by lo_zamoyski | 2025-12-17 19:41:39+00:00
> if we don't trust law enforcement [...], then how do we enforce laws?

Indeed.

Abusus non tollit usum.

To elaborate on the general problem, I am not claiming that abuse cannot occur, or that it doesn't occur, as some people seem to think I have (and for which I was no doubt downvoted). I am not naive. My family lived behind the Iron Curtain where the police were significantly more brutal than what we have in the US. I am also aware, more than most, how methods of control in democratic states operate (tl;dr. they need to be more sophisticated, relying more on information control and psychological techniques than physical brutality, in order to shape the "consent" needed to legitimize rule). I am the last to deny that power can be abused and that it can be an awful thing.

But I do find the liberal tradition of obsessive paranoia tiresome. Yes, governments can go wrong, and they do. Anyone who denies that is a fool. But that doesn't mean they go wrong all the time and it doesn't mean that abolishing imperfect institutions or rendering them impotent is a solution. Yes, you must be prudent about such things, but you aren't left with a better situation through institutional castration or by creating institutional Mexican standoffs. Justice doesn't just materialize or emerge magically without intention, because we have created a separation of powers (a common myth unsupported by the actual evidence). Justice requires authority, that is to say, the marriage of justice with power. When authority is abolished, we are left with naked power. Naked power is what is destructive, but it is also self-destructive. You need at least the appearance of authority to keep up that ruse.

We can see how things actually work in the current arrangement. We have separate institutions (intended to limit institutional power through some alchemy of opposition), but nothing in principle prevents them from colluding, and because there is a considerable gap between institutional interest and personal interest, what you are actually left with is partisan jockeying for power.

Instead of operating from some kind of anabaptist or Quaker presumption of corruption, it is better to presume virtue on the part of an institution and deal with corruption as it occurs, as instances of shameful failure. The advantage is that this presumption sets a norm and an expectation against which the people in that institution are judged. They stand to disappoint us, as it were. To quote Baldus, “No authority whether of the emperor or the senate can make the emperor other than a rational and mortal animal, or free him from the law of nature or from the dictates of right reason or the eternal law. Nothing is presumed to please the emperor except what is just and true." This isn't some New Right brand of nihilism that believes that might makes right or that justice is meaningless or merely a mask for power. No, the presumption of the "emperor's" virtue is just that: a presumption. That, by itself, is a psychologically and socially powerful force, as we can see in the examples of Vespasian, Henry V, or Louis IX, sophistic, dissolute, or ill-tempered in their youth before assuming the throne.

Lord Acton's famous quip that power corrupts as some kind of rule is not actually borne out by the evidence. Maybe sometimes it does, and certainly corrupt people are more likely to seek out power, but power itself does not systematically corrupt.