The other day, His Oppulence, POTUS45, D. Trump sat in meeting at The White house with county sheriffs and declaimed that
Some things are law, and some things are common sense. This is common sense ...
He looked pleased with himself and I take it he felt he had made a clever point. It had to do with his decree to ban visitors and immigrants from certain Muslim countries, and the fact that a district judge had halted the order. Trump simply stated that his decree was common sense - after blasting the ‘so-called judge’ on Twitter.
And he didn’t seem to care. He looked around at his admiring court and may have felt clever. Nobody contradicted him. I, on the other hand, shrunk in my chair at home in front of my TV screen, frightened by the mere implication of his words.
Common sense! Is this something to rule by? Syria’s Bashar al-Assad rules by his idea of common sense, which certainly isn’t in line with what most democratic countries perceive as common sense, much less governance. Vladimir Putin too, seems to be guided by some inner compass of (un-)common sense. It is most unbecoming for any country and its leaders to be ruled by anything as slippery, disparate and divisive as ‘common sense.’ And ‘rule of common sense’ sort of excludes strong institutions.
Also, it is totally out of step with a pillar of democracy, tripartion of power. The whole point of distributing power equally between the legislature, the executive and the judiciary is that the three keep each other in check – to safeguard society from dictatorship, corruption and other ills.
Rule of law is a splendid, unparalleled, construction of governance.
We have seen what happens when countries are ruled by decree, by one all-powerful individual’s whim; we have seen what happens in countries that rely on strong-men’s decrees rather than rule of law. Mao Zedong, like his imperial predecessors didn’t approve of rule of law. He, like China’s emperors before him, ruled by decree. His last decree almost tore China to pieces, and whatever one thinks of his successors, they have steered China towards not exactly rule of law, but away from rule of (one) man towards rule by law – not quite as solid as rule of law, but at least in that direction, and away from rule by decree.
The very reason that the USA didn’t sink into chaos with the assassination in 1963 of president Kennedy was that the country was ruled by strong institutions that could carry on governing, immediately, even with the top leader and commander-in-chief gone.
The same thing happened in Sweden, when the much respected Prime Minister Olof Palme was assassinated, leaving the cinema with his wife one otherwise peaceful Friday evening in Stockholm in 1986. Both countries were in deep national mourning over the loss of respected leaders, but not for one second did anyone fear chaos or destructive power struggle; the countries’ affairs of government continued seamlessly.
But when dictators are toppled, governments and governance evaporate, the countries quickly disintegrate for lack of institutions to carry on. Just look at Nicolae Ceausescu’s Romania, Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, Muammar Gaddafi’s Libya or even Hosni Mubarak’s Egypt. However ruthless and strong the leader, when left rudderless, these countries sank into chaos.
This is why I find it so frightening to watch POTUS45 whimsically signing one decree after the other, seemingly without the slightest consideration for rule of law, legality, legislation or any other stabilising pillar of good governance.