Vittelius
In the case of Germany: a lot less, but it’s not impossible.
The German equivalent to the supreme court is the Bundesverfassungsgerichtshof (BVerG, federal Constitutional Court) and in stark contrast to the highest American court, it is not an appeals court. A lower court might refer a case to the BVerG, or ask it to clarify a constitutional question, that has come up during a trial but most case don’t even have a theoretical path to Karlsruhe. Political parties and NGOs may also go to directly in front of the Constitutional Court to protest the constitutionality of laws.
New justices are confirmed with a 2/3 majority which means that you need to convince roughly 30% of the opposition to vote for your candidate. That in turn leads to more moderate candidates put forward. Justices are also limited to one term of twelve years. Outside of that a justice may be removed from office by the German federal president* if 2/3 of BVerG justices vote to impeach their colleague.
So far so good. Unfortunately there are some weaknesses in the entire setup. The law responsible for needing a 2/3 majority to elect a justice can be changed with a simple majority. A right wing government could also expand the court by introducing a third senate and pack it with their appointees. But that requires them to get into power first.
German late night show Die Anstalt did a segment about that problem a while back: https://youtu.be/ljjZ6AZsmGk (Video in German)
Tldr: the highest German court is not going to stop a fascist government from doing fascism but it is also not working to put the fascists into power, the way the US supreme court is.
- Yes Germany has a president. The role is largely ceremonial though as he isn’t head of government
That sort of depends on the type of electoral system. There are a couple of systems that are not fptp but do produce a winner for each district such as “open list” and “mixed member”.
Gerrymandering doesn’t do as much harm in those systems as it does in FPTP but can still be an issue
Update: Yesterday the German government introduced a constitutional amendment that would protect the Constitutional Court from some of this. It’s not perfect but it is still pretty good and it has the necessary 2/3 majority to pass
https://www.dw.com/en/germany-moves-to-protect-top-court-against-far-right/a-68403671
To add to that I’d like to quote Ian Danskin (aka Inuendo Studios) from his guest lecture about Gamergate at UC Merced:
Bob Altemeyer has this survey he uses to study authoritarianism. He divides respondents into people with low, average, and high authoritarian sentiments, and then tells them what the survey has measured and asks, “what score do you think is best to have: low, average, or high?”
People with low authoritarian sentiments say it’s best to be low. People with average authoritarian sentiments also say it’s best to be low. But people with high authoritarian sentiments? They say it’s best to be average. Altemeyer finds, across all his research, that reactionaries want to aggress, but only if it is socially acceptable. They want to know they are the in-group and be told who the out-group is. They don’t particularly care who the out-group is, Altemeyer finds they’ll aggress against any group an authority figure points to, even, if they don’t notice it, a group that contains them. They just have to believe the in-group is the norm.
exactly. In the next paragraph Ian even has some examples of how that works in modern day American conservative political culture:
Reactionary politics is rebellion against things they dislike getting normalized, because they know, if they are normalized, they will have to accept them. Because the thing they care about most is being normal.
This is why the echo chamber, this is why Fox News, this is why the Far Right insists they are the “silent majority.” This is why they artificially inflate their numbers. This is why they insist facts are “biased.” They have to maintain the image that what are, in material terms, fringe beliefs are, in fact, held by the majority. This is why getting mocked by Stephen Colbert was such a blow to GamerGate. It makes it harder to believe the world at large agrees with them.
This is why, if you’re trying to change the world for the better, it’s pointless to ask their permission. Because, if you change the world around them, they will adapt even faster than you will.
Honestly the whole talk is worth a listen. It’s depressing because, well, it’s about gamergate but it explains so much (and it’s probably one of the parts of his alt right playbook series of video essays getting shared the least on social media
Some sort of playable experience after official support has ended. The proposal doesn’t specify what that has to look like because different games might require different solutions.
It can be a single-player mode it can be dedicated servers or p2p with an open api for third parties to handle matchmaking. It can just be adding bots.
And sometimes it just means removing always on DRM. A lot of games would be perfectly playable offline if it wasn’t for that.
