WEBVTT NOTE Unimagined Power: The Presidency in the History of Political Philosophy 1 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:07.400 Legend has it that the U.S. was founded incipiently, if not explicitly, as a presidential government. 2 00:00:07.400 --> 00:00:16.900 Whether this tendency was already present in the minds of the founders or whether it emerged as an historical destiny to be ecstatically embraced, 3 00:00:16.900 --> 00:00:21.200 an executive regime is what supposedly we were meant to be. 4 00:00:21.200 --> 00:00:28.800 An entire school of American historical writing, which has dominated public education since mid-century, 5 00:00:28.800 --> 00:00:32.800 elevates presidential powers to the skies. 6 00:00:32.800 --> 00:00:43.200 Identified with academic celebrities, Arthur Schlesinger, Clinton Rossiter, William Wachttemberg, James M. Burns and John Morton Blum, among many, many others, 7 00:00:43.200 --> 00:00:51.200 this American historiography treats what is best in our past as the work of activist presidents. 8 00:00:51.200 --> 00:00:58.940 Individually and collectively, these presidents pushed our country toward what intellectuals wanted it to become, 9 00:00:58.940 --> 00:01:07.800 a social democratic experiment bringing the benefits of our reformed society to a still unredeemed world. 10 00:01:07.800 --> 00:01:15.740 This mission civilisatrice is essential to presidential government as conceived by mainstream historians, 11 00:01:15.740 --> 00:01:21.580 and all of the major conflicts into which our leaders have pushed us from the Civil War on, 12 00:01:21.580 --> 00:01:29.180 with the possible exception of the Spanish-American War, are seen as morally desirable actions. 13 00:01:29.180 --> 00:01:35.660 Though the Vietnam War occasioned doubts for at least some of these historians, who were never 14 00:01:35.660 --> 00:01:42.060 as anti-communist as they were anti-fascist and teutonicphobic, the storyline has remained largely 15 00:01:42.060 --> 00:01:49.380 the same. International involvement is mandated by morality and our global position, and only 16 00:01:49.380 --> 00:01:56.180 those who suffer from Richard Hofstadter's paranoid style of politics or Joshua Moravchik's 17 00:01:56.180 --> 00:02:03.240 isolationist impulse com antisemitism reject America's rendezvous with destiny. In Arthur 18 00:02:03.240 --> 00:02:09.840 Schlesinger's scenario, the U.S., as fashioned by Wilson FDR in Truman, defines and upholds 19 00:02:09.840 --> 00:02:17.840 is a vital center, which stands between two ominous extremes, communism and what is generically called the right. 20 00:02:17.840 --> 00:02:25.840 The latter is sufficiently sweeping category to take in such a medley of evils as anti-New Deal Republicans, 21 00:02:25.840 --> 00:02:30.840 Francisco Franco and the shattered remnants of Nazi Europe. 22 00:02:30.840 --> 00:02:37.840 It would be tedious for me to dwell on this characterization of presidential America for an obvious reason. 23 00:02:37.840 --> 00:02:43.420 All of us know what I am characterizing most of us have had it drummed into our heads by 24 00:02:43.420 --> 00:02:48.620 middle and highbrow culture and by American educational institutions. 25 00:02:48.620 --> 00:02:54.200 One does not have to visit Mount Rushmore or look at our coins to get the point. 26 00:02:54.200 --> 00:03:00.200 The U.S. is a land of morally driven energetic presidents who have made us into the envy 27 00:03:00.200 --> 00:03:02.360 and dread of the world. 28 00:03:02.360 --> 00:03:07.780 They have nudged and sometimes pushed us into assuming international leadership while moving 29 00:03:07.780 --> 00:03:13.220 Coming around the furnishings in our own national home. In the extreme example of this thesis, 30 00:03:13.220 --> 00:03:19.740 put forth by Harry Jaffa and Gary Wills, our greatest president, the santus omnium sanctorum, 31 00:03:19.740 --> 00:03:27.040 Abraham Lincoln, had to reconstruct our regime and our national purpose to provide us with 32 00:03:27.040 --> 00:03:31.940 a second birth in freedom. This is the way these historians understand the Civil War 33 00:03:31.940 --> 00:03:38.180 are as a bloody rite of passage into a new America dedicated to democratic equality. 