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Opinion | From China, France and Thomas Jefferson: history lessons for Donald Trump and Republicans on aristocratic excess
- History shows that holding public servants accountable is essential to control corruption, but elections are insufficient to check a rogue leader
- The Republican Party’s authoritarian tactics could return the US to ‘quasi-monarchical’ rule and governance without public benefit
Reading Time:5 minutes
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“Let the constitution of a government be what it will, if there is but one man in it exempt from the laws, all the other members must necessarily be at his discretion.”
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Perhaps we should thank US President Donald Trump for demonstrating the truth of 18th-century French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s insight. Buoyed by “presidential immunity” – a mere supposition, not a law – Trump has shown us how easily a reality television star can render the world’s leading democracy powerless to check even the most blatant abuses.
Following the election and Trump’s refusal to concede, the reality of this fact finally hit home in America, and the pundits are puzzled. After all, every American child learns that Game of Thrones-type intrigues could never occur on our soil because we have checks and balances. Yet after the election, in the normally reserved The Atlantic, the conservative columnist David Frum pronounced the American political system broken.
“The US system depends on compromise and cooperation” to produce legislation for the people’s benefit, he said, but for more than a decade Republicans have refused to cooperate even when the nation’s welfare was on the line.
Interferences with elections, whether of the State or General government by officers of the latter, should be deemed cause of removal
This wasn’t partisan griping. The Washington Post cited multi-year data from an international team of political scientists showing that today’s Republican Party belongs on the far right end of the spectrum, alongside notorious authoritarian factions such as Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party and Hungarian President Viktor Orban’s Fidesz party.
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