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by forapurpose
2895 days ago
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> I think it only matters what type of people are in charge. Democracy won't protect your country, only whether those who have taken an oath to defend the rule of law, their country, and their vote, actually do. I think that citizens in a democracy have the power to protect themselves by voting and taking other political actions. The tools of democracy, unused, are insufficient. At the same time there seems to be a very high correlation between the system of government and the quality of leaders. Trump is a problem but he stands out as an exception in U.S. history. The leaders of mature democracies seem much higher quality than those of other forms of governments, especially over time. Also, institutions have a large effect. Their power isn't absolute, but the institutions in the US government are well-established and support the rule of law; they can't be changed overnight. Those institutions are protecting Americans from much worse (though they are also failing to do all they need to). |
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The quality of leaders you must have for a mature (and thus taken for granted) democracy to survive as a democracy increases with maturity, so this is arguably simple survivorship bias: democracies that get poor leaders when the people have lost the immediate visceral understanding of the fragility and specialness of democratic institutions tend very strongly to stop being democracies.
> Also, institutions have a large effect. Their power isn't absolute, but the institutions in the US government are well-established and support the rule of law.
Do they? There are certainly many executive branch institutions that support the rule of the way things have traditionally been done in those institutions (which, particularly within the national security apparatus, may not reflect the law even when it also does not reflect the whim of the current chief executive. And even where they might (as I think a good argument can be made for the professional core, and even much of the subcabinet political leadership, of the DoJ and FBI) support the rule of law, they are extremely subject to disruption by the President via directed personnel change.
It's certainly not clear that legislative branch institutions support the rule of law at the present time; arguably, the legislative majority (at least in the House) has been openly aligned with the President against those institutions interested in the rule of law.
The judiciary is what's left, but this President has been making appointments there at a much higher rate than most recent ones (there's been attention to his second Supreme Court pick recently, but the pace of lower court appointments has been quite high.)