The Legislative and Judiciary can only keep the Executive in check, if the people with guns in the Executive are willing to listen to them, rather than the superiors giving them orders.
You have “Legislatives” in dictatorships too. but when they refuse to obey the military any longer, they either get disappeared, get a sham process over something they allegedly did, or at best you get a civil war.
Or how Cersay Lannister said in Game of Thrones: “Power is Power”. When push comes to shove, the question is who do the people with guns listen to. Everything around it is just fluff. Unless large parts of the Military and Police defect and take care of their superior and then hand power back to the normal institutions, or there is a peoples uprising and subsequent civil war, the power will not go back.
CommissarVulpin@lemmy.world 1 week ago
I came to a bit of a realization. Every time you think of some possible new government function, or legislation, or resolution to an issue, you cynically think of every way it could be abused, right? You’re confident that greedy, self-aggrandizing politicians or businessmen will use it to further their own power and wealth. The concept that someone will act in good faith is absent. It’s infantile, it’s naive. The world is cruel.
I think this represents a fundamental breakdown of the trust in our government. The US has been coasting on good faith for almost 300 years, and the wheels are falling off. It’s a vicious cycle, where if you don’t trust that other people will do the right thing, you’re less likely to do the right thing yourself. I don’t know if this cycle can be ended, or even if it has an end.