34 00:03:38.180 --> 00:03:43.400 Such arguments about a presidential America prevail despite a very different founding, 35 00:03:43.400 --> 00:03:48.900 one that Mavericks, Bradford, Emmy Bradford, Murray Rothbard, George W. Kerry and Forrest 36 00:03:48.900 --> 00:03:52.100 MacDonald have all focused on. 37 00:03:52.100 --> 00:03:57.420 These and other scholars bring up the embarrassing fact that the authors of the Constitution 38 00:03:57.420 --> 00:04:04.580 and Federalist Papers, assumed they were establishing a legislative republic. 39 00:04:04.580 --> 00:04:09.580 It was a legislative republic that would be dominated at the federal level by Congress, 40 00:04:09.580 --> 00:04:14.180 not by the President, and certainly not by what is the weakest of the three branches 41 00:04:14.180 --> 00:04:17.640 in Hamilton's phrase, the Supreme Court. 42 00:04:17.640 --> 00:04:23.940 The preeminence of a legislative seemed inevitable in a republic, and the founders devoted more 43 00:04:23.940 --> 00:04:29.740 More attention to that body than to any other branch of government discussing its power 44 00:04:29.740 --> 00:04:33.220 and their limits in Article I of the Constitution. 45 00:04:33.220 --> 00:04:39.460 The assignment of a presidential veto in Article II was not intended to allow the president 46 00:04:39.460 --> 00:04:45.460 to push around Congress, but as indicated in Federalist 51, was thought necessary, quote, 47 00:04:45.460 --> 00:04:48.220 to allow him to defend himself. 48 00:04:48.220 --> 00:04:53.260 The need for such a defense is undeniable, explains Publius, quote, in a purely Republican 49 00:04:53.260 --> 00:04:57.760 and Regime, and which the tendency of the legislature to overwhelm the other branches 50 00:04:57.760 --> 00:05:04.660 of government is almost irresistible." In such situations, representatives appear 51 00:05:04.660 --> 00:05:11.940 disposed to assert an imperious control over the other departments, and as they commonly 52 00:05:11.940 --> 00:05:17.480 have the people on their side, they act with such momentum as to make it very difficult 53 00:05:17.480 --> 00:05:24.600 for the other members of the government to maintain the balance of the Constitution. 54 00:05:24.600 --> 00:05:30.720 Not belief in a necessary and salutary executive supremacy, but to the contrary a very different 55 00:05:30.720 --> 00:05:35.600 assumption, namely that presidents would be irreparably weak in republican governments 56 00:05:35.600 --> 00:05:42.400 cause the founders to assign countervailing powers to the executive in dealing with Congress. 57 00:05:42.400 --> 00:05:51.560 A more considered defense of the American executive power made by Straussian authors 58 00:05:51.560 --> 00:05:56.560 Martin Diamond, Harvey Mansfield and others is that presidential government, though not 59 00:05:56.560 --> 00:06:02.000 mandated by the American Revolution and certainly not by the Constitution, came along in the 60 00:06:02.000 --> 00:06:05.280 course of time and that was a good thing. 61 00:06:05.280 --> 00:06:11.040 That turn has contributed to a more just society and to a more peaceful and more democratic 62 00:06:11.040 --> 00:06:16.460 World, wherever American influence has been brought to bear. Such a defense typically 63 00:06:16.460 --> 00:06:21.760 cites all the happy outcomes attributable to presidential energy, the emancipation of 64 00:06:21.760 --> 00:06:27.100 slaves, the victory of democracy in the two world wars, civil rights enforcement, New 65 00:06:27.100 --> 00:06:34.580 Deal initiatives. Without strong executives at the right moment, we are made to think 66 00:06:34.580 --> 00:06:40.680 American democracy and democracy in general would not have prevailed. It is fairly predictable 67 00:06:40.680 --> 00:06:54.680 So what old Republican critics of such a view would respond, in fact, the tracks of Rothbard, Rockwell, Raimondo, Nock, H.L. Mencken, all serve as illustrations to wit. 68 00:06:54.680 --> 00:07:06.680 Overarching executive power has made a mockery of the rule of law that Caesarism by any other name tramples on Republican liberties, that if the U.S. had stayed out of the First World War, 69 00:07:06.680 --> 00:07:15.280 As John Denson points out, it had not lied its way into it, the European powers might have been forced to make a peace without conquests. 