Presidential democracy was a mistake

President’s Day is a bad holiday — and a symptom of a bad system.

Today is Presidents Day, almost certainly America’s fakest holiday, and yet a bona fide day off, which means today’s post will be a bit shorter than usual.

Not only is Presidents Day dumb, the reason for its existence — a disagreement about whether we should observe Washington’s birthday or Lincoln’s birthday or both — is dumb.

But to go even bigger and bolder, the entire presidential system of government that’s in use in the United States is, unfortunately, a pretty bad idea.

I was reminded of this most recently when writing about the Olympics and the political wrangling surrounding it. Some of this wrangling stems from progressives being fussy and irrational, and some of it stems from Trump and his allies being assholes.

But part of the problem is that the American constitutional system fuses the concept of a head of state who symbolizes the nation and the concept of a head of government who leads a political party and engages in partisan political disputes.

In a parliamentary system, the job of representing the country at an opening ceremony would be done by a monarch or a disempowered president. Italy is a republic, but it’s a parliamentary republic, and the Olympic Games are hosted not by Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni (a partisan figure who wields massive power in Italian politics) but by President Sergio Mattarella (a largely symbolic elder statesman whose job is mostly to do this kind of ceremonial stuff).

The fusion of these roles has been in the spotlight during both Donald Trump presidencies because he is so bad at performing the dignified non-partisan aspects of the job.

But it’s a perennial tension in American politics.

We lack someone who plays a national role rather than a partisan one. Presidents are always trying to leverage their head of state status to advance partisan agendas, and rank-and-file supporters of the opposition party are always feeling marginalized or disrespected. The separation of the symbolic and practical roles is a better arrangement.

A much less fake holiday, Independence Day, is coming up this summer, and it’s not just any Independence Day — it’s the 250th anniversary of the country.

I’m a patriotic American. I love July 4 observances, and it’s fun to make a big deal of the 250th. But having all the festivities and pageantry led by Trump stinks. And while of course I personally would be happier with a Kamala Harris semiquincentennial, she would be embroiled in her own set of contentious policy arguments and a whole different set of people would be annoyed by that.

Anti-monarchism is as American as apple pie and there’s a reason that, in the context of American political culture, “No Kings” was a good slogan for making a point about the lawless and capricious and arbitrary way that Trump has wielded power.

But many other countries addressed the capriciousness of royal power by sharply limiting those powers, while retaining the pomp and circumstance. The solution we hit upon was visionary and world-changing, but in many respects less satisfactory than either constitutional monarchy or the modern European vision of a parliamentary republic with a disempowered president.