This Is Why Dictatorships Fail / Es por esto que fallan las dictaduras. De Ann Applebaum

 

Ann Applebaum es una historiadora estadounidense, especializada en la génesis de regímenes autocráticos. Su último libro Atocracy.Inc / Autocracia.SA ha sido en bestseller. Applebaum escribe en Atlantic y vive en Polonia con su esposo, quien es canciller de este país.

[Vea abajo la traducción al español de este artículo.]

This Is Why Dictatorships Fail

The authors of the Constitution separated powers for a reason.

By Anne Applebaum

 

APRIL 10, 2025, 11:05 AM ET / ATLANTIC

He blinked. But we don’t really know why.

Whether it was the stock market cascading downward, investors fleeing from U.S. Treasury bonds, Republican donors jamming the White House phones, or even fears for his own portfolio, President Donald Trump decided yesterday afternoon to lift, temporarily, most of his arbitrary tariffs. This was his personal decision. His “instinct,” as he put it. His whim. And his decision, instinct, or whim could bring the tariffs back again.

The Republicans who lead Congress have refused to use the power of the legislative branch to stop him or moderate him, in this or almost any other matter. The Cabinet is composed of sycophants and loyalists who are willing to defend contradictory policies, even if doing so makes them look like fools. The courts haven’t decisively intervened yet either. No one, apparently, is willing to prevent a single man from destroying the world economy, wrecking financial markets, forcing this country and other countries into recession if that’s what he feels like doing when he gets up tomorrow morning.

This is what arbitrary, absolute power looks like. And this is why the men who wrote the Constitution never wanted anyone to have it. In that famously hot, stuffy room in Philadelphia, windows closed for the sake of secrecy, they sweated and argued about how to limit the powers of the American executive. They arrived at the idea of dividing power between different branches of government. As James Madison wrote in “Federalist No. 47”: “The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary in the same hands … may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.

More than two centuries later, the system created by that first Constitutional Congress has comprehensively failed. The people and institutions that are supposed to check executive power are refusing to restrain this president. We now have a de facto tyrant who thinks he can bend reality to his will without taking any facts or any evidence into consideration, and without listening to any contrary views. And although the economic damage he has caused is easier to measure, he has inflicted the same level of harm to scientific research, to civil liberties, to health care, and to the civil service.

From this wasteful and destructive incident, one useful lesson can be drawn. In recent years, many people who live in democracies have become frustrated by their political systems, by the endless wrangling, the difficulty of creating compromise, the slow pace of decisions. Just as in the first half of the 20th century, would-be authoritarians have begun arguing that we would all be better off without these institutions. “The truth is that men are tired of liberty,” said Mussolini. Lenin spoke with scorn about the failings of so-called bourgeois democracy. In the United States, a brand-new school of techno-authoritarian thinkers find our political system inefficient and want to replace it with a “national CEO,” a dictator by a different name.

But in the past 48 hours, Donald Trump has just given us a pitch-perfect demonstration of why legislatures are necessary, why checks and balances are useful, and why most one-man dictatorships become poor and corrupt. If the Republican Party does not return Congress to the role it is meant to play and the courts don’t constrain the president, this cycle of destruction will continue and everyone on the planet will pay the price.

* * *

Es por esto que fracasan las dictaduras

Los autores de la Constitución separaron los poderes por una razón

Por Anne Applebaum
10 de abril de 2025, 11:05 a. m. ET / Atlantic

Parpadeó. Pero en realidad no sabemos por qué.

Ya sea por el colapso del mercado de valores, los inversionistas huyendo de los bonos del Tesoro de EE. UU., los donantes republicanos saturando las líneas telefónicas de la Casa Blanca, o incluso por miedo a su propio portafolio, el presidente Donald Trump decidió ayer por la tarde levantar, temporalmente, la mayoría de sus aranceles arbitrarios. Fue una decisión personal. Su “instinto”, como él lo expresó. Su capricho. Y su decisión, instinto o capricho podría hacer que los aranceles regresen de nuevo.

Los republicanos que lideran el Congreso se han negado a usar el poder del poder legislativo para detenerlo o moderarlo, en este o en casi cualquier otro asunto. El gabinete está compuesto por aduladores y leales dispuestos a defender políticas contradictorias, incluso si al hacerlo quedan como tontos. Los tribunales tampoco han intervenido de manera decisiva. Al parecer, nadie está dispuesto a evitar que un solo hombre destruya la economía mundial, arruine los mercados financieros, y lleve a este país y a otros a una recesión si eso es lo que decide hacer mañana por la mañana.

Así es como se ve el poder absoluto y arbitrario. Y por eso los hombres que redactaron la Constitución nunca quisieron que nadie lo tuviera. En aquella famosa sala calurosa y sofocante de Filadelfia, con las ventanas cerradas por motivos de confidencialidad, sudaron y debatieron sobre cómo limitar los poderes del poder ejecutivo estadounidense. Llegaron a la idea de dividir el poder entre distintas ramas del gobierno. Como escribió James Madison en el “Federalista N.º 47”: “La acumulación de todos los poderes, legislativo, ejecutivo y judicial, en las mismas manos… puede con razón ser considerada la definición misma de tiranía.”

