I don’t understand the systems in other countries, I’m mostly going based on what happens in the US. If people want to discuss other nations that is fine though, I just don’t understand their systems.
For one thing, the legislative is supposed to be a check on the executive and vice versa. However when they are one party and the legislative branch members are afraid of being primaried for going against the executive, this breaks down. The check the legislature is supposed to provide for the executive stops working.
What about a system where an opposition party of the party holding the executive has investigation power and subpoena power in the legislature? If the president is a democrat, even if congress is democratic then the legislature has various investigative bodies (with teeth) that have to be run by the republicans. The opposite is true of the executive branch is republican. Of course this could just lead to gridlock.
Why does a special prosecutor or special counsel even need to be appointed? Shouldn’t that be a permanent position (an independent investigator who can investigate any crimes committed by anyone in the executive or legislative branch)? The system we have now where an attorney general can fire a special counsel doesn’t make sense, it makes it easier for the executive to cover itself. What if Trump had appointed true blue loyalists to head the AG and FBI? There’d be no special counsel.
Gerrymandering obviously doesn’t help, it leads to more partisan politicians in the house which would support a move towards party loyalty over country loyalty. More representative districts would ideally lead to more moderate politicians.
With the rise of authoritarianism in France, the US, Poland, Hungary, Turkey and various other western nations, what checks and balances ideally would help to prevent an authoritarian from taking power and keeping it?
What if the public want an authoritarian? How do you still stop it? In Turkey they had elections and Erdogan won the popular vote to give himself more power. How do you ensure that one party or one individual can’t take on authoritarian powers even if 50.1%+ of the electorate want them to? Will a constitution and independent judiciary prevent that? Why didn’t a constitution or independent judiciary protect black people in the south under Jim Crow?
The legislature has hardly any police power over the executive branch, as I understand it. They conduct hearings and investigations “in the aid of legislation”, which is no doubt exploited to full elasticity. The judiciary is basically the same everywhere.
But also look at the vertical structure. The local government structure and laws decide how much control the national government has over the different states and municipalities.
The US system of the three branches, combined with term limits (wish we had them for more than just the President’s position) and a tradition of democracy seems like a good system. Not to say that some tweaks couldn’t be added, like the aforementioned term limits for Congress and something like **iiandyiiii’s **suggestions for the SC term limits.
IMO, the main check for authoritarianism is term limits, set in stone, like the US Presidential ones. You can’t be a proper dictator if you know that a few years from now you will be out of power and people you’re lording over may judge you pretty harshly.
A second check is federalism. Weaker central government, stronger local governments. Unfortunately the US has been moving further and further away from that.
Ultimately, if the people want an authoritarian government, they’re going to get it, whether it’s a direct democracy, parliamentary democracy or any other form of government.
[QUOTE=Bemjamin Franklin]
Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.
[/Quote]
At the risk of being accused of a hijack, does this statement (which I am not challenging) remind you of a time in almost-recent history, ca. 1920’s, 1930’s? Isn’t that just a little bit frightening?
I don’t know about term limits. Putin just go around term limits in Russia by changing which office he ran for. He’d be president, then prime minister, then president again.
I guess if a person were popular enough, they could end term limits, but that’d take a supermajority. Which I guess is a good thing.
A little bit, but I’d hope it won’t be nearly as bad. The world has far more knowledge, wealth and interdependency than it did a century ago.
At the end of the day, the public in various countries want authoritarianism. Either a majority want it, or a minority want it strongly enough that it empowers the authoritarian group to act like a majority. I don’t know if we know how to change that. If anything, the wave of automation that will result in mass unemployment in the next few decades will probably make it worse. People will be looking for scapegoats for why they can’t find a job, and it’ll be easy to blame immigrants and other outsiders.
This isn’t what checks and balances means. In this context, checks and balances simply means that both political branches of government have a role to play in preparing legislation, appointing officials, paying/overseeing expenditures. The system often does result in both arms of government being stymied from taking action, but that’s not a requirement. If something is broadly popular with the President and Congress, it gets enacted/appointed/spent. The courts then have an opportunity to review the action for constitutionality. If the political branches cooperate to do something and the courts uphold it, then the system is working, just as much as it is if one branch restrains another. The fact that inevitably one half of the population or the other does not like the action taken does not mean that the system is broken or that the action is authoritarian.
