[walkabout]

Say a prosecutor is elected and literally never prosecutes crimes. Any crime. Ever. Despite laws on the books stating they are, in some cases that have in-fact come up, required to. But this prosecutor keeps getting re-elected, and nobody enforces the laws about their having to bring certain cases.

Both of the following may be true:

1) The prosecutor is doing what a plurality of voters want.

2) The office of prosecutor is not functioning correctly, as defined by law (“has failed” or “is broken” would be other ways of saying this)

[wonderwonder]

This is actually a good thought experiment. In your example, democracy is actually fully working. The people though are voting to override the law (essentially something akin to jury nullification on a massive scale) and the prosecutor is breaking the system. So what is the solution?

Optimal solution is a check and balance where a higher level prosecutor, perhaps a federal or state level steps in and takes charge. Another optimal is courts rule that the prosecutor has to do their job.

But lets say that neither of these happen and there is no way to impeach the prosecutor.

You have a couple of scenarios.

1. Uprising. The people rise up and kill the prosecutor.

2. Dictatorship. A higher power even though they don't have the legal authority steps in and removes the prosecutor.

Now the real question is was this a good result? Democracy failed but you got rapists and murderers off the street.

I think we are very far away from this with Trump, he is still following the checks and balances, those checks and balances are just either

A: refusing to act or

B: acting in a way that some people don't like but I would add that many people do indeed like.

So I guess you could add civil war to the potential outcome as a portion of the population does not like the existing checks and balances and the results of the democratic election.

Now what is interesting is your scenario actually explains partially the rise of MAGA and Trump. For them, the law lead to open borders, what they saw as the promotion of LGBTQ amongst children (drag queen reading hour, etc) and DEI (discrimination against themselves and their children). All things they perceive as a grave threat to the future of the nation. So if they have to vote for someone that works outside the law in order to preserve their desired future they are willing to do so. They are willing to flirt with the dictator option if it means putting off what they view as a cataclysm.

I am not sure which is the best solution in your prosecutor scenario, what are your thoughts?

[walkabout]

“Democracy” in the sense of “a government with large amounts of citizen participation via voting, strong rule of law, and peaceful transition of power” (this is an entirely fine usage; it’s the main way most political scientists use the term day-to-day, ditto ordinary people, that’s why there are so many openings for incorrecting people online with “ackshually only direct democracy is democracy, the rest is sparkling representative republics”, which, again, isn’t how people who study government generally use the term) is failing, because rule of law is failing. This is a (partial, in this hypothetical, but far more complete in the real thing I’m alluding to) clear failure of government.

“Democracy” as in people are voting and the people they elected are wielding power (nb it is not necessarily the case that voters like that crime isn’t being prosecuted in my hypothetical, even in cases that their system of presumably-also-democratic government legally requires it—it could be that this prosecutor is popular despite that) is working.

Maybe you just mean that votes are resulting in things happening, period, regardless of whether those things are legal according to laws established and upheld by prior elected governments, and even if the system isn’t operating anywhere near its foundational legal basis, and that’s the disconnect?

(Outside the hypothetical, rule of law has always kinda struggled at times but is simply collapsing this term in ways and to a degree that’s not been seen in living memory, certainly; voting has been under attack for decades and especially lately between the ‘00s-today baseless but effective attacks on confidence in elections, the “find me votes” and illegal electors pushes having no consequences and the guy behind them currently holding effectively all federal levers of power and quite a few state ones, increasing gerrymandering activity, and the VRA being on life support and likely soon to be dead; and we’ve not seen peaceful transition of power in as shaky a place as it is post-Jan-6th [and the reactions thereto]… maybe ever, aside from the actual civil war? Certainly not since the 19th century; taken together, yeah, American democracy in the former sense is doing extremely poorly and large parts of it are entirely broken at the moment, and it’s very much not clear how much, if any, of it will recover, and it’s a safe bet a lot of that’s going to get worse at least in the short term)