Expanding on the seed of an idea in a previous post:
I’ve acknowledged before the seeming paradox of a liberal democracy: Who is sovereign in a democracy? Is it the President, or the people that appointed him? Who has to listen to whom? In this thought experiment, let’s resolve this paradox definitively on one side and see how it looks.
Vox Imperii
The people, collectively, are the Imperial Sovereign. The People rule by fiat, their edicts have the force of law. The legislature is a court of appointed nobles–nobles appointed by the collective Emperor. As the court of nobles, they clamor for the affections of the sovereign and seek to formalize his edicts. The President is the chief counselor of the bureaucracy–the prime minister, after a fashion. He represents the interests of the bureaucracy to the collective Emperor, reporting on troop dispositions or the reserves in the treasury, or the various other necessities incurred by a far flung population. The collective Emperor is hard to appeal to, so the President must enlist the help of the court of nobles, and advocate for the bureaucracy in the legislative agenda. Effectively, the legislature is where the will of the collective Emperor and the will of the governing bureaucracy interact. The president can seek to influence, but the Emperor has true power. The Supreme Court then represents the interests of the bureaucracy across time, and validates contemporary issues against the collective Emperor’s past edicts for consistency.
The system of checks and balances only works if each of the branches are independent and disinterested. There is a fourth branch that is, per se the Masses, and it is uncontrolled for. The Masses then can grow out of proportion with the other branches, and tip the scales. If a rodent can push a button to get a pellet, it will learn to do so even to it’s detriment. The Masses don’t have a button to push, but can use their uncontrolled influence of the legislature to indulge itself and enable every ill it desires.
A natural follow up question: how do you control for the 4th branch?
I think the answer is simple: A strong executive.
AMDG
Times-Dispatch of Vichy Earth 
The people does not exist until it is formally constituted, which is to say represented in a written or unwritten constitution. I think you are right that the executive is properly the representative of the State in the constitution, although I wouldn’t equate the state and the state bureaucracy. The people are represented in the House of Representatives. When it was properly constituted, Senators represented the States. I wouldn’t say we need a “strong executive,” since this implies that the interests of the State are paramount and there is an ever-present danger that the State’s representative will be too weak. There are presumably times when the executive should be stronger and times when it should be weaker. The problem with power, however, is that the word “should” does not apply. The power of anything simply is what it is.
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I think that social mores and polite decorum–an unwritten constitution–is the default state of being until a written constitution is made that changes that relationship. Social mores are eternal because every group of people has them, and it determines the absolute basic units of culture.
I juxtapose the Executive as a representative of the bureaucracy vs. merely the state because in this thought experiment at least I put the people as emperor and l’etat c’est moi. If the Vox Imperii is sovereign then all statecraft that happens is just between agents of the emperor and not as agents of the government.
“the people are represented” is true but nowadays it feels backwards, since politicians jump on social media bandwagons. It feels like the tail has been wagging the dog for some time. The States being represented in the senate is a stabilizing control for sure but since it was removed it turned the Senate into the House of Lords.
The strong executive is a mitigating control contra a strong people, a strong people are a mitigating control on a strong executive. The two forces need to be in tension. But given the nature of the American revolution, the executive was neutered somewhat and made a public servant rather than a public guardian. The waxing and waning of the strength of the executive should be in direct proportion to the strength of the people, and other branches for which it serves as a mitigating control.
you’re right about “should”–power is what it is, wishing for it to be different is like wishing for a million dollars. Sure, it would be great, but it’s ultimately unhelpful.
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