Everybody’s a constitutional scholar until the Wi-Fi goes down

Jul 14, 2026 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

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(Kaieteur News) – I made the mistake of logging on to social media the other day. It was entirely my fault. Within five minutes, I encountered a gentleman who announced with the certainty that Guyana has no democracy because there is no separation of powers.

Now, I have no objection to people having opinions. Opinions are wonderful things. I have dozens before breakfast. The problem begins when opinions start masquerading as political philosophy. Then we are all in trouble because suddenly every fellow with a smartphone becomes half Aristotle, half constitutional lawyer, and one hundred percent certain.

The argument went something like this: no separation of powers equals no democracy. It sounds convincing. It also happens to confuse two entirely different ideas.

The notion of the separation of powers comes from the eighteenth-century French philosopher Montesquieu. His concern was not democracy as we ordinarily understand it today. He was trying to answer a different question altogether.

Montesquieu asked: How should governmental power be organised so that it cannot easily become tyrannical? He was not asking who should govern. That question belongs to democracy.

Democracy, in its modern understanding, is built upon the principle that governments derive their legitimacy from the consent of the governed. Citizens choose their leaders through elections. Governments remain in office because the people permit them to do so, and they leave office when the people decide otherwise. That answers the question: Who governs?

Montesquieu’s theory answers another question entirely: How should those who govern exercise power?

These are not identical questions. You can have elections and still have a government that accumulates excessive power.

Conversely, you can have constitutional limits on power in a political system that falls well short of modern democracy. In fact, the England that Montesquieu admired was certainly no universal democracy. Most people could not even vote.

His concern was liberty. He believed that concentrated power inevitably invites abuse. His solution was not to create three parts of government that never spoke to one another.

What Montesquieu advocated was the dispersion of governmental authority among institutions capable of checking one another. The legislature would make laws. The executive would carry them out. The judiciary would interpret them.

Each would possess enough independence to prevent another branch from becoming all-powerful.

However, this is not the same thing as insisting upon a complete and hermetically sealed separation. In fact, Montesquieu himself recognised that government inevitably requires interaction among institutions. His objective was not isolation but restraint. Freedom would be protected not because rulers suddenly became saints but because the constitutional structure itself made tyranny more difficult.

This distinction somehow evaporates the moment certain people acquire an internet connection. Social media possesses an extraordinary capacity to transform every concept into alphabet soup. Democracy becomes separation of powers. Separation of powers becomes judicial independence. Judicial independence becomes constitutional supremacy. Constitutional supremacy somehow becomes whether somebody’s cousin got a government contract.

By the time the discussion ends, Plato, Locke, Montesquieu and the fellow selling pepper sauce online have all become authorities on the same subject.

One begins to suspect that if Isaac Newton were alive today, someone would explain gravity to him in the comments section.

None of this means governments should be immune from criticism. On the contrary, constitutional arrangements deserve constant examination. Citizens ought to debate whether institutions perform their checking functions effectively. Those are legitimate discussions.

But we should at least know which discussion we are having. One person is discussing democracy. Another is discussing constitutionalism. A third is discussing judicial appointments. A fourth is discussing the price of chicken. Everybody leaves believing they have defeated everyone else.

This is why we ought to be cautious about assigning too much credibility to confident declarations on social media. Confidence is not evidence. Volume is not scholarship. Repetition is not proof.

History’s great political thinkers spent decades wrestling with difficult questions because they understood that constitutional government is complicated. Social media has somehow improved upon this process by reducing centuries of political philosophy into a meme that can be read while waiting for doubles. That is technological progress of a sort.

The real lesson is wonderfully simple. Before accepting a sweeping constitutional pronouncement from somebody about democracy, ask whether the speaker has confused the question of who should govern with the question of how government should be limited.

If the answer is yes, you have not discovered a constitutional crisis. You have merely discovered the social media.

(The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of this newspaper.)

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• constitutional scholar, Democracy, Peeping Tom, social media, Wi-Fi

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