Happy Presidents' Day!
American presidential democracy is doomed
Today is President’s Day, an odd holiday that no longer specifically commemorates America’s great presidents, but instead celebrates the idea of presidents in general.
Our normal practice at Slow Boring on federal holidays is to bring an old piece out from behind the paywall. But today, I really wanted to bring back two older pieces I wrote for other outlets that are about why presidential democracy is a bad idea. Because I think that, just as a lot of people are saying, Donald Trump has us in a state of rolling constitutional crisis. But I also think the exact nature of that crisis is widely misunderstood — misunderstood somewhat by his critics, who are understating the extent to which we’ve been in low-boil constitutional crisis for a long time, and misunderstood to a large degree by his allies, who have constructed an elaborate and semi-conspiratorial account of what is frustrating about American government.
Elon Musk in the Oval Office said the president needs the authority to rescind spending, fire civil servants, re-write rules, and otherwise manage the executive branch with the level of authority a CEO has over his company in order to “restore democracy,” because otherwise we are living in a bureaucracy-ocracy, ruled by the civil service rather than elected officials.
To Democrats, it’s just the opposite.
Where the analogy breaks down is that a president isn’t like a CEO. A CEO is hired by a Board of Directors, who are elected by the shareholders. He has broad authority, but the authority is purely delegated. He’s analogous to a prime minister in a parliamentary democracy, where the “check” on the elected government is just that they need to maintain the confidence of parliament. The herky-jerky, kludgy nature of the American system isn’t explained by these alt-right fantasies of a secret regime pulling the strings — it’s a design flaw of the Madisonian system. And in the vast majority of cases in other countries, it’s broken down precisely because sooner or later, someone ends up trying to rule as a plebiscitary dictator.
At any rate, I wrote a brief article about this when Yale political scientist Juan Linz died, and then I did a longer piece for Vox in 2015 applying Linzian ideas to America.
Neither piece mentions Trump; these takes are not “about” Trump or any Trumpian ideas, and they don’t reflect Trump Derangement Syndrome. Instead, I would argue that some of the deranged things Trump is doing reflect these very deep systemic issues with the American political system.
In honor of Washington’s Birthday, I’ll repeat a comment that I wrote on an SB thread two years ago:
The greatest damage that Washington did to our country was to govern like an honest man and resign like a saint, instead of behaving like the normal crook that most presidents have been.
Had Washington only taken bribes, abused his office, overreached his authorities, and then conjured up a mob to keep him in power, the Congress would have properly stamped him out and seen to it that strict limits were placed, from that day hence, on presidential discretion and prerogatives.
We could have had an executive that lived in fear of the legislature, if only Washington had had the decency to be corrupt. His uprightness is unforgivable.
I believe the root of Madisonianism's deficiencies lies in its utopian origin story. It was the late-night dorm room stoner session of world constitutions: a bunch of guys (all dudes, all elites, many of them slave-owners) got together and whipped up this Most Awesomest Governance Model. There were some brilliant minds among them. They were very well read, in the main, and knew a great deal about political philosophy. But they were still human. And humans simply don't have enough knowledge and wisdom to come up with schemes likely to work very well, under a wide variety of circumstances, for a very long time. What Communism is to economic models, Madisonianism is to constitutional systems.
Contrast this with the Westminster model, which evolved organically, in dribs and drabs over centuries, jettisoning that which doesn't work and engaging in frequent experimentation.
Of course, Madison and Co. could have given the American polity the capacity to engage in frequent experimentation. We, too, could have enjoyed a constitutional order that gradually evolved, with time, toward greater stability and efficiency. But they made a huge foundational error in the method they bequeathed us for amending the Constitution. As I understand it, they thought we likely *would* be a polity characterized by a fair amount of constitutional experimentation. But they overestimated the ability of the 2/3rds+3/4ths amending formula to coexist with partisanship.
And so here we are, very likely to get our first real brush with authoritarianism.