himself Dictator and had some sort of federal ‘enabling act’ passed to allow him to do whatever he wanted (so long as it was within the scope of the Federal Government’s current purview)—he’d basically be the dictator of a nothing-burger. He’d still have 50 separate independent governors to deal with.

    And that fails to get into if he could even convince the military to play along. (Meaning we’re only talking about the legal aspect, not the cultural aspect of respect for our federal system of government.)

    Throw in the fact that our entire governmental system is rigged against itself—with Democrats and Republicans at each other’s throats, with state lawmakers in opposition to the Federal government about some things, and trying to pass the buck to the Feds on other things, and with a court system rigged against the whole thing: all this loud squabbling, bickering and outright political warfare **is a feature which has insured stability of the system.**

    Which is why you should panic when all the politicians agree on something.

  24. Our military personnel have it drilled into their heads to never follow an illegal order, whether it be war crimes, attacking Americans in our own soil, or taking over the govt.

  25. Honestly I’m surprised this hasn’t been mentioned in other comments, but a lot lies in the fact that historically, the U.S. Military was a weak organization. Not in terms of military strength, but organizational strength. And until the 20th century, it was developed that way by design.

    You see, for most of America’s existence, the U.S. Military was formed of regiments from state militias. Each state had executive power of basically, their own armies. This created some comical historical incidents like the Toledo War, where both Michigan and Ohio marched their militias to Toledo but both sides gave up when neither side could figure out how to get through the Great Black Swamp that bordered the two states.

    Any incident of war or military action at the federal level before the 1860s required troops requested from the state militias, and what troops the federal government got was wholly dependent on those militias. The militias voted with their feet who went and who didn’t, along with state governments. We didn’t have a true, permanent standing military until the 1900s, after the Spanish-American War.

  26. White Anglophone settler-based countries like the United States has a critical mass of small-scale landowner middle class that neutralized large-scale landowner upper class through their majoritarian electoral and political systems, while Brazil and other Latin American countries don’t have, so having a substantial small-scale landowner middle class demographic is the key for preventing the emergence of military general despots financed by large-scale landowner upper class elites.

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