Kritarchy (or kritocracy) is the term for rule by judges or the judiciary. It seems the inevitable consequence of vesting the judiciary with the power to “interpret” constitutions and, when constitutions are deemed supreme, to effectively control government in the form once exercised by dictatorial political bureaus (politburos) and the central committees in one party states. Unless the “judges” charged with constitutional control (control being the end result of purported review) are democratically elected for fixed terms, something which only occurs in Mexico and Bolivia (but even there, the nomination process is controlled by traditional branches of government and, in Mexico, the term is long, 12 years) they are obviously antidemocratic elites. Kritarchy is thus a specialized form of antidemocratic oligarchy rather than an aspect of democracy which sort of makes sense, given that constitutions, by their nature, are inherently antidemocratic, in the sense that democracy requires majority rule. However, given the reality that in purported democracies popular apathy is more the rule than popular participation, democracy as such is more a fable than a reality. A majority is more than a plurality and when large segments of a population do not participate in democratic elections, real majorities (50% of the eligible electorate plus one) are rarely if ever attainable.
Kritarchy is defended as essential to protect human and minority rights from democratic abuse, an obvious fallacy as that assumes judges who prioritize such concepts and that is no more likely in a judicial tribunal than it is in a popularly elected legislature or even, in a popularly elected autocracy. Since the Biden administration’s 2013 destruction of the selection of federal judges in the United States through political consensus via the filibuster (Murphy is still chuckling about that), federal judges in the United States have been more politically biased in their decisions than ever, making it clear, in the cradle of judicial review, just how wrong the infamous decision in Marbury versus Madison (really John Marshall versus his despised cousin, Thomas Jefferson) was. And an incoherent Kritarchy such as that which runs rampant in the United States today is, procedurally, as bad a form of government as currently exists.
Thus we find ourselves, politically and economically, where we do, rule by judges bought and paid for by plutocratic kleptocracies with merit a sort of pejorative, except in the Hobbesian sense of merit, i.e., merit being equated with brute power. It’s as ironic as is the reality that many, perhaps most, perhaps virtually all evangelical pastors are politically tied to Zionism which, when it involves religion at all, insists that the purported Christ, about whom such evangelical pastors incessantly preach, is deemed by their Zionist overseers as, at best, condemned to an eternity in Hell drowning in a pool of molten excrement. Seemingly, the blind leading the blind would be quite an improvement over the deaf, dumb and blind simians who “guide” us today.
We humans are a strange, incoherent and evolutionally counterintuitive species.
_____
© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2026; all rights reserved. Please feel free to share with appropriate attribution.
Guillermo (“Bill”) Calvo Mahé (a sometime poet and aspiring empirical philosopher) is a writer, political commentator and academic currently residing in the Republic of Colombia (although he has primarily lived in the United States of America of which he is also a citizen). Until 2017 he chaired the political science, government and international relations programs at the Universidad Autónoma de Manizales. Previously, he chaired the social studies and foreign language departments at the Eastern Military Academy in Huntington, New York. He is currently the publisher of the Inannite Review available at Substack.com; an intermittent commentator on radio and television in both Colombia and abroad; and, an occasional contributor to diverse periodicals and publications. He has academic degrees in political science (BA, The Citadel, the Military College of South Carolina), law (JD, St. John’s University, School of Law), international legal studies (LL.M, the Graduate Division of the New York University School of Law) and translation and linguistic studies (GCTS, the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies). However, he is also fascinated by mythology, religion, physics, astronomy and mathematics, especially with matters related to quanta, cosmology and cosmogony. He can be contacted at guillermo.calvo.mahe@gmail.com and much of his writing is available through his blog at https://guillermocalvo.com/.
