Fundamental to a stable world are important nations adhering to the kinds of legal frameworks that followed Napoleon's early nineteenth century codifications and the late eighteenth century constitutional formulations of our own gifted post-revolutionary forefathers. But what is now repeatedly endangering all of us across the globe are the repeated floutings of such civilized norms by old-fashioned dictators like Putin and Xi Jinping as well as a host of new tyrants from Asia, across Africa, and into Central and South America. Trump wants to join them, which magnifies the ominous chill that frighteningly pervades the planet.
Absent adherence to the rule of law and local constitutional practices, citizens lose voice and agency, free expression vanishes, rulers and ruling elites operate with impunity, predatory cabals capture states, and critics of government are falsely accused of unpatriotic behavior before being jailed arbitrarily. Putin stifles electoral contenders and even timorous protesters. Xi "re-educates" whole peoples such as the Uyghurs and shuts down freedom in Hong Kong. Many tinpot autocrats do the same -- nowadays from one end of the globe to another.
Not only have there been a host of military removals of democratically elected regimes across Africa (Burkina Faso, Gabon, Guinea, Mali, Niger) but the new usurping ruler of Chad has joined their ranks. Moreover, the (very) aged presidents of Cameroon and Equatorial Guinea have for four decades or more avoided real political participation, jailing and terrorizing opponents. Zimbabwe's President Emmerson Mnangagwa, equally corrupt, joined them in 2017 after ousting his consummately kleptocratic boss -- the feared and skilled propagandist Robert G. Mugabe. Likewise Tunisians (as neighboring Algerians, Libyans, and Egyptians) have seen their own essential freedoms and civil liberties extinguished by (largely incompetent but manipulative) despots.
Gabon's military rulers may genuinely be trying to forge a path back to democracy, having deposed a dynastic family that hardly enshrined the rule of law. But we will have to see. None of the other recent coup regimes seem interested in more than their own financial welfare -- and in what they can get from ties to Putin's new Africa Corps (ex-Wagner Group).
In Senegal, once a determined democratic outlier in western Africa, President Macky Sall late last month abandoned the nation's once hallowed rule of law by calling off an election set for later this month, preemptively staging a rule of law coup that promises to keep him in office until at least December -- well past his constitutionally allotted time. Sall rationalized his move, but illegal, it is enforced by security forces.
Last week, on the other side of the globe, Pakistan staged yet another compromised election. The army, which has essentially controlled the country since it was created in 1947 after the partition of India, kept its most popular politician from contesting the poll, obedient judges having jailed Imran Khan, former prime minister and great cricketer. Instead, the army wanted a former three-time and sometime exiled prime minister (Nawaz Sharif) to resume ruling as a front for soldiers. But the military design may have been thwarted -- at least optically -- by electors resoundingly choosing candidates nevertheless supportive of Khan (who was barred from being on the ballot). His party won 97 Legislative Assembly seats, Sharif ‘s 73 (of 265). Neither have captured sufficient places to govern alone; the military will doubtless negate a coalition that includes Khan's followers, again distorting democracy. Pakistan has no credible rule of law regime and, as a result, is almost always in chaos and crisis. After this election disarray is palpable, no matter what the military do.
Elsewhere in Asia there are long-established rule of law deniers like the cruel post Pol Pot family mafia under dictator Hun Sen in Cambodia and the pariah fantasy undertaking in North Korea (albeit with nuclear armed missiles). Vietnam is another sometime Marxist tightly run copy of China, but with a little more openness and emerging good relations with the United States. Laos, often overlooked, is a more closed follower of Vietnam and China, and still fearful of coming in from the cold.
In widespread Indonesia its outgoing term-limited president has obeyed that constitutional restraint while simultaneously making sure that the nation's chief justice (his brother-in-law) rewrote the constitution's age requirements so that President Joko Widodo (Jokowi)'s 36-year old son (candidates are supposed to be at least 40) could run on Wednesday for vice-president together with presidential candidate Prabowo Subianto, a former general with an unsavory reputation for earlier military kidnappings and numerous atrocities against civilians. Jokowi has marginalized respect for the rule of law, potentially returning Indonesia to its earlier authoritarian trajectory.
Then there is Myanmar, three years after soldiers crushed its brief democratic experiment. But, unlike the other Asian despotisms, the military junta that runs Myanmar cruelly is surprisingly threatened by a feisty alliance of ethnic armies long battling the junta and civilian opponents (now armed and organized) who refused to accept the coup and fled cities to establish an effective rural maquis. Some of the junta's soldiers have even sought asylum in India, fleeing their deteriorating combat in northwestern Myanmar.
President Viktor Orban's Hungary similarly disregards constitutional niceties, albeit more with police than with military assistance. Orban also has vigilante enforcers of his personal rule -- even in the heart of eastern Europe and in defiance of European Union standards. Corruption is also rampant, as is his partnership with Putin.
Closer to the U. S. heartland are the naked intolerant and oppressive dictatorships of Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua and Nicolas Maduro in Venezuela. Guatemala may recently have escaped the same category with the contested popular election of President Juan José Arévalo, but enduringly corrupt outgoing predecessors are fighting back.
What is telling is the popularity of the regimes in El Salvador and Ecuador that have both abandoned any pretense of upholding rule of law provisions. Yet, in both countries most civilians have contentedly given up their civil liberties in exchange for security from criminal gangs.
President Nayib Bukele in El Salvador has to great acclaim pioneered this trade off. In three years, he has broken the hold of the murderous criminal gangs that once held his country in thrall, locking up 75,000 people (in a country of 6.3 million) without any due process whatsoever. (Earlier he sent troops to impose his will on Parliament, sacked judges who refused to rule his way, flouted the country's single term provision, and doubled the size of the army.) Homicide rates, once the highest in the world, have plunged from 48 per 100,000 to 7.8 per 100,000 (just above the U. S. rate of 6.3 per 100,000) and criminal extortion has largely vanished. Salvadorans walk peaceful streets once again. Bukele was re-elected last week with 83 percent of the total vote.
Ecuador, once peaceful, erupted into gang violence last year and the year before. Narcogangs proliferated, trafficking drugs from Bolivia and Colombia, and competing for territory and prominence. After last year's election of President Daniel Noboa, a young banana plantation scion, Ecuador is attempting to use Bukele's methods to eliminate gang power on the streets and in its prisons. Like Bukele, Noboa's troops disdain due process, grabbing possible gangsters (many innocent) from the streets, checking them for identifying tattoos or other gang insignia, and building new prisons. It is too soon to know for sure, but this pushing aside of the rule of law seems again to be returning security and safety to a beleaguered country.
Losing rights and voice is a reasonable trade among frightened citizens if security and physical freedom are restored. But most of the time the denial of rights and voice simply enables ruling elites to entrench themselves, facilitating profiteering and accelerating kleptocratic aggrandizement. Most peoples, in other words, rarely share the returns of authoritarianism and breaches of the rule of law.
The bottom line is that fundamental freedoms are more than ever before at risk across the globe. Dictatorial greed must be battled relentlessly for fear of losing even more than oppressed peoples have forfeited already. Given wannabe megalomaniacal corrupt tyrants at home, we must be especially wary even in these United States. If our constitutional norms are breached, there is little hope for us, or for the world.
Yet more reason - as if we needed it - that we here in America need to do something everyday to reach out and activate voters who have given up in despair. We can protect our democracy if we show up and vote. Joining with friends and neighbors in get out the vote efforts such as the various postcards to voters projects can be both effective and fun!