alt Hacker NewsGermany has learned this lesson the hard way, with a 'defensive' constitution post-1945. You don't have 100% free speech in Germany, and it is possible to make parties illegal. It's not without its issues (currently, the far-right AfD might be banned using these laws but the whole system has been dragging its feet) but it is a lesson the US should have learned after the first Trump term.
Democracies by default assumed that all players in the system are supportive of the system itself, kind of like all early Internet protocols assumed that there are no malicious users.
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They didn't "learn this lesson", they had a constitution imposed on them and were basically occupied for 50 years by multiple foreign powers; even up until 2020 as I recall there were about as many active US army personnel in Germany as German ones. There isn't a hugely compelling story that the constitution is the big factor in the German journey.
It isn't possible to build a paper system that consistently resists an incompetent elite and the people deciding to re-roll the dice on a new system because the current one isn't working. Corruption creeps in and people stop following the official rules.
> You don't have 100% free speech in Germany
You don’t have it in the USA, either.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_speech_in_the_Unite...
Does any country?
Germany has the same fundamental problems. Just the symptoms are different. Look at debt brake etc. And the banning at this point is just not politically possible. It is just a legal fantasy. Over a long term, laws can only reflect the politics.
Germans believe that legalities can ensure politics be conducted in a "desired" manner when the reality is, it just causes more and more factions of the politics to be done outside the legal framework. Politics is like time, it stops for no man and no law.
The civic consens could only be undermined because people lack the contextual knowledge and (self) critical reasoning to not be vulnerable.
Germany tried to solve that problem by creating an extra-governmental body tasked with public broadcasting, with budget autonomy (collects its own pseudo tax) and supposed political independence.
https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Öffentlich-rechtlicher_Rundf...
But this falls short too. There are many positions occupied by people with political party affiliation and cases of corruption/embezzlement.
And the cherry on top are the austerity hawks chipping away at the school system for many decades now. The german school system is slowly collapsing, with state represantatives even boykotting a federal conference because their problems had been ignored for so long.
https://taz.de/Laender-boykottieren-den-Bildungsgipfel/!5918...
Limiting freedom of speech can be helpful in delicate, small scale cases but becomes unenforcable when the dipshit echo chambers grow and the overton window moves.
Germany has the same route ahead as the USA. I am certain :(
the far-right AfD might be banned using these laws but the whole system has been dragging its feet
How is this any different than how in the US, the far-right insurrectionist that orchestrated Jan6 should have been banned from pursuing public office but the whole system had been dragging its feet? It sounds nice in theory, but as long as there is no active interest in wielding that lawful power, it really is just a piece of paper.