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Comment by mmaunder | Hacker News Reader

Democracy with universal suffrage has barely been around a century. In South Africa, it is just over 2 decades old. It's new, it's messy, it doesn't always go our way. What amazes me is that the USA can swing from one side of the political spectrum to the other and the country holds together and happily repeats the process every few years.

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Sorry to break it to you buy Democrats are not left, if anything they are center right by western European standards, the Republicans on the other hand are going right off the cliff https://www.cnn.com/2018/03/03/politics/trump-maralago-remar...

aside: Last time Europe had politics like above it ended badly for millions of people worldwide, except this time nuclear weapons abound

And the US’ right would be considered quite far left compared to many Asian and Middle Eastern countries. I’m not quite sure what point you’re trying to make or how it’s relevant to GP’s. It’s quite clear GP was referring to the US’ policies spectrum, not that of the entire world.

The point I am trying to make is that the US is not oscillating happily between left and right as the OP claims, but is veering further and further into authoritarian right territory.

I doubt many people in US would like their country to become a "shithole country" to quote their current president, but yet here we are watching history unfold

A hundred years ago Americans were being sent off to war to die en masse against their will, and it was a crime to speak out against the war effort. America's still nowhere near as authoritarian as it was.

I think maybe the point is that the swing isn't really that big, so no real surprise that things keep on working

Not really. Trump is a third gen immigrant with an immigrant wife. If he were in Europe, he would talk about bloodline heritage, and how his people were French for centuries. There is a level of protectionism, homognity, and xenophobia that Europeans simply take for granted.

> how his people were French for centuries

Wikipedia:

Sarkozy is the son of Pál István Ernő Sárközy de Nagy-Bócsa (Hungarian: nagybócsai Sárközy Pál; [ˈnɒɟboːt͡ʃɒi ˈʃaːrkøzi ˈpaːl] —in some sources Nagy-Bócsay Sárközy Pál István Ernő), a Protestant Hungarian aristocrat, and Andrée Jeanne "Dadu" Mallah (12 October 1925 – 12 December 2017) whose Greek Jewish father converted to Catholicism to marry Sarkozy's French Catholic maternal grandmother.

Indeed. Gore Vidal put it best:

“There is only one party in the United States, the Property Party … and it has two right wings: Republican and Democrat.”

> What amazes me is that the USA can swing from one side of the political spectrum to the other and the country holds together and happily repeats the process every few years.

This is actually an interesting observation/fact. My assumption is that the sort of political life which hits the media is a thing of the (US) cities while daily life in rural areas remains largely unaffected and is defined by long-term evolved social relationships.

And in the US there are many more people living in rural areas than cities (although if agglomerations or "urban areas" are counted in, it's very concentrated)

https://www.citylab.com/equity/2012/03/us-urban-population-w...

http://www.theusaonline.com/people/urbanization.htm

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