There is a core principle behind Anglo-American democracy as it has evolved in the past few centuries. Which is that you cannot rely on the judgment of one man or woman, unchecked by the law, or by parliament or Congress or the press, to govern a country. The reason is that human beings – all of us – are fallible. We get things wrong; our egos get the better of us; our self-interest blinds us; power corrupts us.

So America’s founding fathers set up a system of checks and balances to ensure that deliberation and debate would precede action. They made impulsive action very difficult because they believed that deliberation was essential to sound governance. And they also believed that any government’s actions should always be accountable, checkable, reversible and reasonable. This is why, in my judgment, the American constitution is such a conservative document: because it enshrines checks against absolute power, due process, deliberation and prudence at the core of democratic life.

This is the core conservatism that George W Bush and Dick Cheney, his vice-president, have systematically attacked for the past eight years – in favour of a de facto protectorate of one strong man. They believe it’s necessary to save us from terrorism. But they also believe the president of the United States is constrained by no law, no treaty and no constitution when he is defending the nation. Even when Congress has passed laws for presidential signature, Bush has attached provisos on many, saying he is not obliged to follow them when acting to defend the country. He has unilaterally suspended the Geneva conventions and unilaterally violated American law in sanctioning wire-tapping and torture. By any rational measure, he and Cheney have committed war crimes and their only defence is that they are above such laws and so incapable of committing any crimes in the defence of the nation.

The key area where this dictatorial impulse has been demonstrated has been the war on terror. But last week we saw the extension of the same kind of thinking to the economy. If Donald Rumsfeld was the unchecked executive of the war, then Henry Paulson has now been asked to be the Rumsfeld for the economy. The wrangling last week – including the disgraceful show-boating and drama of John McCain’s shambolic campaign – was therefore a brief glimmer of hope in a system increasingly controlled by unaccountable strong men.

Consider the parallels between the economic crisis and the terrorism crisis. After 9/11 we were told by Bush that there was no doubt that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and if we did not act immediately the consequences could be catastrophic. Trust me, he insisted, and many of us did. Last week he insisted that the American economy stood on the brink of disaster and that if we did not act immediately, the consequences would be catastrophic. Trust me, he insisted. Then he proposed that Paulson be given total unaccountable power to do whatever he wanted with a trillion dollars of taxpayers’ money.

In war and economic crisis Bush has insisted that there is no alternative to dictatorial rule. As he kept saying: “I’m the decider.” Notice the difference between a decider and a president. A president presides over a constitutional system and acts within his constitutional role to defend the country as commander-in-chief – but has no constitutional right to declare war, a right that is categorically awarded to the Congress in the constitution. A “decider” just does what he wants.

Bush and Cheney did not believe they even needed a congressional vote to go to war with Iraq. They demanded simple trust that they had the correct intelligence, the correct strategy and the correct analysis. The job of ordinary citizens was not to keep a beady eye on their government, not to subject its claims to scrutiny and scepticism. The job of citizens was to “go shopping” while the decider protected them from danger. Last week we saw that Bush had the same view about the economy. The people should simply hand over the reins of government to one man – giving him tools and money that no president has ever had in history before.

Mercifully, finally, the other branch of government began to resist and an actual debate took place last week. Now that Congress is entirely controlled by another party, the total walkover that occurred with the Iraq war has not yet happened. The system began to work as the founders intended it to. But the important thing to note is that this president and the Republican establishment tried to stop this happening. They resisted any attempt to have their power restrained, controlled or negotiated away. When you look at the shambolic McCain campaign you see exactly the same arrogant, one-man executive certainty that has so plagued American politics for the past 7½ years.

It is now extremely clear that, in the run-up to the Iraq war, Congress and the press failed in their duty. We were much too credulous toward an administration’s certainty in the face of great peril. We let deliberation cede to pure action. When reality started to seep through the propaganda, the administration responded by smearing the press, demonising the opposition and running election campaigns on the basis of fear and deference to presidential authority. In the face of the current economic crisis we surely mustn’t make the same mistake again. We have to demand transparency, deliberation, debate and factual data. We must not be rushed into anything rash. Handing a financial dictator a trillion dollars to do with as he wishes is not a democratic impulse; it is antidemocratic.

This is a critical moment for real conservatives to stand up and be counted. Edmund Burke, the founder of Toryism, was concerned above all with checks on concentrated power. Nothing appalled him more than naked, unchecked executive power – as the third and fourth US presidents, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, also understood. And yet that is what has consumed the American constitution for the past seven years, aided and abetted by so-called conservatives who have let fear override reason, power trump freedom and terror displace the rule of law.

In some ways what we are seeing now is also reassuring. It is the end of a great, recent American illusion. The illusion that you can delegate self-government to a great leader. You can’t. The illusion that wars are won purely by saying they can’t be lost. The illusion that you can borrow and borrow and spend and spend and the day of reckoning will never come. But that day is here. And it is long overdue.

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