70 00:07:15.280 --> 00:07:29.680 Moreover, continues this rejoinder, Lincoln's war against the South's constitutionally defensible, albeit imprudent secession, cost the American people over 600,000 lives, as well as the end of the Old Republic. 71 00:07:29.680 --> 00:07:37.180 But despite the fact that these respondents would differ in their judgment from the promoters of executive energy, 72 00:07:37.180 --> 00:07:40.680 they would all agree on the general picture of what has happened. 73 00:07:40.680 --> 00:07:47.180 Both sides look at the rise of presidential power as the major political change since the Civil War 74 00:07:47.180 --> 00:07:49.680 and even more since the Progressive Era. 75 00:07:49.680 --> 00:07:56.180 Both stress that the consolidation of presidential power took place at the expense of Congress 76 00:07:56.180 --> 00:08:26.180 After a long struggle for federal control between the two branches, one might also perceive an overlap in the way the two sides trace presidential ascendancy from Hamilton's establishment of a central state with centralized banking and a monarchical president through Lincoln's seizure of despotic or dictatorial power down to the activist interventionist executives of the century. Though most in this room would disagree, 77 00:08:26.180 --> 00:08:33.140 With the triumphalist depiction of the process, they would accept the evolutionary course it highlights. 78 00:08:33.140 --> 00:08:37.140 That is, from Congressional Republic to Presidential Empire. 79 00:08:37.140 --> 00:08:43.580 The same process is outlined in James Burnham's grim study of American Congressional Government 80 00:08:43.580 --> 00:08:50.620 as the one major curb, in James Burnham's words, on the soaring executive and an unleashed 81 00:08:50.620 --> 00:08:51.620 bureaucracy. 82 00:08:51.620 --> 00:08:56.340 Congress ceases to be an active, functioning political institution, wrote Burnham in the 83 00:08:56.340 --> 00:09:02.300 late 40s, then political liberty in the United States will come to an end. 84 00:09:02.300 --> 00:09:07.140 While Burnham ultimately opts for the imperial presidency as a corollary of the American 85 00:09:07.140 --> 00:09:13.740 Empire he thought necessary to oppose Soviet expansion, he nonetheless recognized its Caesarist, 86 00:09:13.740 --> 00:09:16.460 anti-constitutionalist features. 87 00:09:16.460 --> 00:09:21.780 Here, writes Burnham, is a symbolic solution, the only possible solution, for the problem 88 00:09:21.780 --> 00:09:27.380 of realizing the general will, that is for the central problem of democratic ideology. 89 00:09:27.380 --> 00:09:31.700 Furthermore, writes Burnham, once the structure of government in the modern world, including 90 00:09:31.700 --> 00:09:37.500 the U.S., moves away from the rule of law, the only alternative will be the soaring rule 91 00:09:37.500 --> 00:09:38.500 of Caesarism. 92 00:09:38.500 --> 00:09:44.480 I, for one, have no problem with Burnham's strictures about presidential power, or with 93 00:09:44.480 --> 00:09:49.940 Note this distinction between a Republican rule of law vested in Congress and the presidential 94 00:09:49.940 --> 00:09:52.320 Caesarism that ensued. 95 00:09:52.320 --> 00:09:56.680 It is equally reasonable to treat early American history as belonging predominantly to the 96 00:09:56.680 --> 00:10:01.840 first, and most of our more recent history as betokening the second. 97 00:10:01.840 --> 00:10:06.560 In fact, it may be argued that down to the present century even vehement assertions of 98 00:10:06.560 --> 00:10:12.780 presidential power, e.g. by John Adams and the Aliens Addition Act, by Andrew Jackson 99 00:10:12.780 --> 00:10:17.420 and the Nullification Controversy by Abraham Lincoln, far, far more cataclysmically, during 100 00:10:17.420 --> 00:10:23.540 the Civil War, did not exhaust the Republican framework of our government entirely. 