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Comment by throwaway2037 | Hacker News Reader

throwaway2037

   > Switzerland its the longest living democracy in the world

I Googled that and found: This highly authoritative article from World Economic Forum that disagrees with you: https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2019/08/countries-are-the-wor...

And, a bunch of Internet randos arguing about it here: https://www.theguardian.com/notesandqueries/query/0,,-80426,...

As an outsider, highly advanced democracies appear to argue about very small things because most of the big things are done right. See also: Japan, Netherlands, Norway, Canada, Finland, etc.

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>This highly authoritative article from World Economic Forum

You mean highly biased? Switzerland's direct democracy is the antithesis of what the WEF stands for.

WEF is based in Switzerland and their annual meeting is in the Swiss Alps.

The financing of WEF is mostly big corps which are in large part headquartered in Switzerland, and is financed by the Swiss government directly.

Swiss direct democracy is irrelevant to WEF.

Their definition of democracy is quite arbitrary, I would argue that any country where women and minorities cannot vote isn’t a democracy, it is according to them.

Sure but in that case, Switzerland wasn't a democracy until 1990 when women in the canton of Appenzell Innerrhoden finally got the right to vote in federal elections.

Wiki says: Women in Switzerland gained the right to vote in federal elections after a referendum in February 1971.

You're correct but women weren't allowed to vote on the canton level in some cantons until 1990. That's almost as bad:

https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/politics/a-visit-to-appenzell-i...

not going to condone it, but it makes my point. Other countries ban the vote by felons, or by certain classes of people. Yet, they are still called democracies. The only difference is that the agreement to strip voting power is bipartisan in 1 case, and in switzerland it was a niche who approves of it.

The United States is not and never has been a democracy. The Senate and the SCOTUS are not democratic institutions.

Can you explain why the US Senate is not democratic? And do you feel the same about the senior house for all other highly functioning democracies?

I'm assuming they are from a high populous area, and feel that overall popular vote should have the majority representation at the federal level.

I'm quite glad this is not the case, I don't want to be governed by the populist progressive votes in the coastal cities.

> I don't want to be governed by progressive

This is why the world is ending.

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