Otis Redding and Aretha Franklin were Right: it’s all about Respect

Featured image above by Ryan Arrowsmith, CC BY 2.5, via Wikimedia Commons

Otis Redding and Aretha Franklin were Right: it’s all about Respect¹

Discussions of the rule of law can come across as, and in fact often are, dry discourses on an abstraction that few people have had the opportunity to think much about in a careful way. It is not hard to see why this is the case, as the rule of law is a concept that has been largely taken for granted in established democracies for decades. Some of the other basic elements of democracy have been vigorously contested over this period. For example, what does it mean for people to have equality? What are the legitimate limits on free expression? But the rule of law has not been seriously challenged in countries, such as the US and Canada, for a long time; it has been part of the more-or-less ignored background not the attention-getting foreground.

But now, when great concern is being voiced about the solidity of the rule of law in some western countries, particularly – and with understandable significance for Canadians – with the deterioration we are seeing in the United States, discussions of the strength of the rule of law need to take on a more vital, even urgent, character. To protect democracy, the interdependence of the rule of law and democracy has to be more fully appreciated: the truth is that you simply cannot have one without the other.

The deterioration we are seeing is due to actions taken by some in government, that is, it is due to what those people are actually doing. It is also due to the attitudes that are reflected in making those moves, that is, the sneering, the mocking, the carelessness associated with those actions. We need to better understand how a failure to respect vital institutions such as the rule of law imperils our democracy. We need too to appreciate that a failure to show that respect can, in and of itself, undermine the attitudes and beliefs needed to sustain our political culture, including our democracy.

Beverly McLaughlin, former Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Canada, spoke recently (March 2025) at the Toronto Public Library. Whatever it was she had intended to speak about (“Protecting Canada’s Courts” was the advertised topic, but that could have meant any number of different things), she was motivated that evening by what she sees as aggressive attacks on the rule of law in the US to directly address democracy’s dependence upon the rule of law. The two, she said, go hand in hand for the rule of law keeps democracy on track. By upholding democracy’s guardrails, the rule of law helps prevent the abuse of power. And you will not have the rule of law without democracy because only with the expectations of accountability built into democratic culture will political actors accept the limitations of the rule of law. Autocrats, dictators and the like have no respect for such limitations.

I am accepting as given that power can in fact be abused in a democracy. If evidence were required, we need only look south of the border to Donald Trump’s role in the January 6, 2021, uprising where he encouraged rioters to march on Congress in the aftermath of his electoral loss the previous year. Perhaps a direct democracy – such as the New England town meeting where every citizen could, if they wished, participate in decision-making – would be less susceptible to such abuses. But complex, representative democracies are another beast altogether. Not every citizen of such can attend to every significant move that their elected representatives make, supposedly, on their behalf. There have to be institutions that ensure the accountability of those representatives and of the people (bureaucrats) they appoint to carry out the actual administrative work of government.

McLaughlin also spent some time expanding on the deeply cultural character of the rule of law. The successful democracies have been successful – that is, have remained democracies – at least in part because they have had the benefit of an entrenched commitment to the traditions and attitudes necessary to democracy, such as the rule of law. People in the established democracies expect that the institutions that are essential to their democracy will be respected and preserved. Specific laws and regulations, individual politicians, bureaucrats and judges, will of course come and go, but a country must have a robust system for requiring democratic accountability.

Readers living in one of the better-established democracies, such as Canada, may not recognize themselves as having any such expectation. But if so, that is because we have been immersed in a political culture where one takes for granted that abuses of power will be curtailed. And because there is that expectation, those who wield power in such democracies are far more likely to stay within the guardrails than those who operate in other forms of government.

It is a silly comparison perhaps – because it is so obvious – but it does, I think, still make the point: in a country such as Russia which enjoyed a fledging and chaotic sort-of-democracy for a few years after the Soviet Union collapsed, there was never any deep-seated conviction on the part of ordinary Russians that abuses of power would be remedied or accounted for. In fact, the then commonly held, pessimistic belief they would not was one of the reasons democracy failed there. Those inclined to abuse power in Russia knew that most Russians expected them to get away with it. I am not saying most Russians wanted them to get away with it, but that they expected – based on their miserable political history – that they would. In the established democracies most of us do not expect gross abusers of power here to get away with it. (Yes, of course: nothing is perfect. Sometimes abuse does go unsanctioned in such countries.) But that is because we have a political culture of accountability. To their enormous disadvantage, Russians do not.²

I am also working on the premise that the rule of law is more than the rule by law. An unfortunately common confusion is to think that, if a country is governed by law, then it has the rule of law. The rule of law does indeed require ruling through law – because laws in a democracy are made by representatives chosen by the people on whose behalf they are supposed to govern – but not through just any laws. Some of the more egregious examples are well-known, such as those of the Apartheid regime in South Africa and of Nazi Germany, where human rights were viciously and murderously violated, often explicitly pursuant to law. Both used law in abusive ways and thus neither can be said to have been governed by the rule of law.

