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Republicans introduce extreme bill to ban lawsuits against Big Oil forever | Shouldn't Democrats... be saying something about this? (heated.world)
submitted 5 months ago by to c/aboringdystopia@lemmy.world
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cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/36932203

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[–] -4 points 5 months ago (7 children)

Switzerland, Iceland, the Iroquois Confederacy, polish-lithiuanian Commonwealth, san marino

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  • [–] 16 points 5 months ago

    In 1776 Switzerland was not even called Switzerland, it was The Old Swiss Confederacy, and not even a single unified country. They didn't abandon the sovereignty of the individual cantons until 1848 when they adopted their constitution. I wouldn't call the canton situation a modern democracy.

    I'll give you The Six Nations.

    I don't know enough about the others to say specifically, but I suspect that much like Switzerland, they didn't reform their governments from a fuedal state to a modern state until the mid to late 1800s much like the rest of Europe.

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  • [–] 3 points 5 months ago* (5 children)

    Iceland has one of the oldest parliaments. It didn't become a democracy until 1944. San Marino vested sovereignty in the people (the definition of democracy) in 1974.

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  • [–] -3 points 5 months ago (4 children)

    Ok. By that definition the us isn't a democracy either. If you don't count imperfect democracies and then only count your own imperfect democracy as a democracy then yeah. You're the first. Congrats.

    Who votes for president again?

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  • [–] 5 points 5 months ago (3 children)

    C'mon, now, Iceland was under the Danish king until 1944. That's clearly a monarchy. As for San Marino, the point is that they were tweaking bedrock fundamentals of their system as recently as 1974. It's not been the same one in use for hundreds of years.

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  • [–] -1 points 5 months ago* (2 children)

    That's not clear to me at all. Canada, Australia, the UK, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Lichtenstein, the Netherlands, Belgium, and more are all currently monarchies still today. Are they not democracies?

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  • [–] 1 point 5 months ago (1 child)

    I would say that they are democracies today, but the closest thing to a clear binary distinction between democracy and not is where sovereignty is vested. I'm most familiar with the history of the UK; nobody would say that it became a democracy once King John signed the Magna Carta, and agreed to share sovereignty with the aristocracy, but we would call it a democracy today. It is technically a hybrid system, in which sovereignty is split between the king and the people. The king approves all acts of Parliament, but it's a formality, and the king approves whatever acts the popularly-elected Parliament passes. It was a bit-by-bit transformation from monarchy to democracy. (And it is continuing its transformation in 2026 with the abolition of the last hereditary seats in the House of Lords.)

    I get that it's righteous to shit on the United States — because we mostly deserve it — but in this case it really was the first modern nation-state explicitly founded on pure, popular sovereignty. (As in, no monarch or aristocracy, not that everybody could vote.)

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