In the meantime, however, legalism is trying to conquer new areas. Having infiltrated many national and regional policies, he is now trying to rule the world. In short, legalism in the broad sense is the idea that law and legal institutions can maintain order and resolve political disputes. It manifests itself in powerful courts, a ruling class of lawyers, and a reliance on legalistic procedures in decision-making bodies. Legalistic autocrats operate by pitting democracy against constitutionalism at the expense of liberalism. It is not difficult. Democracy and constitutionalism are known to be in tension when what people want at a given time is (or should) supplanted by constitutional principles that thwart that desire. Democracy is a political system in which leaders are accountable to the people; Constitutionalism is a political system in which leaders and the people together are additionally responsible in a system of constitutional constraints in order to defend fundamental values that go beyond the moment. Democracy and constitutionalism can come into conflict if the public does not fulfill its constitutional obligations and if elections produce a majority for unconstitutional changes. Or tensions between constitutionalism and democracy can lead to a crisis when elites offer democratic publics choices that jeopardize liberalism.
Legalistic autocrats know this and use a simplistic notion of democracy – which every particular election has produced by chance – to rail against any constitutional coercion that hinders what voters wanted from voters. The end result, if such a ploy succeeds, is the principle of simple majority, which can quickly lead to illiberalism. Of course, the tension between democracy and constitutionalism can also be resolved liberally. This essay showed that a new generation of autocrats has learned to govern by invoking the legitimacy of elections while using the tools of the law to consolidate power in a few hands. New autocrats can win elections – often repeated – but after their first victory, they remain in power by weakening opposition support structures such as parties and NGOs that monopolize broadcast media to limit public debate, intimidating critics and tinkering with electoral rules. They are rewriting constitutions to turn what was once unconstitutional into something constitutional. They do not call tanks or declare a state of emergency as a first resort; They do not take office with a phalanx of soldiers. Instead, they come to power with a phalanx of lawyers. The new autocrats look like hard-playing Democrats,127 not dictators playing softball. As is clear from the previous discussion, legalism is a complicated and ambiguous concept, and any attempt to reduce it to a definition is dangerous. Nevertheless, several common elements can be identified.
I don`t want to exaggerate the degree of similarity between legalistic autocrats. Not all of these governments have followed exactly the same path, although they have gone in the same direction. For example, only some of the legalistic autocrats began to immediately attack the Constitution itself, while others waited a while before doing so. While Chávez, Correa, and Orbán completely changed their constitutions as soon as they came to power, Erdoğan and Putin were in power for years before it became clear that they were planning structural changes in the organization of their governments to endanger liberal constitutional democracy.[36] While hiding the Supreme Court`s disenfranchisement under the guise of judicial reform, the three cases of Roosevelt Erdoğan and Orbán look familiar, There are still significant differences between them. At first, Roosevelt considered a plan to amend the Constitution to change the composition of the court, but this plan was abandoned because the outcome was difficult to predict and it would have taken too long anyway. Id at 384–86. Roosevelt then turned to Congress to pass a bill to go to court. Roosevelt`s plan failed because of a resilient Congress whose upper chamber had the anti-majoritarian institution of obstruction to strengthen minority opposition. See William E. Leuchtenburg, FDR`s Court-Packing Plan: A Second Life, A Second Death, Duke L J 673, 681–84 (1985). Roosevelt failed not because his plan was so different, but simply because the American constitutional order has more bottlenecks that make it difficult to take control of the courts; Roosevelt was almost guaranteed to fail. In short, the defense of the U.S.
Constitution against the appropriation of the Constitution worked. After more than a decade of autocratic consolidation, Russia and Venezuela appear to have completely left the family of global democracies,37 and Venezuela is showing signs of a failed state.38 It seems that a little more than a decade passed after this type of reform began, before the pretext of democratic government and the rule of law disappeared completely and the strength of the system underpinned the system. is openly visible. But not all states that embark on this path of autocratic legalism necessarily find themselves in a spiral of democratic death. Some states are pulling out of the abyss. Revolutions in the name of democracy can sweep away parched illiberal constitutional orders, as happened during the revolutions of the late eighteenth century. But sometimes revolutions in the name of democracy can sweep away parched liberal constitutional orders. The attempt to stop the masses with appeals to constitutionalism does not always work, because the limits of liberalism are not always democratically attractive when there seems to be a crisis – events, confidence, an approaching enemy. Democracy without liberal constitutional coercion can quickly degenerate into purely majoritarian thinking, in which minority rights are not recognized and leaders transform temporary majorities into permanent empowerments to govern. Illiberal revolutions can be very powerful. They can destroy fragile liberal and constitutional principles in a spasm of apparent democracy.
The heterogeneity of American society. The United States has always been a heterogeneous society. The first citizens were mostly of British origin, but there were also Germans, Dutch, and others, not to mention American Indians, who had to be treated in one way or another, and Africans, who were mostly slaves.