Higher Standards: With Great Power Should Come Great Expectations

*for unto whomsoever much is given, of him shall be much required* – Luke 12:48

The more power the State gives you to, the higher its expectations for your behavior should be.

As both Spider-Man and the Bible agree.

(And so does the U.S. constitution.)

And, in the abstract at least, I think it’s likely that most people would agree with this too.

Even our language supports this: you need to be trustworthy for the State to trust you with power.

And yet, somehow, all that goes out the window every time we start talking about holding people accountable for abuses of power.

Oh, we hear from officials and the press every time a police officer does something blatantly illegal or a soldier tortures a civilian or a regulator takes a job with industry or a President takes along boxes of classified documents on their way out of office, their jobs are so dangerous and they’re under such pressure.

You have to make allowances for people in their position, they say.

No, you certainly do not.

If you hold a position wielding the State’s powers, then your behavior in that position must be literally above reproach. In such a position, you represent and are acting as an agent for all of us and you should be able to do just that.

Without fail.

The State should hold you to a higher standard than is expected of citizens without that power.

We don’t need to trust the random person on the street to nearly the degree that we need to trust the police, the soldiers, the bureaucrats and the politicians.

And if you can’t handle that, then you need to get a new job, because you’re not fit for the one you have.

There should be an expectation that people who abuse positions where they wield the powers of the State will be dealt with much more harshly by the legal system than a common citizen would be.

Perhaps with something like a statutory multiplier on the penalties for a conviction of any crime for anyone employed by the State, with the scale of the multiplier tied to just how much power your job gives you.

And any conviction for abusing a position of power should also come with a ban on holding any such position again.

And the legal system needs to be capable of prosecuting these crimes.

So no more immunities from prosecution or liability for the agents of the State.

Qualified immunity, presidential immunity: these just encourage abuses of power by guaranteeing that there will never be consequences.

And no more secrets either.

Because a law that will never be enforced is meaningless, and just brings the whole idea of law into disrepute. And secrecy prevents enforcement, because you can’t prosecute a crime if its existence or the evidence are secret.

And there’s the real problem with trying to fix the State.

When you get down to it, a State whose agents are not corrupt and where abuses of power are dealt with effectively has to be very, very different from the State we have today.

It has to be open, and not keep secrets from its citizens nor even have the ability to. It has to have mechanisms for identifying and removing agents who abuse their positions. It has to recognize corruption when it happens, and be able to deal with it effectively.

It has to do these things publicly, where they can be seen to be done correctly.

And it has to have the cultural and citizen support for the structures and systems it needs to make those things possible.

And the United States currently has none of that.

Apparently I’m in a more pessimistic mood this morning than I thought I was when I started writing this.

I set out to put together a quick call for higher standards of behavior in the agents of the State, and ended up basically concluding that we can’t have those because the absurd tribal affinities of our populace matter more to them than any principles like fairness or justice do.

So there’s your depressing thought for the weekend: having a good government depends on first having a citizenry that wants it.

And we don’t seem to have that.