Trump is actually being contained pretty well by the checks and balances. It may seem to some that he is an overreaching tyrant but by just about any political standard he is more or less constrained and bottled up.
It seems to me that the US legislative branch has built-in internal checks and balances, in that there are 2 bodies constitutionally mandated, and 2 parties that have emerged over time. These divisions act to make it harder to get anything done by design, so that egregious nonsense is avoided (supposedly).
The judicial branch also benefits from 2 party involvement (again, not by design, but just how it has worked out historically).
Whereas the executive branch? Not so much, other than elections every 4 years, and the 8 year term limit. I can’t help but notice other countries have a separate President and Prime Minister. Perhaps a similar structure, where they can not be from the same party, would inject some buffering mechanism?
When Reagan was president, there was a lot of rumbling about repealing the 22nd amendment, but no one moved enough on it, and by the time we were halfway through his second term, it was pretty obvious he was too old to handle a third term-- if the amendment had been repealed-- and he would not have run anyway. Then (and I was shocked-- SHOCKED, I tell you!) he was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s practically the day after he left office, but his family swore he was absolutely fine the whole time he was serving.
Anyway, a lot of people thought we’d dodged a bullet, not repealing the 22nd amendment, and I think that example is still fresh enough that no one is going to suggest repealing it again any time soon. And I seriously doubt anyone, even his “base” really wants to elect a nearly 80-year-old Trump to a 3rd term.
Yes they are, but Trump is a very very shitty politician.
Trump is deeply incompetent, very polarizing, totally clueless about how government works, has atrocious political skills and social skills, can’t form coalitions or build alliances, has a low IQ (based on how his knowledge seems very superficial), no attention span and probably has multiple mental illnesses (malignant narcissism and probably dementia).
Trump doesn’t respect or value democracy, the constitution or western values. But what if the next authoritarian who becomes president doesn’t either, but they actually are competent? What if someone who truly understands government, can build alliances, has amazing social skills, has a high IQ, etc. comes who also doesn’t respect democracy, the constitution or western values?
Putin came to power using a mix of (among other things) corruption, bribery, intimidation, blackmail and false flag terror attacks. He parlayed that into becoming head of an authoritarian state. The nazis transformed the Weimar republic into a dictatorship by passing 3 laws.
Are the checks and balances in the US strong enough to resist a president who is intelligent and knows what s/he is doing? The fact that they are holding up while a deeply incompetent, mentally ill president is in charge doesn’t fill me with confidence about their abilities in the future. What if the next authoritarian fills the FBI and justice department with loyalists? What if they know how to pressure judges into giving rulings they agree with (using carrots and sticks)? What if they know how not to alienate congress, or they know how to push for laws that have secret back clauses that expand his/her power in the executive?
Once a President you like better is in office, aren’t you going to be mighty sorry that you’ve tied his hands and taken away his ability to get anything done?
He is hostile to a free press, hostile to an independent judiciary, he has good things to say about dictators, he supports violence against protesters, supports voter suppression, supports torture, ok with elections that are questionable due to hacking, etc
I’ve thought about that. I thought I mentioned that in the OP, not sure. Too many political checks and balances assures nothing gets done. However you can still have checks and balances to uphold the concept of democracy and the rule of law w/o checks and balances that also make legislation impossible.
Making a special counsel a permanent position who could investigate anyone in the executive or legislative branch wouldn’t hamper legislation.
I assume there are at least 3 categories of checks and balances
Political (parties check each other)
Rule of law
Structural checks and balances (legislative, judicial, executive. Free press, etc)
As to astorian’s second question: I wouldn’t want my President, your President or anyone’s President to act like Trump is acting. This isn’t “That is the wrong person to be getting away with that”-It is “It is wrong for any person to get away with that.”
