>>90379803Edgar did face consequences for her corruption, by getting exiled to the Cursed Earth in all but name and stripped of all power, but I definitely see your point. And honestly, John Wagner probably sees it too, since the entire Day of Chaos epic was based around a crisis that the judges completley failed to prevent and the general public losing all faith in them as a result.
The thing about the judges/citizens relation is that, as shown in Twilight's Last Gleaming and other stories, most citizens are (by 100% design of the judges) so stupid and indoctrinated that they literally cannot even imagine something other than the judges. Which is in itself an incredibly damning statement on politics in general: when hegemony and cultural domination grows so strong that most people can't think of things being different than "the way things have always been", then absolute power becomes much more attainable.
But as the judges' promise of eternal safety falls apart, and it has fallen apart really hard recently, so we see citizens growing disillusioned with them. The big failing of the strip, in my eyes, is that it hasn't produced yet any big figure or movement for those disenfranchised citizens to rally around. Back in the Democracy days we had that, but with that gone there's no longer a group of genuinely well-meaning, non-violent, ordinary smart people who present an alternative to the judges' rule. And so therefore, with no alternative, their power remains uncontested.
It's probably a small comfort, but I do enjoy the way Dredd himself has grown to see the system as terribly flawed thanks to the dying words of Fargo and such, and is trying in his own way to either improve things, or to groom people who will be able to improve things in places he couldn't (or wouldn't) reach.
