The rule of law or the rule of class?

I read an article the other day in the Montreal newspaper, La Presse (May 13, 2017), about the rule of law. One of their regular columnists, Yves Boisvert, was trying to claim that the recently fired director of the FBI, James Comey, owed his allegiance to the US Constitution, not to that country’s ultra-egotistical president, because the USA is a democratic country, practising the rule of law. Unfortunately for Boisvert, and for Comey, “the rule of law” is really just another overworked expression, used by people who truly believe in the political ideology known as liberalism. Thoroughly convinced liberals contend instead that the rule of law has to be seen as some kind of absolute principle in all, self-proclaimed liberal-democratic countries. They obstinately refuse to recognize that it is in fact just another political slogan, like “the dictatorship of the proletariat” in self-proclaimed communist countries, or “the will of Allah” in the equally self-proclaimed Islamic caliphate.

In the real world, however, also known as “le monde tel qu’il est” (René Lévesque), expressions like “the rule of law” only work whenever some rich and/or powerful person, or group, wants them to work, but not at all whenever such a powerful individual, or group of powerful individuals, prefers to ignore them instead. It simply is not true that no one is above the law. No political document, such as the US Constitution or the Canadian Bill of Rights, whenever or wherever adopted, truly guarantees anything at all, but only possesses the force of persuasion that any particular VIP, or group of VIPs, allows it to possess. In other words, whenever it happens to be in the best political interests of some particular group of dominant people to follow that particular principle. While it it true that some countries apply such formulas more often than do other countries, since no country has ever been truly run by ordinary people, it is impossible to presume that any human institution of any sort will always do the right thing in every case.

Constitutions are always being interpreted differently from one powerful person to another, or even from one particular situation to another, during any given mandate. All over the world, constitutional “guarantees” are sometimes being observed, and sometimes being ignored, depending on which particular event is being analyzed. As many US citizens found out recently, when Donald Trump’s businesses were seen to be profiting from certain foreign emoluments, it turns out that even the article in the US Constitution prohibiting such emoluments has never been applied to any real situation since it was first written down. The written word only means something to people who want it to mean that particular something. It has nothing whatever to do with whether or not a given situation is more or less complicated than any other one. As Machiavelli pointed out several centuries ago, all political situations are always “complicated” by the fact that no VIP wants to be tied down to any predetermined course of action.

Unfortunately, no threshold exists beyond which it is impossible for some dominant individual, or organization, to go. In every case, not just in “failed states” or “straightforward” dictatorships, but also in self-proclaimed democracies, might makes right. The richer and the more powerful someone is, or some private or public organization is, the more that that individual or organization gets to ignore any kind of collective agreement. No matter whether it is just an “ordinary” collective agreement between a trade union and an employer, or a supposedly “much more important” UN Security Council resolution, or even an international climate treaty.

The only people who have to obey the law all the time are those who are too poor, or too powerless, to make their “equality before the law” plea heard in high places. Only “lesser” people cannot get away with ignoring any of the laws, established by their “betters” to keep them in their not-so-high places. For their part, higher-ups can pretty much do whatever they want. In some countries, even ruling-class people may have to maneuver a bit in order to get around theoretical restrictions, but the lesson of history is that they always manage to do so if they try hard enough. The rule of law is a lot like taxation, in that those who run the system can always find a way out of the maze.

This sort of thing is proved over and over again, all over the world, whenever some less fortunate person, or group of people, finds out that they simply do not have the money, or the clout, necessary to take someone to court and thus to obtain some sort of justice. Enormous differences in income or in social status make it impossible for most people to get anywhere near equal consideration in legal disputes. Even in the so-called rich countries, such as Canada or the USA, the vast majority of the population does not have anything like an equal chance, or an equal opportunity, to make their voices heard.

In the field of industrial relations, in particular, collective agreements are quite often ignored, much more often by companies, or by neoliberal governments, than by the unions involved. Some trusting souls try to argue that in certain countries, certain union appeals to the court system, to overturn some employer’s arbitrary decision, sometimes result in damages being awarded to some union. At least, once they have been accepted by a judge to have been in fact contrary to some collective agreement. Such cases, however, are quite rare, and in most of those rare cases, token damages are only awarded after the union has spent an enormous sum of money on litigation. Most of the time as well, such damages are only awarded twenty or thirty years after the litigation began, therefore rendering the final result totally irrelevant to the initial situation. Money makes the world go round, not principle. As the gospel according to Matthew tells it, the more money one has to start with, the more of it one gets later on, and the less one has in the beginning, even that small amount is eventually taken away.

