why are either of our countries like, why are they
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Replying to @BootlegGirl @LizardOrman and
History. A lot of it is the same history.
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Replying to @bazzalisk @BootlegGirl and
The "Anglo-American tradition", such as it is, is vaguely synonymous with the tradition of the common law, with its focus on attempting to maintain the perception of an unbroken tradition reaching back to an ancient origin
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Replying to @arthur_affect @bazzalisk and
The US Constitution isn't all that ancient, but we're still very proud of having had a theoretically unbroken constitutional order for our whole existence, and the Constitution attempts to root itself in the common law tradition minus the idea of the monarch as sovereign
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Replying to @arthur_affect @bazzalisk and
The idea of sometimes just having to scrap your government and start over, like France being on its Fifth Republic, is alien and shameful to us (and wildly hypocritical considering how often we've tried to impose it on others)
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Replying to @arthur_affect @bazzalisk and
And yeah it's an attitude that very much could it survive with the British and American Empires being hegemonic powers for a long time that were largely insulated from the outside world and got stuck in a certain degree of tunnel vision
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Replying to @arthur_affect @BootlegGirl and
To be honest it’s really weird that the US has managed to combine that kind of ancient tradition worship with a codified constitution. The only reason the UK manages to have an unbroken set of legal traditions going back over a thousand years is because they can be fudged.
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Replying to @bazzalisk @arthur_affect and
Major parts of the UK constitution can simply shift or be reinterpreted over time as needed to keep things working. And that’s a constant process.
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Replying to @bazzalisk @BootlegGirl and
We're obviously doing that too we just lie about it a lot
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Replying to @arthur_affect @bazzalisk and
Like of course the wackjob libertarians are right that we're not following the Framers' "original intent" but that's because the idea of doing so is ludicrous
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In particular even the stodgiest legal scholars kind of have to admit the constitutional order massively changed after the Civil War, and the 14th Amendment basically outright says so and changes the whole equation of "federalism vs states' rights"
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Replying to @arthur_affect @bazzalisk and
But no one will talk about that directly, Lincoln made it his priority to mythologize the United States and pretend the conquest of the Confederacy was restoring an ancient order rather than creating a new one, so we've been making it up as we go along
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Replying to @arthur_affect @bazzalisk and
There's no way to characterize, say, the incorporation of the Bill of Rights into federal law under the 14th Amendment's due process clause as anything other than an ad hoc common law kind of thing
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