What does Major League Baseball Commissioner Bud Selig have in common with Egyptian generalissimo Abdelfatah al-Seesi? Nothing — except for the inclination to declare state a of exception and throw the rule book out the window.
Reports that Selig might summarily suspend the New York Yankees’ Alex Rodriguez by invoking his “right to take action against a player to preserve the integrity of the game” are important to no one except baseball fans, of course. The general’s decision to oust elected President Mohammed Morsi affects the future of democracy in Egypt, the Middle East and the world. Yet taken together, these examples — one minor and one major — can teach us a fundamental lesson about the importance of procedures and the nature of power itself.
What theory allows a leader to sidestep the procedures, to announce that the circumstances are so dire that the rules must go? The answer comes from the most important political theorist you’ve never heard of, the German constitutional thinker Carl Schmitt. Writing in 1922, Schmitt explained how power works in a single sentence: “Sovereign is he who decides on the exception.” What he meant, in essence, was that true sovereignty needn’t lie with the people, even in a democracy. The real power belongs to whoever has the capacity to throw out the rules and make his commands stick. If people listen when the leader ignores procedure, then he is really in charge — the people aren’t.
Rules and procedures — no matter how dull, plodding, slow and inadequate — are what stand between collective government and the absolute rule of the individual. If we are following those rules, we are diffusing power away from the central decision maker and to the people who claim the right to choose that leader. No rules, no constitutional democracy — it’s as simple as that.
It also doesn’t matter if some members of the public — such as the demonstrators who wanted Morsi out — support the dictator who declares the exception. In a constitutional democracy, popularity is no excuse for circumventing the rules. Indeed, the reason we have rules is to reduce the temptation for the popular leader to consolidate power.
The lesson, then, can be stated simply: The rules and procedures are what keep us free. Break them, and you may be able to get away with it. But you will have betrayed and destroyed democracy. And once a single person becomes the sovereign in place of the people, he can be hard to remove.