Comments by "Louis Giokas" (@louisgiokas2206) on "Assassination Attempt and A Changing World || Peter Zeihan" video.

  1. This whole issue of the shifting makeup of the political parties in the US is not new. It is not even particularly violent today or significant in the sweep of US history. Just look at Ronald Regan. Do you remember the time when sitting Congressmen were publicly switching parties? This was mostly the southern Democrats, who were conservatives but were not Republicans because of the lingering effects of the US Civil War and its aftermath. The closest thing we have to that today is Kyrsten Sinema declaring she is an independent but continuing to caucus with the Democrats. Those southern Democrats made John F. Kennedy, an East Coast liberal, fairly ineffective and allowed both Richard Nixon and Ronald Regan to be very effective. Just listen to Peter's description of the electoral system and especially our first past the post system in the US (the UK has something similar). The situation one ends up with is that there are two parties with "factions". In a proportional representation parliamentary system, which is common in Europe, and much of the rest of the world, one ends up with lots of little parties. In many of these countries no party has had an actual majority for a long time, if ever. The coalitions are explicit. I don't want the parties to be too powerful. They are not an explicit part of the fabric of our system of government. John Adams warned about this at the dawn of the 19th century. I have a couple (at least) problems with the proportional representation system. The first I will call locality. I personally want the connection to place and the people in that place to be as local as possible. The parties don't pay taxes. People, who necessarily live in a particular place, pay taxes. The original impetus for parliaments and representative government in the last millennium was that of taxation. The second is that the proportional representative system with governments that are not time limited, gives too much power to small factions. Look at Israel today. That should scare the crap out of you. There is an additional layer of problems when you add in the parliamentary system where the head of "government" (we would say executive branch) is elected by the parliament, not the people. Just look at the Netherlands situation recently. At one point, in the not too distant past, it took Germany six months to "form a government". How about France today? Heck, just look at Germany in the 1930s. Hitler's party never won a majority of the vote even in the last "semi-free" election. We are seeing echoes of fears of that right now in Germany.
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  2.  @SeattlePioneer  Thanks.
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  3. At about 3:55 Peter mentions "today's populist era". I may be a bit sensitive to this, but I expect he is using the term in a negative sense. During the Cold War we were facing an enemy that was literally trying to take over the world to impose a political and economic system that was, to put it mildly, antithetical to our own. Oh, and at the same time, they were threatening us with nuclear annihilation. To use the populist label is disingenuous. Peter is an admitted internationalist. That only works when people agree on the rules of the game. In case you haven't noticed, neither the Chinese nor the Russians want to adhere to those rules. So, if that is populism, I will take it any day over a failed "internationalist" approach any day.
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