I’m listing all the mechanisms and policies that can defend democracy. I want to analyze how well they work, how they work, and how hard it would be to eradicate them.
Here are the policies I can come up with:
- Voting in free and fair elections
- Separation of powers
- Independent Legislature
- Independent court system
- Jury duty
- Constitutional monarch
- Federalism
- Mutual protection pacts
- Free travel
Free and fair elections
Free and fair elections are the first defense against fascism. It works as long as the average citizen can recognize fascism and vote against it.
Elections have the obvious downside that if people are convinced that fascism is to their advantage, they vote to eliminate essential freedoms. Populist candidates can whip people up into a mob to vote against their interest, and sometimes that is all that is necessary for a democracy to collapse.
That being said, since I do not believe it is possible to have benevolent dictators forever, elections are essential to having freedom.
All free societies have elections.
Not all elections lead to free societies.
Separation of powers
Democracies usually separate powers between the branches of government. Presidential systems like the United States do this by separating the executive, legislative, and judicial branches into two co-equal branches of government.
If the executive is overstepping the bounds of their duties, the separation of powers can break down. The executive then needs to be removed by Congress. If Congress refuses to remove the President, the system breaks down and rights are trampled.
Parliamentary systems solve this by having their head of government serve as long as they have support from parliament. The prime minister is removed from office once a vote of no confidence passes. This works as long as a majority of parliament believes in democracy.
Separation of powers can work quite well as long as the executive does not overstep the powers of their office.
Independent judiciary
The same applies to the courts. Separation of powers depends on the court system being fair and limiting itself to asking whether the case follows existing law. This is a murky area because sometimes the law is wrong or unethical, and the courts should step in for human rights. But who determines human rights? If a liberal can state that the right of African Americans to attend quality schools and not be barred based on their race, why can a conservative judge not stretch the bounds of the Second Amendment and ignore the well-regulated militia requirement?
Ultimately, it comes down to people needing a strong understanding of ethics. Not necessarily legal theory, but a clear understanding of right and wrong is essential for a functional society. While I fall squarely in the liberal school of thought, what if your society is taken over by conflict theory, which is the antithesis of liberal values? My values in a society that bases morality on conflict theory would be seen as abhorrent.
A functional jury trial is essential in functional democracies, requiring most citizens to have a decent understanding of morality. When this fails, the entire system can easily fall into despotism. Look at the Jim Crow era.
How does one determine ethics in a vacuum? This is the challenge with all legal systems and is the basis of the field of ethics. One cannot have a functional judicial system without a society coming to an understanding of ethics. Courts can go from protecting liberty to a form of despotism in a society with a broken moral compass. This is worth a full series on its own.
Courts are important, but they can be stacked. Jury trial works as long as the people on the jury are ethical. This makes all court systems a double-edged sword.
Constitutional Monarch
When talking with Canadian friends, the argument is proposed that a Constitutional Monarch can, in theory, remove a Prime Minister who is violating ethics.
Like all checks and balances, this is a double-edged sword. If the monarch is benevolent, they can move society in the right direction, but if the monarch is a tyrant, they can move society backward.
In reality, most constitutional monarchs choose not to comment on political matters.
Federalism
Federalism comes to a similar issue with all checks and balances. If you give the federal government superior power over the states in a federation with each other, where do states have power over the federal government? This is a delicate balancing act that will never have a definitive answer.
Federalism necessarily acts as a counterbalance to whatever direction the federal government is moving. We saw states pushing to criminalize abortion when Biden was president, and now we are seeing states attempt to protect their people from deportation while Trump is president.
While I have my views, and I find deportation without trial to be a clear violation of the Constitution, this is why Federalism is like any other check and balance. It is only as good as the people in power, and is a counterbalance, no matter how the federal government moves.
Every check slows down the central government, no matter which direction the government moves. Thus, checks and balances are ethics-agnostic.
All checks and balances systems are built around the idea that centralized power is inherently evil. This is a fallacy. There is a fundamental difference between incarcerating people without trial and ensuring that every child has three full meals every day and a good quality school. Checks and balances cannot differentiate between the two.
This doesn’t mean checks and balances are inherently evil. They slow progress in every direction, making them a double-edged sword. They slow down your political opponents, but they also slow you down.
They only slow down those willing to abide by those willing to follow the system, as long as they have not captured every aspect of society.
When courts, the presidency, and Congress are all held by one party, there are no checks and balances left, putting the speed of government into overdrive.
I’m not saying checks and balances are inherently evil. I am just realizing they are not enough to defend democracy by themselves. There are too many flaws to defend your democracy only with checks and balances.
Mutual protection pacts
In theory, mutual protection pacts can be used to stop coups. But in practice, this doesn’t always happen. Venezuela has seen its democracy effectively destroyed by Chavez and Maduro, despite having a mutual protection pact with the United States and most of Latin America; no one has stepped in to remove those dictators.
