Nixon just got ousted & the law had nothing to do with it

That is precisely what so many foreigners didn’t get about Nixon’s threatened impeachment. I’ve told the story before about how a Nigerian friend believed completely that, once elected, a senator had immunity from all law. To him, and to many in his society, that was what political power was: the ability to act with impunity. They see the ruler as sovereign; otherwise he is not strong enough to control the forces of society. For the law to be sovereign, there has to be something underlying the ruler and the state and that is lacking in most societies in the world. That is what Fukuyama takes up in Ch. 18.

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