this post was submitted on 05 Mar 2025
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The checks and balances were there, but they've been methodically corrupted and dismantled over decades without anyone doing anything about it.
That’s just it. There is no perfect government. The government is made of humans, and humans are imperfect. Any government, no matter how pure/noble its founding intentions, will eventually become corrupt need to be replaced.
We’re finally feeling that in America after a good 250 year run.
Alexis de Tocqueville, a Frenchman sent to analyze the American government in its early days— specifically studying its checks and balances—called it way back in 1835. There’s nothing to stop tyranny in America. Well worth reading his writings, “Democracy in America.”
The checks and balances were never what they were advertised to be. They haven't really been corrupted, just revealed to be more something people followed out of convention than an actual working system.
The US founding fathers were a bunch of mainly rich dudes, mostly in their 20s, from the 1700s. Their knowledge was limited to what a rich kid could in the 1700s. They had a decent grasp on how the English parliamentary system worked, some vague ideas of how systems worked in ancient Rome and Greece, they'd read a bunch of philosophers, and had a lot of youthful enthusiasm.
They come from a time 200 years before Game Theory and a century before the beginnings of Political Science. When they came up with these checks and balances, they didn't do it in any kind of formal way, trying to attack the system as a clever adversary would. There were all kinds of assumptions baked into their models of how the system would work that they never questioned. As a result, their system of checks and balances doesn't stand up to a popular party that wants the US to be a dictatorship.