Legend has it that the U.S. was founded incipiently, if not explicitly, as a presidential government.
Whether this tendency was already present in the minds of the founders or whether it emerged as an historical destiny to be ecstatically embraced,
an executive regime is what supposedly we were meant to be.
An entire school of American historical writing, which has dominated public education since mid-century,
elevates presidential powers to the skies.
Identified with academic celebrities, Arthur Schlesinger, Clinton Rossiter, William Wachttemberg, James M. Burns and John Morton Blum, among many, many others,
this American historiography treats what is best in our past as the work of activist presidents.
Individually and collectively, these presidents pushed our country toward what intellectuals wanted it to become,
a social democratic experiment bringing the benefits of our reformed society to a still unredeemed world.
This mission civilisatrice is essential to presidential government as conceived by mainstream historians,
and all of the major conflicts into which our leaders have pushed us from the Civil War on,
with the possible exception of the Spanish-American War, are seen as morally desirable actions.
Though the Vietnam War occasioned doubts for at least some of these historians, who were never
as anti-communist as they were anti-fascist and teutonicphobic, the storyline has remained largely
the same. International involvement is mandated by morality and our global position, and only
those who suffer from Richard Hofstadter's paranoid style of politics or Joshua Moravchik's
isolationist impulse com antisemitism reject America's rendezvous with destiny. In Arthur
Schlesinger's scenario, the U.S., as fashioned by Wilson FDR in Truman, defines and upholds
is a vital center, which stands between two ominous extremes, communism and what is generically called the right.
The latter is sufficiently sweeping category to take in such a medley of evils as anti-New Deal Republicans,
Francisco Franco and the shattered remnants of Nazi Europe.
It would be tedious for me to dwell on this characterization of presidential America for an obvious reason.
All of us know what I am characterizing most of us have had it drummed into our heads by
middle and highbrow culture and by American educational institutions.
One does not have to visit Mount Rushmore or look at our coins to get the point.
The U.S. is a land of morally driven energetic presidents who have made us into the envy
and dread of the world.
They have nudged and sometimes pushed us into assuming international leadership while moving
Coming around the furnishings in our own national home. In the extreme example of this thesis,
put forth by Harry Jaffa and Gary Wills, our greatest president, the santus omnium sanctorum,
Abraham Lincoln, had to reconstruct our regime and our national purpose to provide us with
a second birth in freedom. This is the way these historians understand the Civil War
are as a bloody rite of passage into a new America dedicated to democratic equality.
Such arguments about a presidential America prevail despite a very different founding,
one that Mavericks, Bradford, Emmy Bradford, Murray Rothbard, George W. Kerry and Forrest
MacDonald have all focused on.
These and other scholars bring up the embarrassing fact that the authors of the Constitution
and Federalist Papers, assumed they were establishing a legislative republic.
It was a legislative republic that would be dominated at the federal level by Congress,
not by the President, and certainly not by what is the weakest of the three branches
in Hamilton's phrase, the Supreme Court.
The preeminence of a legislative seemed inevitable in a republic, and the founders devoted more
More attention to that body than to any other branch of government discussing its power
and their limits in Article I of the Constitution.
The assignment of a presidential veto in Article II was not intended to allow the president
to push around Congress, but as indicated in Federalist 51, was thought necessary, quote,
to allow him to defend himself.
The need for such a defense is undeniable, explains Publius, quote, in a purely Republican
and Regime, and which the tendency of the legislature to overwhelm the other branches
of government is almost irresistible." In such situations, representatives appear
disposed to assert an imperious control over the other departments, and as they commonly
have the people on their side, they act with such momentum as to make it very difficult
for the other members of the government to maintain the balance of the Constitution.
Not belief in a necessary and salutary executive supremacy, but to the contrary a very different
assumption, namely that presidents would be irreparably weak in republican governments
cause the founders to assign countervailing powers to the executive in dealing with Congress.
A more considered defense of the American executive power made by Straussian authors
Martin Diamond, Harvey Mansfield and others is that presidential government, though not
mandated by the American Revolution and certainly not by the Constitution, came along in the
course of time and that was a good thing.
