Rule of Law

We are used to a tidy taxonomy of regimes. There are democracies, where power changes hands by election and is restrained by law, and there are dictatorships, where a single man or clique rules without restraint and the population has been stripped of any means of resistance. Most of the world fits somewhere on that line. But the United States has slipped into a condition for which the taxonomy has no ready word — a condition that, to my knowledge, has no real historical precedent. Here is a country that remains, at its core, a functioning democracy: it has independent courts, a parliament that can say no, a press nobody can silence by decree, fifty states with real sovereignty, and a citizenry that is armed. And this democratic country is led by a man and a faction whose views and methods can only be described as fascist — supported, it should be said plainly, by something close to half the population. The result is not a coup and not yet a dictatorship. It is a live, ongoing battle between a still-free nation and a clique that would very much like to make it unfree. And the most honest thing one can say is that the outcome of that battle is genuinely undecided. ...

Every few weeks a reader writes to me with some version of the same hopeful question. Tell us, they say, what does the ideal electoral system look like? Which country has solved the problem of government? Sketch us the perfect constitution and we will fight for it. I understand the impulse completely. After living under a regime that is lawless to its marrow, you crave a blueprint — a finished design you could lift off the shelf and bolt onto your own ruined country once the tyrant is gone. But I have come to believe this craving rests on a mistake, and a dangerous one, because the search for a universally perfect system is structurally identical to the search for a perpetual-motion machine. Both promise something the world does not permit. There is no ideal electoral system, no ideal state structure, no ideal model of government, for one stubborn reason: none of these things can be separated from the society it is supposed to serve. ...