Sure. But they are both bad. Only one is going on today so we can discuss your point in a different discussion.
>The FBI in 2023 sought and obtained data about the senators’ phone use from January 4 through January 7, 2021. That data shows when and to whom a call is made, as well as the duration and general location data of the call. The data does not include the content of the call.
Which is the main - or perhaps the only reason - why some countries have due process in the first place.
It is not that social elites just decide to extend it on everyone out of grace
It is that those in power want to extend it on themselves, so that they could not be killed, jailed or exiled extrajudicially, just out of political expediency
This is a naive surface level conclusion. Ask yourself why. The answer is because the nobles, or whoever matters in your example society, isn't gonna have much allegiance to a system then are basically disposable to and will be disposed of at the drop of a hat and so their allegiance will be just about the same.
A system where nobody really supports anything beyond the degree to which it keeps their head on their shoulders and everyone is looking over said shoulder is gonna have a lot of disruptive power transitions (in a "you go bankrupt slowly, then suddenly" sort of way as people all throw their weight behind the new thing as it starts to gain the upper hand) and engage in a lot less long term productive activity than societies with due process or some other way to keep people from losing everything at the drop of the hat. And it will get out competed by those societies.
Those scheming up evil ways to levy ruinous fines for failing to use one's blinker or get people kicked out of industries for having odious opinions on unrelated subjects ought to take note.
Just wait until it's an end you don't like.
Just wait until it's a bad means to an end you don't like.
Just wait until it's a bad means to an end you don't like.
One could even argue that repeated application of that shit over the past 20 (or 120) years is why we're here now having this discussion.
I remember during the Fanny-whatever-her-name-was thing that went through the courts prior to Trump's election they pulled up cell location records from 10yr ago as if they were nothing special whatsoever and introduced them as evidince. Sure, all of that was done according to laws and process, but having decades old location records exist at all to be subject to government inquiry is probably something that's bad on its face and we should not be doing even if it lets us nab a few people who did wrong.
By "good guys got the bad guys" what I am referring to is that the arctic frost stuff resulted in federal prosecutions. First off, you can't really use conviction as a bellwether for whether serious wrong was actually done. Federal prosecution is intentionally ruinous for anyone without huge, huge resources and even if you beat the flagship charge the laws are such that if they want you they'll still get you and they're only really constrained by political optics. Martha is probably the best example of this. And second, even if the prosecution is being done in pursuit of people who have legitimately done wrong (note I did not say "violated the law" because the laws are so broad), I'm not sure that prosecuting sitting politicians is a door that ought to be opened because due to the ruinous nature of of having the feds after you it basically hands a ton of power to the executive to harass politicians to get what they want.
This ties us back to 24 and the CIA because they were theoretically torturing people to "save american lives" and "prevent terrorism" which, while noble goals, are still not justification for going from "torture is never acceptable" to "torture is acceptable sometimes".
I am skeptical that doing so would result in greater concentration of executive power constrained only by political optics—given that that's what we're seeing now—and it is hard to envision a scenario of executive harassment of the legislature more obvious than what we've already seen² happen.
¹ to be clear, we're talking about things which actually happened in real life: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_fake_electors_plot
² Senate Chamber, January 6 2021 https://share.google/kJois0ZmHS7j6XMAU
I believe due process is important in every case, and I want to believe that having a mixed system eventually results in due process being skipped more and more, but the example from the end of the article goes against that: England and France diverged, so it’s possible for a mixed system to go either way?