• Apepollo11@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Maybe.

    But we don’t have people storming the capital in an attempt to overthrow elections here (UK) and we don’t have a formal constitution.

    The two things might be unrelated.

    • AggressivelyPassive@feddit.de
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      1 year ago

      And we did have some guys trying to storm the Reichstag in Berlin, we do have a constitution, but we don’t call it constitution and it’s also more of a permanent draft.

      • ToxicWaste@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        IMO the constitution is that important to Americans, because they don’t really have tradition or culture to draw from. The USA is a very young country. Yes I know that technically modern day Germany, Italy and others are younger. However, those countries have many centuries of tradition and culture to draw from.

        Pretty much every country has some form of ‘the highest law’, which is intentionally kept rather abstract. Afterall it is the framework for more specific laws to fill in and regulate daily life. But an identity and feeling of self for the USA pretty much started with the civil war. Which lead to the writing of the constitution, their ‘highest law’. The constitution is part of the creation mythos for the USA. A marking point of when people start to think of themselves as Americans, a sovereign entity. Since the USA, compared to other countries, doesn’t have much more culture to draw from, the relative importance of that one piece is inevitably higher.

      • Apepollo11@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Honestly, it’s been in continual decline my entire life. Thatcher put an end to any sense of social responsibility, New Labour ushered in the era of post-truth politics, Boris and his bunch didn’t even have to pretend that they were acting in the interest of the country.

        Anything short of full political reform will only end up being the next phase in this hell spiral.