Reddit mentions of Are We Rome?: The Fall of an Empire and the Fate of America

Thanks for asking , CindySherman. I checked out the wikipedia article on the constitution and it's not that helpful. I'll give it a shot.

I have been thinking a lot about executive power and constitutions lately. I live in Canada, and follow US politics, and have been a student of US history for a couple decades now. I think the way the office of the US president influences and interfaces with both politics and the culture is really distorted. (This problem long predates the current occupant of the office.)

It's interesting that almost 250 years ago, the Americans overthrew kings, and immediately set up a political system that has a markedly quasi-monarchical element right at its core. (One could argue that the original framers were trying not to do that, and that the monarchical elements only revealed themselves in time, and that they tried to install the "checks and balances" that theoretically constrain the office. I think that at best, they accidentally set the traps that would later be sprung, and at worst, they unconsciously created an echo of the form they fought against. And in the case of Alexander Hamilton, he was quite consciously trying to create a very strong, unified executive, and although all aspects of his vision did not prevail, he influenced the office considerably.)

Then, that quasi-monarchical office, fused with a four-year democratic cycle which now sucks billions of dollars and so much oxygen and attention to it, because the position has become at once incredibly powerful and strictly time-limited. It's a mess, and kind of an ironic mess on quite a few levels. The Americans revere their constitution, and it just isn't that great, and the reverence accorded to presidents has, in particular, done weird things to US society.

Here's what's admirable about the Swiss constitution. (I checked out the Wikipedia entry, and it's not very good - I can see why you didn't get much out of it.) . Like the American, Canadian, German, Australian constitutions, and a few others, it's federal in scope. (Instead of states or provinces, of course, Switzerland has cantons.) A lot of decisions and powers are made at the cantonal or municipal level, just as in other federations. This is a good start already, but nothing particularly unique.

The giant difference that Switzerland exhibits is in the executive. Switzerland does not have a President, Prime Minister, or Chancellor to act as head of government. They have a seven-member Federal Council. (Yes, there is a president of the Council, but the position rotates.) They build in power-sharing and responsibility-sharing, and multipartite democracy right into the executive function of a modern state. That consultation and power-sharing is done at a higher level than Westminster-style governments (with their cabinets) or the US model. It's seriously different in form and practice from what almost any other government does.

There are some very weird distortions that show up in democratic societies due to the huge powers (both executive and in terms of the bully pulpit) we grant to one person at a time. It warps politics and culture in strange, hard-to-describe ways, and we take those distortions as just the way things have to be, not as strange interference patterns and artifacts of design choices we make. This gets exceptionally distorted in the US (for another reason that I'll come to in a second) but it shows up in just about every other democracy as well. We personalize politics, and a lot of that personalization and attention crystallizes in and gets directed to just one person at a time. Politics becomes what are Merkel, May, Trudeau, Macron doing?

​

I'm not trying to present the Swiss as a perfect society, and not making the claim that their politics is perfect, but I think they are working with a better form and practice. I think there's some weird, deep, primate-level stuff that gets activated in politics, and gets worsened when there is one leader in the executive, and the Swiss have figured out an end run around that.

​

Back to America for a moment. There is another huge flaw in the US system. The President, the head of government, is also the Head of State. This invests both the office of the president, as well as the person, with immense symbolic and ceremonial authority and power. (This is where the quasi-monarchical, and nigh-imperial, tendencies in US political culture get really bad.) Canada, the UK, Australia, the Netherlands, and the Scandinavian countries avoid the potential pitfalls of this arrangement because they are constitutional monarchies and have either monarchs or governors-general functioning as heads of state. The Germans and Irish, in their republics, make their presidents ceremonial heads of state, and invest executive power in the office of the chancellor and Taoiseach.

But the Swiss do us all better. The Federal Council as an entire body is the Swiss head of state. It's the only major country with a collective as head of state. (Of course, they don’t send all seven to important funerals. The rotating president of the council will attend, often. But the point is that no one person is Swiss Head of State. So again, built into the ceremonial functions of the executive is diversity, with a sense of coherence, cooperation and cohesion.

​

***

Obviously there were "evolutionary" forces at work in Swiss society and politics that drove this form forward: the fact of four different language communities, the geography that favoured political independence of the cantons, and the decision of the cantons not to join their co-linguists in the large and powerful nation-states around them, but to hang together to maintain their freedom. All that meant that a powerful executive in the form of one person was unlikely to fly in Switzerland.

Although probably no other country would have been likely to spontaneously produce the form on its own, now that the form exists, it can be and should be learned from, emulated and adopted.

This book comes to mind, although I havent read it