No, you’re right, I meant a hypothetical society with a fair and just system of laws. The US is deeply flawed, its laws are often unfair, both facially and as applied.
And it does have authoritarian elements in its law and its government, but it not the hypothetical authoritarian state I describe either.
But it matters that this trial and conviction are compatible with a hypothetical just and fair society, because so much is being made of how it’s compatible with a corrupt authoritarian dictatorship. The people who oppose Trump’s conviction need to say more to make the case that this is better evidence of authoritarianism than justice.
Biden should be investigated every time he’s credibly accused or reasonably suspected of criminal conduct. But every investigation does not warrant a trial. If the investigators determine the evidence is insufficient to support the conclusion that Biden broke the law, there should not be a trial.
I’m strongly in favor of more investigations. Requiring that each investigation lead to a trial would have the opposite effect.
That’s the kind of case where prosecutorial discretion goes badly awry: local prosecutors investigating local priests, significant and shared community ties, shared religious affiliations, a strong and well-connected institution interested in protecting the wrongdoer, powerless victims who can’t advocate for themselves, icky fact patterns that most people don’t want to think about and a lot of people would rather ignore. It’s a case study in what to look out for to control prosecutorial discretion (and note that it’s very different from the Biden documents case; there wasn’t a Special Counsel or a public report on the investigation at the time the crimes were committed).
Sadly many of the cases were deferred long enough that there’s no longer recourse under the criminal law because the relevant statute of limitations has expired. Evidence goes stale, memories become unreliable, a fair trial becomes impossible. In those cases, civil remedies (i.e. lawsuits) often provide a backstop, and in the case of the Catholic Church that was what happened.
There is no perfect law. A law that is rigid and uniform will always miss some bad acts. A law that is flexible will be stretched to reach unfair results. A system that protects individual rights will be forced to let some wrongdoers go. A system that is committed to prosecuting every wrongdoer will destroy the lives of many innocents along the way.
For all its flaws, the US legal system is pretty good. It’s not perfect, it can be improved, but it’s among the best the world has known (though that’s not a very high bar). And treating it as beyond saving does nothing to fix its flaws.