101 00:10:23.540 --> 00:10:28.220 Movement back in the direction of congressional authority, shared sovereignty with the states 102 00:10:28.220 --> 00:10:35.660 and effective limits on federal overreach usually followed periods of extraordinary 103 00:10:35.660 --> 00:10:38.220 assertions of presidential will. 104 00:10:38.220 --> 00:10:42.460 After the Civil War, when a largely Republican Supreme Court struck down Reconstructionist 105 00:10:42.460 --> 00:10:48.700 Legislation, breaks were put on the Central State by the Central State itself. From the 106 00:10:48.700 --> 00:10:53.740 Civil War down to the Progressive Era, with the possible and useful exception, in my opinion, 107 00:10:53.740 --> 00:10:59.260 of the old Democrat Grover Cleveland, presidential power was at least as restrained as it had 108 00:10:59.260 --> 00:11:05.100 been in the early Republic. It is only since the twentieth century that, save for the Harding-Coolidge 109 00:11:05.100 --> 00:11:11.260 anomaly, the presidential momentum has seemed unstoppable. Presidential bureaucracy has reached 110 00:11:11.260 --> 00:11:18.780 which the density of a middle-sized municipality, presidents initiate wars, pretty much at will, 111 00:11:18.780 --> 00:11:27.020 and national media and their academic echoes favor even further extension of presidential 112 00:11:27.020 --> 00:11:35.140 prerogative, providing these prerogatives fit the progressive models of social reconstruction 113 00:11:35.140 --> 00:11:37.340 favored by the media. 114 00:11:37.340 --> 00:11:42.340 Despite these developments, I would suggest a modification of the received view of presidential 115 00:11:42.340 --> 00:11:43.340 power. 116 00:11:43.340 --> 00:11:51.540 The apparent enhancement of executive authority is also something else. 117 00:11:51.540 --> 00:11:57.020 Indeed, by now it is principally something else, the expansion of the managerial state. 118 00:11:57.020 --> 00:12:02.580 The American intellectuals and journalists who drool over bumptious executives have no 119 00:12:02.580 --> 00:12:08.260 Most scruples about running down and even unseating presidents when it suits their needs. 120 00:12:08.260 --> 00:12:12.940 They will turn around, as Arthur Schlesinger and other liberals did, and decry imperial 121 00:12:12.940 --> 00:12:18.900 presidents even when associated with liberal policies, as in the case of Johnson and Nixon, 122 00:12:18.900 --> 00:12:22.140 when they decide they want someone else in the White House. 123 00:12:22.140 --> 00:12:26.980 Most of our opponents are no more pro-presidential than the Earl of Warwick during the War of 124 00:12:26.980 --> 00:12:29.420 the Roses, who is pro-monarchical. 125 00:12:29.420 --> 00:12:35.140 They support executives they and their friends can jerk around or whom they happen to fancy. 126 00:12:35.140 --> 00:12:41.220 It is unfitting to compare such devious opportunists to divine-right monarchists or to those who, 127 00:12:41.220 --> 00:12:45.420 like Carl Schmitt, believed honestly in executive dictatorships. 128 00:12:45.420 --> 00:12:50.820 Moreover, the executive democracy that our opponents talk up has less and less to do 129 00:12:50.820 --> 00:12:53.140 with presidential energy. 130 00:12:53.140 --> 00:12:58.580 It does not require willful presidents, but demands figureheads who allow the right sorts 131 00:12:58.580 --> 00:13:04.340 of Status to Take Charge. Those who extol Clinton's policies would likely turn on him 132 00:13:04.340 --> 00:13:11.020 in an instant if he issued executive orders defanging federal anti-discrimination enforcement. 133 00:13:11.020 --> 00:13:17.420 What has happened is that most federal administration is now tied to the executive, and so the chattering 134 00:13:17.420 --> 00:13:24.220 class praises that branch as the one especially concerned about human rights as opposed to 135 00:13:24.220 --> 00:13:37.220 and Mir Republic and Liberty. Note that I am not denying that presidents in the past contributed to the unmaking of constitutional government, but such is no longer the case because of frantically energetic executives. 136 00:13:37.220 --> 00:13:46.220 Our presidents are becoming like Scandinavian monarchs, photogenic frontmen for a managerial dictatorship. 137 00:13:46.220 --> 00:13:59.220 While Danish and Swedish kings in the past crushed local liberties and instilled servile habits, their descendants provide or function as decorative art for socialist governments. 