i don’t actually know this, this isn’t a rhetorical question, but, like, do other representative democracies expect that their heads of state maintain 14-16 hour a day, 7 day a week schedules, or is that just specific to our national obsession with looking busy?
From what I understand it's function of our President be an executive with a capital E, the Prime Minister of the UK, for instance, simply has a lot more bureaucracy and shares a lot more power with Parliament.
I mean “head of state” means functionally a lot less when winning an election more or less automatically appoints cabinet positions. The parliamentary system vests most power with parliaments.
there's an entire category of things that head of state does and head of government doesn't. functionally we do devolve a good chunk of that to other proxies, but our system is somewhat rare in that head of state and head of government are the same person.
you obviously can manage to get by with them being the same person-- we have-- but there are good reasons (not always the same good reasons) why most other systems don't.
Yeah, though I think that our biggest issue is that the Constitution is one for a federal republic where sovereignty is shared between states and the federal government, which is pretty much a historical anomaly.
And one that is not at all constructed for a functional modern state, but which is apparently unchangeable in that regard. Like, it's probably closer in structure to the EU than any specific European country, but with a military.
To varying degrees, but nothing really approaches it, I think. Germany is a "federal republic" but there's nothing guaranteeing each German state equal representation in a body as powerful as the Senate.
i always remind myself that the founding fathers, for all their failures and negotiations to try and hold together their fragile new country that had already failed one attempt at democratic self governance, were really making shit up in uncharted territory.
like, at the time they were writing this in more than one country in europe the head of state was in a very literal way seen as the country itself. louis xvi and george iii were divine right of kings guys.
Actually by the time King George III showed up the parliamentary system was already gaining power and the divine right of kings went out with the Bill of Rights Act of 1689. So our founding fathers werent working in the dark. From the Magna Carter on they had some building blocks.
To me, the most interesting set up is independent countries that used to be part of the British Empire (e.g. Canada and Australia) that continue to use the British Monarch as the Head of State via an appointed Governor General.
If you look at say Ireland or Israel, they have an elected President with (very limited) powers as head of state and then a PM as head of government.
And then there’s France.
Like, the German PM doesn’t even have to set the price of gas and eggs.
Imagine. Getting on every morning as President and before you even get to watch Morning Joe or eat your hash browns you’ve got to determine what the public will be paying for gas, eggs and a million other things.
I think the distinction is super important and the confusion of the two in the US is a Big Problem, Actually. It leads to confusing the acts of the government with those of the state, and that's toxic and shitty.
