Surely you’re not saying that the point of arresting him is to prevent him from winning an election. Surely you’re not saying that.
There are many points to arresting criminals. Making it harder for them to amass power is one of them, of which winning an election is a subset.
Do you think such a taboo is likely to increase or decrease the risk from dictators taking over?
Increase, for the reasons I enumerated.
Maybe you could claim that would-be dictators are more likely than good candidates to have committed crimes
That’s one factor, yes.
On the other hand, if there is no such taboo, then a dictator who has already been elected is more likely to appoint cronies who will prosecute his political opponents for whatever might stick to them—even if they don’t stick, the prosecution itself can be damaging and onerous.
That doesn’t work for the reasons I gave (to very briefly repeat them—the dictator will not respect any informal taboos (or formal ones, for that matter)).
Aside from not respecting informal taboos, he will be helped by other Republicans in other branches of the government to get away with both overstepping his authority and committing outright crimes.
The idea you’re describing is the exact opposite of how social interaction and the system of power work, and has been generated and released into the wild by bad-faith actors who are invested in people falsely believing in them (another one is “we have to give the Babyeaters a platform and host their hate speech on our servers, so that people can see how terrible they are and stop supporting them,” which also works, in reality, the other way around).
There are many points to arresting criminals. Making it harder for them to amass power is one of them, of which winning an election is a subset.
Increase, for the reasons I enumerated.
That’s one factor, yes.
That doesn’t work for the reasons I gave (to very briefly repeat them—the dictator will not respect any informal taboos (or formal ones, for that matter)).
Aside from not respecting informal taboos, he will be helped by other Republicans in other branches of the government to get away with both overstepping his authority and committing outright crimes.
The idea you’re describing is the exact opposite of how social interaction and the system of power work, and has been generated and released into the wild by bad-faith actors who are invested in people falsely believing in them (another one is “we have to give the Babyeaters a platform and host their hate speech on our servers, so that people can see how terrible they are and stop supporting them,” which also works, in reality, the other way around).