Más de dos siglos después, el sistema creado por ese primer Congreso Constitucional ha fracasado de forma total. Las personas e instituciones que deberían controlar el poder ejecutivo se niegan a frenar a este presidente. Ahora tenemos un tirano de facto que cree que puede doblar la realidad a su voluntad sin tener en cuenta hechos ni evidencia alguna, y sin escuchar opiniones contrarias. Y aunque los daños económicos que ha causado son más fáciles de medir, ha infligido un nivel similar de daño a la investigación científica, las libertades civiles, el sistema de salud y el servicio público.

De este incidente tan destructivo y costoso se puede extraer una lección útil. En los últimos años, muchas personas que viven en democracias se han sentido frustradas con sus sistemas políticos, por los interminables conflictos, la dificultad de llegar a compromisos y el ritmo lento de las decisiones. Tal como ocurrió en la primera mitad del siglo XX, aspirantes a autoritarios han comenzado a argumentar que estaríamos mejor sin estas instituciones. “La verdad es que los hombres están cansados de la libertad”, dijo Mussolini. Lenin hablaba con desprecio de los fallos de la llamada democracia burguesa. En Estados Unidos, una nueva escuela de pensadores tecno-autoritarios considera ineficiente nuestro sistema político y quiere reemplazarlo con un “CEO nacional”, un dictador con otro nombre.

Pero en las últimas 48 horas, Donald Trump nos ha ofrecido una demostración perfecta de por qué los poderes legislativos son necesarios, por qué los pesos y contrapesos son útiles, y por qué la mayoría de las dictaduras unipersonales se vuelven pobres y corruptas. Si el Partido Republicano no devuelve al Congreso el rol que está destinado a desempeñar, y si los tribunales no limitan al presidente, este ciclo de destrucción continuará y todos en el planeta pagarán el precio.

An Overlooked Force in Iran

Women in sunglasses and headscarves, speaking through megaphones, brandishing cameras, carrying signs: When they first appeared, the photographs of the 2005 Tehran University women's rights protests were a powerful reminder of the true potential of Iranian women. The images were uplifting; they featured women of many ages; and they went on circulating long after the protests themselves died down. Now they have been replaced by a far more brutal and already infamous set of images: The photographs and video taken this past weekend of a young Iranian woman, allegedly shot by a government sniper, dying on the streets of Tehran.

I don't know whether the girl in the photographs is destined to become this revolution's symbolic martyr, as some are already predicting. I do know, however, that there is a connection between the violence in Iran over the past week and the women's rights movement that has slowly gained strength in Iran over the past several years.

In the United States, the most America-centric commentators have somberly attributed the strength of recent demonstrations to the election of Barack Obama. Others want to give credit to the democracy rhetoric of the Bush administration. Still others want to call this a "Twitter revolution" or a "Facebook revolution," as if zippy new technology alone had inspired the protests. But the truth is that the high turnout has been the result of many years of organizational work, carried out by small groups of civil rights activists and above all women's groups, working largely unnoticed and without much outside help.

Since 2006, the One Million Signatures Campaign has been circulating a petition, online and in print, that calls for an end to laws that discriminate against women and the enactment of laws that provide equal rights for women in marriage, equal rights to divorce, equal inheritance rights and equal testimony rights for men and women in court. Though based outside the country, the Abdorrahman Boroumand Foundation, founded by a pair of sisters, translates and publishes online fundamental human rights documents; it maintains an online database of the names of thousands of victims of the Islamic Republic as well. In the past decade, Iranian women have participated in student strikes as well as teachers' strikes, and in organizations of Bahai, Christian and other religious groups whose members are deemed "heretics" by the regime.

Not Obama, not Bush and not Twitter, in other words, but years of work and effort lie behind the public display of defiance and, in particular, the number of women on the streets -- and their presence matters. Their presence could strike the deepest blow against the regime. For at the heart of the ideology of the Islamic Republic is its claim to divine inspiration: Its leadership is legitimate, as is its harsh repression of women, because God has decreed that it is so. The outright rejection of this creed by tens of thousands of women, not just over the past weekend but over the past decade, has to weaken the Islamic Republic's claim to invincibility, in Iran and across the Middle East. The regime's political elite knows this well: It is no accident that the two main challengers to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in the Iranian presidential campaign promised to repeal some of the laws that discriminate against women, and it is no accident that the leading challenger, Mir Hossein Mousavi, used his wife, a political scientist and former university chancellor, in his campaign appearances and posters.

The Iranian clerics know that women pose a profound threat to their authority, too: As the activist Ladan Boroumand has written, the regime would not bother to brutally repress dissidents unless it feared them deeply. Nobody would have murdered a peaceful, unarmed young woman in blue jeans -- unless her mere presence on the street presented a dire threat.

The regime may succeed. Violence usually succeeds, at least in the short term, in intimidating people. In the long term, however, the links, structures, organizations and groups set up by Iranian women, not to mention the photographs of the past week, will continue to gnaw away at the Iranian regime's legitimacy -- and we should take note. I cannot count how many times I've been told in recent years that "women's issues" in the Islamic world are a secondary subject: Whether the discussion is of the Afghan constitution or the Saudi government, the standard line among most commentators has always been that other things -- stability, security, oil -- matter more. But regimes that repress the civil and human rights of half their population are inherently unstable. Sooner or later, there has to be a backlash. In Iran, we're watching one unfold.

(The Washington Post)