Populist politicians all over the world, such as Montreal mayor Denis Coderre, honestly seem to believe that even traffic cops “belong to” their VIP employers, not that both low-ranking and high-ranking public officials are all supposed to serve the people together. In any particular situation, such as the disastrous floods that took place recently in and around the city of Montreal, such politicians are always heard proclaiming that “today is not about pointing fingers”, it is only about “coming together for the common good”. In other words, no one over a certain income level, certainly no one in power, is ever supposed to be blamed for anything at all, not today and not tomorrow either. So far as the VIP-serving legal system is concerned, the only people who should ever be held to account for their crimes are the ordinary John Does who always make up the vast majority of every country’s prison population.

In other words, the rule of law almost always turns out to be the rule of social class. This has become increasingly obvious in recent years, the news media in many parts of the world finally catching onto the fact that up-to-date “white-collar crime” has become a whole lot more damaging to society (and to the world economy) than old-fashioned “blue-collar crime”. The media have also started to catch onto the fact that white-collar criminals are much less often caught, or punished in any way, than the blue-collar kind. Some white-collar criminals, such as Bernard Madoff in the USA, have been sent to jail recently, in cases when their victims have included people even more powerful than themselves. But when the white-collar criminal turns out to be a billionaire “pillar of the community”, not to mention the president or the prime minister of some presumably liberal-democratic country, catching a crook suddenly becomes a whole lot more difficult. Even if caught red-handed, putting such a person in jail, especially for a period of time appropriate to the seriousness of the crime, is practically impossible.

Moreover, governments all over the world are constantly ignoring their own laws all the time. Almost every day, some journalist investigating some scandal somewhere or another discovers the existence of some obscure law that everyone had conveniently forgotten about ever since it was adopted. Governments are regularly being called to task for refusing to apply some law that they initially adopted five, ten, twenty or more years ago, in order to gain a lot of political mileage back then. Not actually implementing such laws later on simply means that legislation is often ignored in the same way as election promises are ignored once the election is over. Every day, international treaties are also being signed, without any guarantees that any of their particular clauses will ever be implemented. Big governments, like big businesses, have all been practising the art of “newspeak” (otherwise known as “alternative facts”) ever since they first came into being several millennia ago.

One of the more recent inventions in the long list of methods involving deliberate, official ignorance of the law has been the increasing inefficiency of the legal system in dozens of different countries. The recent trend of settling every possible difference of opinion between VIPs in court, and of corporate defence lawyers coming up with hundreds of increasingly complicated delaying tactics in every case, has bogged the “legal industry” down in totally unrealistic wait times. In Canada, the Supreme Court has come up with equally inapplicable guidelines, designating periods of months or years during which all cases must be decided upon, before being abandoned. Unfortunately, the only discernible outcome of such guidelines has been the freeing of hundreds of probably guilty criminals, including more than a few accused murderers connected to organized crime.

It should not be too difficult to imagine what that sort of thing has done to the already sufficiently undermined, liberal pretensions about the rule of law, not only in Canada but in most other places. This is in addition to all the social laws being ignored by certain immigrant populations, at least within the group of countries that allow any type of immigration to exist. The more tolerant countries often end up allowing such immigrant populations to ignore their own established laws, importing instead “barbarian cultural practices” from abroad such as female excision, forced marriages and the use of both modern and traditional methods to ensure that most families within those immigrant populations end up with thirty or forty percent more boys than girls. Most of those practices are also theoretically illegal in most of the home countries where such practices originate.

Even though, on the face of it, those practices seem to be impervious to social divisions within those communities, a deeper understanding of the social realities within such populations reveals that they are all symptoms of ultra-severe control over subject populations. Control ingrained for centuries in those selfsame populations by ultra-conservative VIPs who make Donald Trump look like a rank amateur by comparison. What initially seems to be an exception to the rule of social class triumphing over the rule of law, turns out to be merely the world’s most extreme example of that same VIP domination.

To be sure, the world might seem be a much better place in which to live if the rule of law really did triumph over the rule of class. Unfortunately, it does no one any good whatsoever to pretend that it really does.