138 00:13:59.220 --> 00:14:12.860 They make public appearances and dutifully read speeches prepared for them by leftist administrations in a way that prefigures the current American presidency placeholding monarchs reign while administrators rule. 139 00:14:12.860 --> 00:14:26.980 But our executive may be more problematic. After almost a century of constitutional derailment, bringing cumulative power to the office of the president, both the possibility and temptation to abuse that office exists. 140 00:14:26.980 --> 00:14:35.260 If the abuser cultivates journalists in the permanent administrative state, he should be able to get away with considerable mischief. 141 00:14:35.260 --> 00:14:42.860 Spraying countries disliked by the media with bombs to the accompanying applause of House Republicans may not even be the worst of it. 142 00:14:42.860 --> 00:14:54.340 Each time the President steps forth to call for collective atonement for racism, sexism, homophobia, or speciesism, he encounters diminishing public objection and resident media approval. 143 00:14:54.340 --> 00:15:05.140 Today, most Americans do not care if the same President, who inflicts quotas and sexual harassment suits on other white males, takes gross liberty with female employees. 144 00:15:05.140 --> 00:15:10.540 What for others is a public disgrace and a costly crime is for him a private matter. 145 00:15:10.540 --> 00:15:15.460 For tens of millions of Americans, mostly black and female, it is outrageous that one 146 00:15:15.460 --> 00:15:19.520 dares even to judge the PC occupant of the Oval Office. 147 00:15:19.520 --> 00:15:23.960 Whatever else has caused the suspension of ethical judgment, it is certainly related 148 00:15:23.960 --> 00:15:25.940 to the cult of the President. 149 00:15:25.940 --> 00:15:31.360 The German President, who is a largely powerless windbag, does not have the resources to become 150 00:15:31.360 --> 00:15:33.440 a Clinton-like deity. 151 00:15:33.440 --> 00:15:37.120 He is a proper figurehead who is intended to be little more. 152 00:15:37.120 --> 00:15:42.540 We would do well to imitate this German practice and not to allow our executives their present 153 00:15:42.540 --> 00:15:44.480 cultic status. 154 00:15:44.480 --> 00:15:49.140 The most that can be said in favor of energetic presidents in the past is that they resembled 155 00:15:49.140 --> 00:15:52.720 willful monarchs of centuries past. 156 00:15:52.720 --> 00:16:00.040 Because of their unfettered energies and contempt for constitutional restraint, powerful presidents 157 00:16:00.040 --> 00:16:04.720 increase not only their own influence but the imperial sway of their country. 158 00:16:04.720 --> 00:16:09.680 But this does not justify adulation for the Presidency in general, or for its current 159 00:16:09.680 --> 00:16:15.540 depraved occupant, any more than admiration for, say, William of Orange should predispose 160 00:16:15.540 --> 00:16:22.260 one to empower Prince Charles to invade other countries or to punish the sexism of his subjects. 161 00:16:22.260 --> 00:16:26.620 An argument can be made that presidents should be forced to accept the original limits on 162 00:16:26.620 --> 00:16:28.200 their power. 163 00:16:28.200 --> 00:16:34.360 To this the response from George Will, the neoconservative weekly standard, would be 164 00:16:34.360 --> 00:16:38.360 that an emasculated president leaves us vulnerable. 165 00:16:38.360 --> 00:16:43.360 This of course begs the question, vulnerable to what? 166 00:16:44.360 --> 00:16:48.800 Are we speaking of an invasion from Latin America, or the incursion of Middle Eastern 167 00:16:48.800 --> 00:16:50.320 terrorists? 168 00:16:50.320 --> 00:16:55.840 Both are now happening with presidential support, and partly because of the immigration policies 169 00:16:55.840 --> 00:17:00.140 is endorsed by the conservative opposition, in quotations. 170 00:17:00.140 --> 00:17:05.320 Besides lamenting, a weakened executive branch is a bit like worrying about the future barrenness 171 00:17:05.320 --> 00:17:10.920 of teenage recipients of welfare if we discourage underclass fertility. 