That turn has contributed to a more just society and to a more peaceful and more democratic
World, wherever American influence has been brought to bear. Such a defense typically
cites all the happy outcomes attributable to presidential energy, the emancipation of
slaves, the victory of democracy in the two world wars, civil rights enforcement, New
Deal initiatives. Without strong executives at the right moment, we are made to think
American democracy and democracy in general would not have prevailed. It is fairly predictable
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.
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,
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.
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.
But despite the fact that these respondents would differ in their judgment from the promoters of executive energy,
they would all agree on the general picture of what has happened.
Both sides look at the rise of presidential power as the major political change since the Civil War
and even more since the Progressive Era.
Both stress that the consolidation of presidential power took place at the expense of Congress
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,
With the triumphalist depiction of the process, they would accept the evolutionary course it highlights.
That is, from Congressional Republic to Presidential Empire.
The same process is outlined in James Burnham's grim study of American Congressional Government
as the one major curb, in James Burnham's words, on the soaring executive and an unleashed
bureaucracy.
Congress ceases to be an active, functioning political institution, wrote Burnham in the
late 40s, then political liberty in the United States will come to an end.
While Burnham ultimately opts for the imperial presidency as a corollary of the American
Empire he thought necessary to oppose Soviet expansion, he nonetheless recognized its Caesarist,
anti-constitutionalist features.
Here, writes Burnham, is a symbolic solution, the only possible solution, for the problem
of realizing the general will, that is for the central problem of democratic ideology.
Furthermore, writes Burnham, once the structure of government in the modern world, including
the U.S., moves away from the rule of law, the only alternative will be the soaring rule
of Caesarism.
I, for one, have no problem with Burnham's strictures about presidential power, or with
Note this distinction between a Republican rule of law vested in Congress and the presidential
Caesarism that ensued.
It is equally reasonable to treat early American history as belonging predominantly to the
first, and most of our more recent history as betokening the second.
In fact, it may be argued that down to the present century even vehement assertions of
presidential power, e.g. by John Adams and the Aliens Addition Act, by Andrew Jackson
and the Nullification Controversy by Abraham Lincoln, far, far more cataclysmically, during
the Civil War, did not exhaust the Republican framework of our government entirely.
Movement back in the direction of congressional authority, shared sovereignty with the states
and effective limits on federal overreach usually followed periods of extraordinary
assertions of presidential will.
After the Civil War, when a largely Republican Supreme Court struck down Reconstructionist
Legislation, breaks were put on the Central State by the Central State itself. From the
Civil War down to the Progressive Era, with the possible and useful exception, in my opinion,
of the old Democrat Grover Cleveland, presidential power was at least as restrained as it had
been in the early Republic. It is only since the twentieth century that, save for the Harding-Coolidge
anomaly, the presidential momentum has seemed unstoppable. Presidential bureaucracy has reached
which the density of a middle-sized municipality, presidents initiate wars, pretty much at will,
and national media and their academic echoes favor even further extension of presidential
prerogative, providing these prerogatives fit the progressive models of social reconstruction
favored by the media.
Despite these developments, I would suggest a modification of the received view of presidential
power.
The apparent enhancement of executive authority is also something else.
Indeed, by now it is principally something else, the expansion of the managerial state.
The American intellectuals and journalists who drool over bumptious executives have no
Most scruples about running down and even unseating presidents when it suits their needs.
They will turn around, as Arthur Schlesinger and other liberals did, and decry imperial
presidents even when associated with liberal policies, as in the case of Johnson and Nixon,
when they decide they want someone else in the White House.
Most of our opponents are no more pro-presidential than the Earl of Warwick during the War of
the Roses, who is pro-monarchical.
They support executives they and their friends can jerk around or whom they happen to fancy.
It is unfitting to compare such devious opportunists to divine-right monarchists or to those who,
like Carl Schmitt, believed honestly in executive dictatorships.
Moreover, the executive democracy that our opponents talk up has less and less to do
with presidential energy.
It does not require willful presidents, but demands figureheads who allow the right sorts
of Status to Take Charge. Those who extol Clinton's policies would likely turn on him
in an instant if he issued executive orders defanging federal anti-discrimination enforcement.
What has happened is that most federal administration is now tied to the executive, and so the chattering
class praises that branch as the one especially concerned about human rights as opposed to
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.
Our presidents are becoming like Scandinavian monarchs, photogenic frontmen for a managerial dictatorship.
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.
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.
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.
If the abuser cultivates journalists in the permanent administrative state, he should be able to get away with considerable mischief.
