The doormat constitution: How selective will turns liberal democracy into an experiment in failure
The Mt Kenya Times 
By Jerameel Kevins Owuor Odhiambo
The factual starting point is this: every major liberal constitution of the modern era from the American in 1787 to the post-war German Basic Law, the Indian Constitution of 1950, and the wave of post-1989 Eastern European and African documents rests on a deliberate wager. That wager is that written limits on power, judicially enforceable rights, separation of powers, and regular elections can restrain the eternal human appetite for dominance. The issue is not theoretical. In practice, the experiment repeatedly shows the same fracture line: the parchment holds only where political actors choose to treat it as binding rather than ornamental. Where they treat it as a doormat, the document does not fail; it is failed.
This is not an abstract complaint. Consider the measurable pattern. Freedom House’s long-running data show that the number of countries classified as “free” peaked and then stagnated or declined in the last fifteen years even as formal constitutional texts proliferated. The Varieties of Democracy project records a clear rise in “executive aggrandizement” leaders elected under liberal rules who then hollow out the independent institutions those rules created. Courts are packed, electoral commissions captured, media regulators weaponized, and opposition figures pursued through selective prosecution. The constitution remains on the books; the will to enforce it evenly evaporates. Situational ethics becomes the operating system: rules are sacred when they protect the in-group and disposable when they restrain it. Cherry-picking is not a bug; it is the method.
History supplies the correlation that makes the pattern vivid. The Weimar Constitution of 1919 was, on paper, one of the most progressive liberal documents of its age universal suffrage, proportional representation, robust rights guarantees. It was not the text that collapsed. It was the systematic refusal by parties, paramilitaries, and eventually the executive to treat the text as inviolable when it obstructed their immediate goals. Article 48’s emergency powers, intended as a narrow safety valve, became a highway for authoritarian rule because those who held the levers decided the constitution was a tool rather than a master. The same dynamic appears in the late Roman Republic: the mos maiorum and the republican constitution were not abolished by decree; they were worn down by successive acts of selective enforcement until the forms remained and the substance was gone. Sulla, Caesar, and the triumvirs did not invent a new order so much as they demonstrated that a constitution without consistent guardians becomes a stage prop.
The danger today is sharper because the rhetoric of constitutional reverence coexists with open contempt for its constraints. There are political actors across the spectrum who speak of the constitution as the foundation of the nation while simultaneously treating its clauses as optional depending on the day’s political convenience. When a provision protects their coalition, it is sacred scripture. When it protects their opponents or restrains their patronage networks, it becomes an obstacle to “the will of the people,” a colonial relic, or an elite conspiracy. This is not principled constitutionalism; it is situational ethics dressed in patriotic clothing. The baby is not merely neglected; there are factions that would smother it if the smothering advanced their hold on power. They do not say so aloud. They speak instead of “transformative interpretation,” of “living constitutionalism” that somehow always expands the preferred side’s latitude, or of “emergency” that somehow never ends.
The intellectual failure here is the refusal to distinguish between the design and the operators. Liberal constitutional democracy is not a self-executing machine. It is a set of constraints that require a critical mass of office-holders, judges, bureaucrats, journalists, and citizens who regard those constraints as higher than their factional interest. Where that critical mass is absent, the experiment produces the appearance of liberal order while delivering the substance of majoritarian or elite capture. The data are consistent: countries with the strongest formal rights protections still see rising polarization, declining trust in institutions, and the normalization of “rule by law” rather than rule of law when the same legal instruments are applied with different rigor depending on the target. Enforcement becomes a political weapon rather than a neutral discipline. This is not the constitution’s betrayal of liberalism; it is liberalism’s betrayal by those sworn to it.
Literary devices illuminate what statistics alone cannot. The constitution is a lighthouse built to warn ships off the rocks of arbitrary power. When the keepers of the light decide that only certain vessels deserve the warning, the lighthouse remains standing while wrecks multiply. It is a fence erected around the exercise of force; when the fence is removed for friends and reinforced against enemies, the fence has not failed the guardians have. It is a contract among citizens that no temporary majority may rewrite at will; when one side treats the contract as a temporary cease-fire rather than a permanent settlement, the contract is already half-dead. The metaphor of the doormat is exact: a constitution wiped underfoot retains its legal form while losing its moral and practical force. Those who treat it that way are not reformers. They are successors to every historical faction that discovered it is easier to capture the referee than to play by the rules.
Original thought demands we reject the comforting fatalism that “liberal democracy is simply exhausted.” Exhaustion is a description of will, not of institutional design. The design has survived far darker hours than the present when enough actors insisted that the text bind everyone or bind no one. The present danger is the growing comfort with partial binding. Once a society accepts that constitutional constraints apply rigorously only to the out-group, the experiment is no longer liberal. It has become a contest of raw power conducted under the lingering aesthetic of legality. That aesthetic is useful to the powerful precisely because it confuses the public: the forms of constitutional democracy persist while the substance of limited government dissolves.
The call is therefore categorical and directed at specific actors. Judges must refuse the invitation to become political partners in selective enforcement; their legitimacy is the last institutional barrier against the doormat treatment. Legislators must stop treating constitutional limits as inconveniences to be circumvented by creative drafting or emergency language. Executives must accept that the power they hold is temporary and constrained, not a personal mandate to reshape the order. Political parties must abandon the habit of framing every adverse ruling as existential warfare against the people. Media and civil society must apply the same scrutiny to their preferred side that they reserve for the other. And citizens must recover the elementary understanding that a constitution that protects only the winners is no constitution at all.
The alternative is not mysterious. History has already run the experiment of constitutions treated as optional. The results are measured in eroded rights, captured institutions, and the eventual replacement of liberal forms by something harder and less accountable. The parchment cannot save itself. Only the consistent, inconvenient, non-situational will of those who hold temporary power can. Anything less turns the great liberal wager into a well-documented failure not of the idea, but of the people entrusted with it. The baby is still alive. The question is whether enough of its guardians still prefer the child to their own advancement.
The writer is a social commentator
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