172 00:17:10.920 --> 00:17:17.140 Let's worry about present excesses and not conjure up hypothetical alternative ones. 173 00:17:17.140 --> 00:17:23.080 All the same, any attempt to control the presidential mystique will likely fail unless strenuous 174 00:17:23.080 --> 00:17:29.800 actions are taken to rein in federal bureaucracy. Administrative tyranny will continue to rage 175 00:17:29.800 --> 00:17:35.080 no matter under what branch of the federal government. It can thrive as easily behind 176 00:17:35.080 --> 00:17:40.960 a congressional shield as a presidential one and behave equally arbitrarily in either case. 177 00:17:40.960 --> 00:17:47.140 In conclusion, let me quote from one of the most cloying tributes to presidential arrogance 178 00:17:47.140 --> 00:17:54.140 ever devised, the deprecation of Dwight Eisenhower in the revised edition of Clinton Rossiter's 179 00:17:54.140 --> 00:17:56.700 The American Presidency. 180 00:17:56.700 --> 00:18:03.580 According to Rossiter, and I was forced to read this disgusting book as an undergraduate, 181 00:18:03.580 --> 00:18:09.300 Eisenhower quote, came to the office with practically no thoughts about its power and 182 00:18:09.300 --> 00:18:10.300 purpose. 183 00:18:10.300 --> 00:18:16.300 He had swallowed a good deal of the propaganda directed at Roosevelt in Truman, and the result 184 00:18:16.300 --> 00:18:22.020 was a first year in office during which his view of his power was not much different from 185 00:18:22.020 --> 00:18:25.640 that announced long ago by William Howard Taft. 186 00:18:25.640 --> 00:18:31.660 Rossiter Scholes Eisenhower, quote, for asking congressional approval in 1955 for the authority 187 00:18:31.660 --> 00:18:35.420 to defend Formosa and the Pescadores, unquote. 188 00:18:35.420 --> 00:18:40.340 Because of this quaint belief that the President was somehow, quote, under a stern obligation 189 00:18:40.340 --> 00:18:45.700 to ask congressional support for the deployment of troops, Eisenhower was willing to cripple 190 00:18:45.700 --> 00:18:51.380 and the striking power of the presidency in a crisis, unquote. 191 00:18:51.380 --> 00:18:56.380 Rossiter believed that, quote, history, and let me tell you, I believe this junk at one 192 00:18:56.380 --> 00:18:57.380 time. 193 00:18:57.380 --> 00:19:00.380 I mean, I'm not only reading, I, you know, as long as it's almost with, you know, fear 194 00:19:00.380 --> 00:19:03.140 and trembling for my soul, but I'm reading this stuff. 195 00:19:03.140 --> 00:19:07.380 I believe this as an undergraduate in college. 196 00:19:07.380 --> 00:19:11.460 Rossiter believed that, quote, history will likely judge Mr. Eisenhower's leadership 197 00:19:11.460 --> 00:19:16.940 to have been the most disappointing of all because of his failure to extend executive 198 00:19:16.940 --> 00:19:23.260 power in two areas, quote, his abdication of moral and political leadership in the crisis 199 00:19:23.260 --> 00:19:29.120 of integration in the South and his refusal to push steadily for solutions of the crisis 200 00:19:29.120 --> 00:19:35.340 of education by imposing a federal solution, unquote. 201 00:19:35.340 --> 00:19:40.620 Rossiter despised Eisenhower for not going far enough both to impose federal control 202 00:19:40.620 --> 00:19:45.740 over Learning, and to reconfigure social life in the American South. 203 00:19:45.740 --> 00:19:51.420 But what he blamed on Eisenhower's, quote, modest conception of the presidency, unquote, 204 00:19:51.420 --> 00:19:56.780 the failure to engage in grandiose social engineering, no longer hinges on the person 205 00:19:56.780 --> 00:19:59.020 of the chief executive. 206 00:19:59.020 --> 00:20:04.140 Rossiter's plan for the American presidency can now go forward at an accelerated rate 207 00:20:04.140 --> 00:20:10.140 because it has been turned over to bureaucrats, judges and opinion-wrenchers. 208 00:20:10.140 --> 00:20:16.980 Meanwhile, the President has grown weaker domestically, but does enjoy one remaining 209 00:20:16.980 --> 00:20:18.980 dangerous power. 210 00:20:18.980 --> 00:20:25.760 Though he cannot undo it without having held to pay, he can, or he is allowed to fast-forward 211 00:20:25.760 --> 00:20:29.140 the Left's agenda with minimal opposition. 212 00:20:29.140 --> 00:20:33.740 From an experiment in Caesarism, the American presidency has now become an appendage of 213 00:20:33.740 --> 00:20:35.740 managerial tyranny. 214 00:20:35.740 --> 00:20:42.060 The Center of an Imperial Regime, it has been occupied by an ideologically driven bureaucracy 215 00:20:42.060 --> 00:20:47.660 with a debauched puppet cast in the unlikely role of Caesar Augustus.