How executive power, party discipline, and judicial dependence are turning representative democracies into elective autocracies
The constitutional system of checks and balances is a utopian fallacy of democratic mechanics in which executive, legislative, and judicial powers are supposed to limit one another to prevent abuses arising from power concentration.
The very definition provokes irony in an era where so-called “balanced and divided” power is assumed to allow each branch to control, veto, or review the others, guaranteeing a near-perfect rule of law.
Through this supposed division of political power, Montesquieu sold an idyllic system designed to prevent tyranny and protect “our” freedom.
In The Spirit of the Laws, he ultimately consecrated a postmodern form of tyranny and once again extinguished the individual’s responsible freedom to decide what kind of society to live in.
With subtle sophistication, the perennial degenerates quietly return to political power concentration, eliminating all remnants of resistance to their abuses, blowing apart the supposed counterweights, and endowing the system with a Machiavellian precision for domination in service of the most abject designs of those who hold power.
The old monarchical absolutism has been perfected beyond anything previously imaginable, selling us the illusion that we choose our representatives, that we elect those who will separately exercise executive and legislative power, and that minorities are guaranteed participation in decisions.
As if that were not enough, the system promises political projects designed to satisfy all collective economic and social desires.
To secure these outcomes, we grant the judiciary additional constitutional oversight and the protection of “our” rights.
What could possibly go wrong.
Paraphrasing Churchill, before sacrifice arrives: you were given the choice between being responsible for your decisions or delegating them for comfort. You chose comfort, and now your freedom will be violated and you will be subjected by others.
In an 1790 speech, Irish statesman John Philpot Curran warned that the condition under which God has granted liberty to man is eternal vigilance.
This naive delegation of freedom assumes that those who occupy the three branches of power are superior beings, incorruptible, perfectly wise, and entirely incapable of conspiring against your rights or appropriating your property.
Such folly is striking, especially given that revolutions cost lives precisely to improve conditions against which individuals rebel.
This illusion has endured, interrupted only when failure becomes undeniable, corruption intolerable, and abuse absolute.
Once again, power is surrendered ever more submissively, subject to human fallibility, the myth of permanent virtue among the supposedly different, and the denial that organized evil can conspire within government.
Anyone acting in good faith who suffers the effects of insolent evil, as Discépolo warned, will lift the veil of this farce and perceive the inevitable consequences of this supposed separation of powers.
In the constitutions we swear to defend, Montesquieu’s tripartite division lacks autonomous realism in postmodernity and forms an ideological line that repeats the same cause. The executive controls the purse and makes the other powers dance to its tune, sometimes fatally.
This analysis touches the nerve of a profound contemporary political debate. The erosion of checks and balances and the transformation of representative democracies into strongly presidential regimes or elective autocracies.
A return to monarchy disguised as democracy, rarely blessed with an ideal ruler who genuinely defends the rights of subjects.
The executive as de facto legislator.
In Montesquieu’s theory, the legislature is the heart of the state. In practice, the executive monopolizes the agenda through exclusive initiatives such as budgets that parliaments can barely modify, often to extract more resources from citizens.
Party discipline turns legislators into a governmental notary rather than an organ of refinement and control.
Judicialization and prosecution.
When criminal systems rely on transactional justice and prosecutors depend administratively and financially on the executive, impartiality disappears.
Judicial institutions, whose officials are appointed through political agreements dominated by the executive, become instruments of selective punishment rather than guardians of legal truth.
The inversion of fiscal control.
Parliaments were originally created to limit taxation by the crown. Today they often push for higher spending to secure electoral clientelism, while fiscal restraint is managed by executive technocracies calculating how much debt can be accumulated before the next election.
The role of protecting taxpayers from abuse has vanished.
Toward a postmodern monarchy.
What we are witnessing resembles what political scientists call hegemonic presidentialism.
Unlike historical monarchies, legitimacy now comes from elections. Once in power, however, leaders exercise authority that neutralizes the independence of other branches, collectively abusing citizens.
A collective violation of liberties, rights, and property from which defense is impossible because all instruments of coercion are concentrated in the same hands.
This is the heart of a contemporary debate. The erosion of institutional balance and the mutation of representative democracies into elective autocracies sustained by ideology and intolerance toward dissent.
To be continued.