Nothing. I don’t remember which philosopher on the Systems of state said it (and can’t Quote it literally) but the ghist was that
a Democracy relies on rules (beliefs) that are outside the written rules / embedded in the Population and by their nature impossible to write down
E.g. part of a working modern Democracy* is a free press, to control the govt. and Report to the People, so the People themselves can hold the press accountable.
If however you get to the Point where either yellow hate-press (because that sells easily) like the UK or Fox News dominate the media, or where a significant part of the Population (30% or more) distrusts Facts altogether (alt-Facts), or the main media are not interested in the truth, only in “give both sides equal time, the Reader can figure it out (no they can’t that’s what experts are for)” - then a part of Democracy doesn’t work, and the System is threatened.
But you can’t write into the constitution to have state media, instead (although several European countries have state-financed media for a good reason: to do away with the pressure of “easy sells” and do real reporting), because you still Need real journalists and the Population Needs to trust the media. You can’t define or require trust.
Another example: if a large enough part of the parties and the voters demand pure ideology and sincerely consider the other side as evil - not as “mistaken in their Approach, but we are all fact-based and can look for the best solution together” but “if we give them an Inch, the Country will collapse into apocalypse” - then compromises become impossible ** and without compromise, you already have a theocracy/ idelogocracy / authocracy.
In a fiction book by an english author taking place in South America in the 1960s, a British expat talks with another character about why Democracy doesn’t and can’t work in South America, when it works in GB, and he basically says “it’s because there (South America) the Population does not believe there is any other way to get rid of a bad government than a violent Revolution. After all, that’s how the current government got there, and the one before. It doesn’t matter if the new Revolution is the purest and best ever, or the current govt. the worst ever - the cycle will continue because the Population never experienced anything else. Whereas in GB, the Population finds it inconceivable today to not get rid of a bad govt. with an election and doesn’t dream of violent Revolution solving anything”.
Now apply that to the many many Hollywood movies where the only way to save the US from being taken over by a Hitler-like dictator is the hero Shooting the wannabe-bad (Classic: Dead Zone by Stephen King, but many others) - and you see the Problem with the Population believing that the System is too broken and that revolutions work.
can we at least in this thread Dispense with all that “there is no true Democracy”, “The US is a republic not a Democracy” and all other word-definitions game usually played on the Dope? Because otherwise a reasonable discussion gets 10 times as Long with all the qualifiers or impossible because outside Modern Democracy it’s difficult to unite all Western European plus North America (US+Canada) + Australia Systems under one term though there are enough similiarities to be useful.
** (Plato dreamed about one Truth self-evident to the Smartest guy in his Republic, and that the way to recognize the Smartest Guy was that he would know the One Truth of how do things. It took until the 20th century and Popper to Point out how unreal and dangerous that idea is).
You don’t - Trump was elected.
To be fair, Turkey had Problems with the Population not believing really in Democracy since Kemal Atatürk. That’s why there were regular Military Coups prevent religious parties from getting too much influence (similar to Egypt). If the Population can only see the choice between Military dictatorship on one side, and theocracy on the other - how can they believe in normal Democracy working?
You can make it harder, e.g requiring not a simple majority, but 2/3 or 3/4 majority for changing Major laws - but that doesn’t rule out a big coalition getting enough votes.
Independet judiciary alone doesn’t help - somebody still has to Appoint the judges, which is why Erdogan can go ahead with jailing journalists and why Orban in Hungary just has kicked out all judges opposing his laws.
It also doesn’t help (see Point above about Meta-Rules) to Appoint judges if the judges themselves feel bound to a Party ideology like in the US (here, Judges feel it’s a honor to be called to the constitutational court; Terms are limited, which helps, but the Obligation the Judges themselves feel to stay impartial and neutral while in Office there can not be written down as law in any way).
You can’t write a law that says “Politicans shouldn’t throw temper tantrums like toddlers if they shut the whole state down” as happened with the Republicans in the US some years back (and not the first time either). You can write a law that the old Budget continues until the new one has passed, but that stops the symptom not the cause.