The All-Powerful Presidency
by Gerald J. Russello - June 7, 2008
Reprinted with permission.
The Cult of the Presidency: America's Dangerous Devotion to Executive Power
Gene Healy, Cato Institute, $22.95, 264 pages
When we were in college, Gene Healy set up an ideological quiz in the central campus square, and invited all comers to test their ideological and political preferences based on their answers to a series of questions. The point of the exercise was to burst people's perceptions of themselves. In particular, the test generally showed college-age liberals were more doctrinaire than they expected, and conservatives were far too willing to cede decision-making control to authority figures.
Healy is still bursting bubbles. From his perch as a senior editor at the libertarian Cato Institute after a stint practicing law, he has taken aim at one of America's biggest myths: the all-knowing, feel-good presidency. Both liberals and conservatives come in for a drubbing in his provocative and well-written new book, The Cult of the Presidency. Healy shatters conventional illusions about what we think the presidency is for and what we expect a president to do. Healy's analysis demands that we examine whether the modern presidency has permanently warped our constitutional system.
Americans have long been of two minds (at least) about their chief magistrate. On the one hand, we have a suspicion of concentrated power. After all, the Constitution explicitly limits the president's duties and functions, which is not surprising given the founders' suspicion of monarchical power. On the other hand, the nation has increasingly looked to the president to solve all the nation's problems. Rather than merely execute the laws the people's representatives in the Congress enact, we expect the president to propose his own legislative agenda on almost every imaginable topic, from agriculture to the economy, from schools to the environment, to put cops on every corner and solve obesity. We have become so used to seeing the president appear at every natural disaster site that we have forgotten that this is not what the president is supposed to be doing at all.
In pointed chapters bearing titles such as "The Age of the Heroic Presidency," "Superman Returns," and "Why the Worst Get on Top… and Get Worse," Healy presents a disturbing picture of presidential overreach. Healy covers the central political and legal events that have created our modern presidency, from Theodore Roosevelt's use of the "bully pulpit," McKinley's expansionism, Wilson's wars for democracy and general megalomania, FDR's court packing, the erosion of congressional war-making power, misuse of American intelligence services to harm political opponents, all the way through the contemporary War on Terror and fight over protecting civil liberties. Through it all, Cult is a good read; Healy has an eye for the telling quote or illuminating anecdote, and takes great pleasure in puncturing blowhards like Clinton Rossiter, who spoke of his "veneration" for the presidency, and political sycophants of all stripes. Crucially, Healy shows that although Lincoln is often cited by proponents of the active executive, his legacy "had no immediately visible effect on the powers or prestige of the presidency" after the Civil War ended. In other words, the constitutional tradition of limited power held. But that tradition collapsed with the turn of the last century.
Healy is especially good at explaining why war is good for big government but bad for the nation. While not exactly attributing presidential foreign adventures as good distractions for their poor choice at home, Healy demonstrates how easy it is for a modern president to lead the nation to war, untethered from congressional oversight and communing directly with the people. Healy also explains how layers of staff improperly insulate the president from public opinion or dissenting voices. The modern presidency requires endless fundraising and making promises, and combined with what Healy calls its "kingly isolation" from real Americans, almost inevitably distort the office and by extension, the entire federal government as power concentrates in one branch instead of being spread through all three.
The allure of the presidency as the nation's conscience was supposedly shattered by Watergate and the Vietnam War. Yet poll after poll confirms we still have a romantic view of, and trust in, the nation's highest office. As Healy explains, we have long had a bipartisan love affair with the idea that the "successful" president is an active one, either in domestic policy or in projecting American power overseas. Everyone prefers an activist president, so long as it is their kind of activism. Even in academia, "[w]hether they're conservative or liberal, America's professors prefer presidents who dream big and attempt great things – even when they leave wreckage in their wake." Liberals prefer a Johnson or a Kennedy, with their moral suasion on behalf of civil rights or economic welfare. Conservatives, too, have fallen sway to the energetic national leader since the 1980s. Initiatives like the New Frontier or War on Poverty give professors something to write about. Merely presiding over a period of peace brings no academic glory to a president; just ask Calvin Coolidge, a hero to Healy but a nonentity to most professors. And since Theodore Roosevelt, all presidents have made free use of executive orders to make laws, which are little more than presidential fiats without much if any democratic support.
The media, too, has played its part. It is easier, after all, to focus on one executive rather than 535 members of Congress. In addition, the media have amplified the president's ability to communicate directly with the voters, turning a presiding executive into a plebiscitary leader. Presidential rhetoric has become increasingly less modest; not for a modern president George Washington's public agonizing over his fitness for the job. "In their rhetoric and public behavior, modern presidents encouraged (and still encourage) [a] grandiose view of presidential capabilities by promising to protect Americans from economic dislocation, to shield them from natural disasters and all manner of hazards, and, increasingly, even to provide the moral leadership that could deliver them from spiritual malaise." For its part, the Congress has been all too happy to cede its powers – crucially, that of declaring war – to the president.
Cult of the Presidency opens a window of hope that the American tradition of skepticism – indeed, of mockery – toward those in power will return in full flower to protect the remaining vestiges of republican government. The heroic president, like every institution, is suffering from endless YouTube loops playing supposedly off-the-record gaffes and do-it-yourself parodies. Judging from the current presidential campaigns, however, where the old tropes of the president live on, that hope is small indeed.
Gerald J. Russello is a fellow of the Chesterton Institute at Seton Hall University. He is working on a book on Christopher Dawson.