Many of the executive orders issued by Trump since his inauguration undermine the rule of law. I can only address a few of the problems to which they give rise because the volume of orders has been staggering. That huge volume was probably intended to overwhelm opponents and would be consistent with Trump’s leadership style which, as has been observed by others, is to throw a lot of “stuff” at the wall and hope that at least some sticks. This intentionally confusing tactic itself constitutes an attempt to avoid accountability and in doing so undermines the rule of law.

As well, many of the orders seem to have been very poorly thought out. A prime example here would be the series of orders regarding tariffs. Tom Friedman addressed Trump’s tariff policy in The New York Times recently:

This sloppiness is an abuse because it reflects a lack of respect for law – for the use of the executive order – but also of the populace which is subject to the wielding of presidential power and the anxiety they feel with constant and seemingly inconsistent change being imposed on them. In any humane system, the more power you have over any person, the more carefully you should wield that power. It is a matter of respecting the humanity, and hence vulnerability, of those you have power over. A parent, for example, has a great deal of power over a child and thus the care with which the parent exercises that power over the child should (and would) be judged to a higher standard than, say, the occasional babysitter who is impatient and overly strict about bedtime.

A hugely significant problem with Trump’s executive orders is that some of them seem clearly to exceed the constitutional limits on executive power: some seem on their face to be illegal. For example, there are the orders that target specific, named law firms denying them, amongst other things, access to federal buildings including the courts, unless they kowtow to Trump’s demands. As Carlos Lozada describes in “Trump Just Reached a Historic Milestone”, an op-ed published this April in the New York Times, “Trump repeatedly attacks major law firms that have worked with Democratic clients or that have ties to prior investigations against Trump, suspending their security clearances and terminating any government contracts.” Those firms are let off the hook if they commit to donating millions of dollars worth of their services to causes that Trump supports. 

We’ll come back to these attacks against law firms below. But suffice here to say that issuing these orders is abusive in a paradigmatically bullying way: I am going to dominate you and, if you try to challenge my domination, you will pay an even higher price. The horror of bullying is of course that once you give in, you will be bullied again – because you have shown yourself to be compliant (cowardly?) And sure enough:

As an exercise of power in a democracy these executive orders are without a shred of a doubt an abuse of power, incompatible with the rule of law and threatening that to democracy.

In what may be a first in American history, an American president has called for the impeachment of judges whose decisions he does not like, portraying those judges as having acted politically instead of in an unbiased manner. For example:

This challenge to the judiciary’s independence by Trump was so egregious that it provoked an almost immediate response from John Roberts, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, who made clear his view on any such thing:

As Beverley McLaughlin made clear in the remarks I referred to earlier, unbiased adjudication is essential to the rule of law, that is, to avoid the abuse of power and, crucially, to maintain our collective confidence in the system which ensures government accountability. Suggesting as Trump has, without giving any substantiating argument or evidence, apart from the fact that the judge has ruled against his wishes, that that judge has acted in a biased way undermines the rule of law. Perhaps worse, it would seem that those attacks were intended to do exactly that.

The growing and very grave worry is that Trump will not abide by decisions of the courts. Lower court decisions can be appealed, so it is his response to the rulings by the US Supreme Court that occupies so many. It is clear that the administration leans in the direction of ignoring court decisions – this is what it would like to do. The deportations to Latin America without any semblance of due process have raised the greatest fears so far of a constitutional crisis. For what has happened to the rule of law, and hence democracy, if the president flat out defies the courts?