Mutual protection pacts can also be abused, as in Chile, with the removal of Allende. Sending your economy to economic collapse is not a good reason to be invaded by your ally. The economic crisis should be enough to teach voters to make better decisions. My understanding is that Allende’s economic policies were foolish, and Pinochet was a despot. Neither of them was ideal.
Mutual protection pacts require the country you have a pact with to be activated during a clear constitutional crisis, while not being abused simply because your ally does not like the person your country has elected. They rely on your allies being just, and that is never guaranteed.
Free travel
Free travel allows people to live and work in places that match their needs and desires. If you desire to live in a place where abortion is treated as murder, you can do that. If you want to live where every child can attend school, you can do that.
Free travel is anti-federalism. It moves the idea that we should keep our economies tied with minimal barriers for trade and travel into overdrive. Anyone in the free travel zone can migrate where they choose for any reason. You can seek employment in another country in the zone as if you were getting a job down the street. It does not mean concentrating political decisions in one central government, but keeping them at a more local level.
It allows people to vote with their feet. You don’t sacrifice your citizenship or right to vote in your home country, but you may relocate temporarily or permanently. Citizens of the European Union and the Schengen Area have this right.
So if your country adopts policies that harm the economy so you can’t find work, you are free to apply for and be employed in a country in the zone that has not adopted such insane policies. This causes a labor shortage and revenue shortfall in the country adopting subpar policies.
In this way, free travel forces countries to adopt best practices or fall behind. It doesn’t work through courts, a central government, or even binding laws. The one law it establishes is the right of citizens to freely leave their home country and enter any other that has adopted the treaty. The rest of the law is up to member states.
There can still be some laws that are binding to stay in the zone, such as gun control, so you don’t end up with the free flow of firearms. You will likely also have vaccination requirements to prevent the free flow of disease. Anti-money laundering laws need to be unified in any centralized banking system. Aside from issues that can easily spill over borders, the rest of the law will remain fully in the realm of the member state. The hardest part is determining which laws should be collective and which should not. This is why generally such laws work on a consensus model in the European Union. European Union law acts as a baseline, not seriously touching a lot of programs that most governments take on, such as directly running schools, health care, and pension systems. Even defense is mostly left up to the member states. Most of it has to do with harmonizing product requirements, like food safety, since it is not in the state’s interest for their citizen to get food that will make them sick in another member state and then have to pay the health care costs of another country having lax food safety. It also harmonized transportation rules, which allow trains to move between countries. Repealing these laws would not be as devastating as the United States eliminating Medicare.
I believe currency should generally stay local. I’ve talked about this in other posts. There are so many tradeoffs.
So it allows countries to experiment while encouraging best practices under the threat of economic depression.
As long as the free travel treaty exists, it does not depend on a supreme court to stay unbiased. It does not depend on checks and balances. It does not inherently speed up or slow down policies. Aside from a core set of laws which are mandatory for the free travel area to work (e.g., guns, vaccines, money laundering), the rest of the law is left up to member states with no further restrictions.
As opposed to checks and balances, free travel makes it clear that if you adopt bad policies, you will have additional negative consequences. Positive policy improvements will see more benefits, especially attracting highly paid, skilled labor, which improves tax collection.
So if you adopt a policy defunding schools, people will move to a member state that has not adopted such a dumb policy.
If you make it easier for businesses to be established, more businesses will be formed, bringing revenue to your government.
If you harm workers’ rights, workers will move to a member state that respects them.
If your government starts passing ideas causing your people to flee, and then you push forward, more people in your government will question the wisdom and consequences of your leadership.
It lets the market work like no other policy. It is the only policy I know of that is hard to corrupt, hard to remove, magnifies positive policies, and minimizes the impact of bad ideas.
You don’t need every worker to pack their bags and leave for the impact on the economy to be severe enough to get the government to reverse course.
The key to this working is not transferring funds from the less corrupt and wealthier states to the more corrupt and poorer states. If you do that, then the impact of their policies will not be felt, leading to an unhealthy dependency relationship. This hurts everyone in the agreement. This leads to the corrupt government being cemented further into power, reducing the power of free travel to move member states to better policies. The threats of depopulation and economic depression are essential tools for protecting democracy.
For this reason, I think free travel between countries is the best policy discovered so far to defend democracy.
Other potential policies
Now I am stuck. I am trying to think of another policy that will work like free travel, and so far, I have not come up with anything.
To make an effective defense of democracy, it will have the following attributes:
- It must be automatic.
- It must not rely on a tribunal that can be corrupted.
- It must be difficult to remove.
- It must be easy to implement.
- It must automatically counteract your government when your government is stupid.
- It must not activate when your government implements beneficial policies.
Free travel for now is all I have thought of that fulfills all 6 criteria.
Can you think of another that fulfills all 6?