Democracy Requires Agencies That Follow the Laws

The Threat Lawlessness Poses

Citizens hold a society together with shared values and shared expectations of behavior. They make laws to reflect and specify these rules. When their government routinely disregards the rules and get away with it, public trust in the system erodes. And when their government inflicts punishments even on people following the laws, they learn to fear and hate their country. Over time, this transforms a previously stable country into a free-for-all, where the only certainty is in whatever citizens can get away with.

The most important thing to understand about authoritarian leaders is that they seek power for its own sake. Fame, wealth, and political influence are all forms of power. Since the majority of authoritarian leaders are patholigical narcissists, they chase after anything and everything that reinforces their internal need to both feel and be seen as powerful. Nothing else matters more to them. Because of this, they fill vital government positions with people who agree with everything they say and do. These people are rarely the most competent or trustworthy, however. This leads to gross inefficiencies and corruption in government as these yes-men fumble their jobs, take advantage of their roles to enrich themselves, or even do both. Because they fall in line with everything their leader wants, their leader readily lets them ignore the legal consequences of anything they do. This is how authoritarians let corruption fester and spread within their governments.

One of the earliest noticable effects of a transition into autocratic government is general economic instability, paired with skyrocketing personal wealth of the authoritarian leader and those in their circle. This is very often paired with other conspicuous behaviors designed to strip power from the people, leaving the authoritarian leader and their close allies with the freedom to do as they please. It doesn't take long at all before more and more citizens notice what's happening and feel the effects, whether it's the economic decay or the violation of rights that used to be respected. This causes an escalating back-and-forth where outraged citizens rail against what's happening and officials use their powers to quash resistance in ways that increasingly violate existing democratic norms. Throughout it all, those in power lie to the public, change their narrative, suppress truth, and manipulate elections and other vital government processes. After enough time, violent transitions of power become normal, and peaceful democratic process dies.

We're seeing a too many of these developments happen right now. This isn't the first time our country has taken steps toward tyranny: American history has several exmaples of Presidential attacks on democracy, some of which have had lasting effects on our institutions. Some of what's happening now has happened before. What hasn't happened before, though, is the sheer speed and scale of transition into authoritarianism in this past year. Nor has a Supreme Court ever in our history exempted the office of the President from criminal prosecution for their actions. And what's perhaps more important is that many of the authoritarian shifts that are happening now keep happening throughout our history, such as Congress refusing to check an administration's overreach purely because of political affiliation. The more often an authoritarian practice occurs, the more likely it is to become permanent.

The best solutions to this issue revolve around redistributing power so that it's no longer concentrated in so few hands. One key component would be to have more rigorous laws safeguarding against tyranny. The other is to put more power back into the hands of ordinary people by enabling them to remove and replace representatives who violate their oath of office.