Some of the more astonishing moves made by the Trump administration are its attacks on members of the legal profession that have taken cases which challenge Trump personally or steps he has taken as president. I have already pointed out the executive orders aimed at certain members of the legal profession. But through attacking the legal profession Trump is also undermining the judiciary. The judicial branch of government simply cannot function without lawyers free to represent the competing points of view that come before the courts. Judges must have evidence before them in order to render sensible and fair decisions. Lawyers assist their clients in presenting that evidence. Lawyers are simply necessary to governance that respects the rule of law. Yes, there are sleazy lawyers, and they should lose their licenses to practice if fair, legally governed processes show that to be necessary. But there has been no fair or “due” process backing up the attacks launched against these lawyers and law firms. Seeking to intimidate lawyers the way Trump has through this set of executive orders is clearly contrary to the rule of law and probably to law itself.

Because of the interdependence of democracy and the rule of law, the above are all attacks on democracy even though they do not directly address the most obvious elements of democracy, such as elections. But it should be added that even some of the rules around elections are coming under attack by the Trump administration.⁶

Some law firms in the US have readily caved to Trump’s wishes. Instead of resisting and challenging the legality of the executive orders in question, they have simply acceded, sparking – fortunately – much loud criticism. Many members of the legal profession in the US have been appalled by the quick caving in of these law firms, as have many other people. But the caving in continues.⁷

Here we need to remind ourselves of the obligations those of us on the receiving end of abuses of power bear. In his book On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century, Timothy Snyder writes compellingly on our duty to be strong: Lesson 20 – “Be as courageous as you can.” Some of the other chapters of the book are apt as well, especially Lesson 5 – “Remember professional ethics” where he says: “When political leaders set a negative example, professional commitments to just practice become more important. It is hard to subvert a rule-of-law state without [the connivance of] lawyers, or to hold show trials without [compliant] judges.”

When it comes to protecting our institutions, what is actually done by those who threaten them is of course important, but so also is how what is done is done, that is, with what kind of attitude. Behavior that mocks through sneering, name-calling and the like, undermines democratic institutions. As noted above, it has been crucial to the success of the established democracies that their publics have had confidence in their political institutions. Repeated expressions of disrespect for those institutions, especially from people in positions of authority, can corrode that confidence. And such behavior is itself an abuse of power, a violation of the seriousness which must attach to our dealings with and our discussions about democratic institutions. Democracy is the only form of government the aim of which is to protect the dignity of the individual. This is what is at stake when we tolerate the undermining of the rule of law.

Many have observed how carelessly, even dismissively, Trump deals with everything having to do with the law. Timothy Snyder also spoke in Toronto recently. In answer to a question taken at the end of his remarks he remarked that for Trump and his administration law is a kind of “joke” Joke. Breathtaking.

We know it is true but it is worth stating outright: character matters. So, what kind of a person behaves in the way Trump does? In “Producing Something this Stupid Is the Achievement of a Lifetime,” a piece written for the New York Times recently on the chaos that has followed the introduction of new tariffs by President Trump, David Brooks says:

I do not know how stupid or not Trump is. (For what it is worth, Trump has said that he is a “stable genius”.) I rather doubt that lack of intelligence is the problem, although lack of education is almost certainly part of it. And perhaps that was not the sense of “stupid” that Brooks had in mind anyway. But I do know that the lack of respect reflected in his words, in what he is actually doing and in his failure to take seriously the democratic institution at stake is profoundly destructive. No doubt many changes are much needed to the way the US is governed, and many may be urgent – the same could be said of any country. But needed too is respect for what has been accomplished so far to keep democracy on the rails in the US. The current administration seems to have none of that respect – not a shred. And this is profoundly disturbing.

Another set of issues that have been making headlines as I write this piece was triggered by Trump’s executive orders concerning universities, from which Trump has demanded many changes. For example, as the president of Harvard said in his letter refusing to capitulate to those demands: “No government … regardless of which party is in power — should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue.” As with some of the law firms targeted by Trump, some of the universities subject to such orders have quickly complied. But some, and importantly Harvard, probably the richest and most prestigious of American universities, have not. Harvard has said it cannot comply for to do so would be to give in to illegal and probably unconstitutional demands.

Gessen, a journalist with the New York Times, has seen up close how dictatorships work: although educated in and now again living in the US, Gessen is originally from Russia and spent some time there during the post-Soviet years. They write:

The Trump administration quickly responded to Harvard’s refusal to comply by doing what it said it would: it has withheld $ 2.2 billion in funding for the university. “Still,” Gessen continues,

And there it is: what matters is respect for the law, without which we have neither the rule of law nor democracy.

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