Spraying countries disliked by the media with bombs to the accompanying applause of House Republicans may not even be the worst of it.
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.
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.
What for others is a public disgrace and a costly crime is for him a private matter.
For tens of millions of Americans, mostly black and female, it is outrageous that one
dares even to judge the PC occupant of the Oval Office.
Whatever else has caused the suspension of ethical judgment, it is certainly related
to the cult of the President.
The German President, who is a largely powerless windbag, does not have the resources to become
a Clinton-like deity.
He is a proper figurehead who is intended to be little more.
We would do well to imitate this German practice and not to allow our executives their present
cultic status.
The most that can be said in favor of energetic presidents in the past is that they resembled
willful monarchs of centuries past.
Because of their unfettered energies and contempt for constitutional restraint, powerful presidents
increase not only their own influence but the imperial sway of their country.
But this does not justify adulation for the Presidency in general, or for its current
depraved occupant, any more than admiration for, say, William of Orange should predispose
one to empower Prince Charles to invade other countries or to punish the sexism of his subjects.
An argument can be made that presidents should be forced to accept the original limits on
their power.
To this the response from George Will, the neoconservative weekly standard, would be
that an emasculated president leaves us vulnerable.
This of course begs the question, vulnerable to what?
Are we speaking of an invasion from Latin America, or the incursion of Middle Eastern
terrorists?
Both are now happening with presidential support, and partly because of the immigration policies
is endorsed by the conservative opposition, in quotations.
Besides lamenting, a weakened executive branch is a bit like worrying about the future barrenness
of teenage recipients of welfare if we discourage underclass fertility.
Let's worry about present excesses and not conjure up hypothetical alternative ones.
All the same, any attempt to control the presidential mystique will likely fail unless strenuous
actions are taken to rein in federal bureaucracy. Administrative tyranny will continue to rage
no matter under what branch of the federal government. It can thrive as easily behind
a congressional shield as a presidential one and behave equally arbitrarily in either case.
In conclusion, let me quote from one of the most cloying tributes to presidential arrogance
ever devised, the deprecation of Dwight Eisenhower in the revised edition of Clinton Rossiter's
The American Presidency.
According to Rossiter, and I was forced to read this disgusting book as an undergraduate,
Eisenhower quote, came to the office with practically no thoughts about its power and
purpose.
He had swallowed a good deal of the propaganda directed at Roosevelt in Truman, and the result
was a first year in office during which his view of his power was not much different from
that announced long ago by William Howard Taft.
Rossiter Scholes Eisenhower, quote, for asking congressional approval in 1955 for the authority
to defend Formosa and the Pescadores, unquote.
Because of this quaint belief that the President was somehow, quote, under a stern obligation
to ask congressional support for the deployment of troops, Eisenhower was willing to cripple
and the striking power of the presidency in a crisis, unquote.
Rossiter believed that, quote, history, and let me tell you, I believe this junk at one
time.
I mean, I'm not only reading, I, you know, as long as it's almost with, you know, fear
and trembling for my soul, but I'm reading this stuff.
I believe this as an undergraduate in college.
Rossiter believed that, quote, history will likely judge Mr. Eisenhower's leadership
to have been the most disappointing of all because of his failure to extend executive
power in two areas, quote, his abdication of moral and political leadership in the crisis
of integration in the South and his refusal to push steadily for solutions of the crisis
of education by imposing a federal solution, unquote.
Rossiter despised Eisenhower for not going far enough both to impose federal control
over Learning, and to reconfigure social life in the American South.
But what he blamed on Eisenhower's, quote, modest conception of the presidency, unquote,
the failure to engage in grandiose social engineering, no longer hinges on the person
of the chief executive.
Rossiter's plan for the American presidency can now go forward at an accelerated rate
because it has been turned over to bureaucrats, judges and opinion-wrenchers.
Meanwhile, the President has grown weaker domestically, but does enjoy one remaining
dangerous power.
Though he cannot undo it without having held to pay, he can, or he is allowed to fast-forward
the Left's agenda with minimal opposition.
From an experiment in Caesarism, the American presidency has now become an appendage of
managerial tyranny.
The Center of an Imperial Regime, it has been occupied by an ideologically driven bureaucracy
with a debauched puppet cast in the unlikely role of Caesar Augustus.