Then it won't work. The current iteration of Germany is fully based on having been bombed to get a fresh start. If you already have something, you won't change it. If you have to re-build, you will implement improvements. No bombs, no reset, no joy.

James May did a documentary loosely based on this. "The Peoples Car"

Basically analysing the economies of WW2 participants via their automobile industries.

Its staggering how being bombed into the ground has forced technological and economic innovation. And how the inverse, being the bomber, has created stagnation.

I don't think it would matter even if the us did have to start again. The entire us alliance after ww2 benefited from the same structural causes of increased pluralism and egalitarianism. A fractured elite, complex international trade, expanding and increasingly difficult to control communication channels, and a growing bureaucracy. These all inhibit autocratic concentration of power. International trade became uncomplicated, there is one manufacturer that is not a consumer, and many consumers. This leads to an increasingly less fractured elite. The structural reasons for democracy and rules based order are all fading. The us is just a really big canary.

Congress is the problem, but not in the way most describe.

Congress has abdicated its powers because as an institution it is broken. Several inland states with total state wide populations less than that of major metro areas on the coasts have the same amount of senators as every other state has - two. This means voters in a lot of states are over represented. Meanwhile, they say land doesn't vote, but in the United States Senate the cities and localities with the most people that drive much of our growth and dynamism are severely underrepresented. The upper and most important chamber of the Congress is thus undemocratic. Given it's an institution deeply susceptible to minority gridlock that depends on wide margins to do anything, well now more often than not it simply does nothing. An imperial presidency thus frankly becomes the only way the country can actually get most things done.

This two senators for every state arrangement was a compromise agreed to when constitutional ratification was in doubt, when the USA was a weak, newborn country of about 3 million people confined to the Eastern seaboard at a time in our history where our most pressing concern was being recolonized by European powers. The British burned down the White House in 1812 imagine what more they could have accomplished if the constitutional compromises that strengthened the union had not been agreed to.

This compromise has outlived its usefulness. No American today fears a Spanish armada or British regulars bearing torches. These difficult compromises at the heart of America already led to one civil war.

The best we can do is create a broad political movement that entertains as many incriminations as possible (probably around corruption/Epstein, which must make pains to avoid any distinction between say a Bill Clinton or a Donald Trump) so we can get past partisan bickering to get enough of mass movement to try to usher in a new age of constitutional amendment and reform.

If it doesn't happen this cycle of Obama Trump Biden Trump will continue until this country elects someone who makes Trump look like a saint. It can happen. Think of how Trump rehabilitated Bush. We already see the trend getting worse. And if it does, then the post WWII Germany style reset being mentioned here will then become inevitable.

The people running the show are all building generational fallout shelters in new zealand. As seems to be the real 'whitehouse ballroom' plan too. They seem to be expecting that part.

> Their economy lifted a bunch of people out of poverty

This is fallacious as every economy that started at extreme poverty lifted a bunch of people out of poverty.

Unless we invent a time machine and do an A|B test we can't really attribute the success to policy when _any_ policy would have clearly lifted out a bunch of people out of poverty (basically almost impossible to not go up from extreme deficit). The closest we can do is look at similar scenarios like Taiwan which also lifted a bunch of people from poverty while retaining more human rights.

Agree with much of this. However: plenty of Central/Eastern European countries seem like they have pretty definitively shaken off communism in favor of pretty standard European style capitalism/social democracy.