A Case Against the Modern American Presidency
When Obama clinched the Democratic nomination, in June of 2008, The New York Times published an unusually good political profile of the man and his moment. Instead of simply profiling Obama’s life, the essay’s author profiled Obama’s opinion on the nature of political profiles. It was a pomo backflip, and it actually worked. For this was the height of “Obamania,” and the phenomenon of people writing about Obama (and talking about Obama and thinking about Obama) was absolutely central to the story that had to be written about Obama.
Today, the soaring “hope” of 2008, and all that talk about “change you can believe in,” has largely been forgotten – perverted into a sort of gnarled despair – but our obsession with the man remains. Reading them now, Obama’s remarks on his own fame come off as prescient. “I find these essays more revealing about the author than about me,” he says, presumably with a grin, as he looks one such author in the eyes. “I am like a Rorschach test. Even if people find me disappointing ultimately, they might gain something.”
What a perfect summation of his presidency! Obama has disappointed everyone, and through our varied disappointments, we’ve gained something. We’ve learned about our fears: our fears of “government takeover,” of corporate capture, and of Kenyan princes. And we’ve learned about our hopes: our hope for a “simpler time,” for a “less partisan” nation, and for a more creative leader. But more than anything, it seems to me, our experience of disappointment with Obama has taught us (or should have taught us) how fundamentally dependent we are on the experience of disappointment with Obama to learn about ourselves. It’s a meta lesson, but it’s true. We’ve discovered in these past three years that we’re totally, eyes-glued-to-the-TV, ass-plopped-on-the-shrink’s-couch obsessed with our president – even those who are disappointed with him, indeed, especially those who are disappointed with him.
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Obsessively hating/loving your president is a fine American tradition. But it’s also a telling admission: when you criticize Obama, you’re admitting his power to solve our collective problems, and denying your own. He can save us; we cannot. But the truth is often the opposite. Our president is one man in one branch of one layer of government, which is itself just one system sitting alongside others. And we, by contrast, are the creators of the society in which we are situated, and beneficiaries – here in America, and especially today – of all the freedoms and material capabilities we’d need to take on the task of building solutions to the problems we encounter, whether it’s starting businesses that create jobs or cleaning our parks that create community. William James once wrote that, “The nation blest above all nations is she in whom the civic genius of the people does the saving day by day, by acts without external picturesqueness.” In a democracy, citizens don’t wait to be saved by others; they do the saving themselves, “day by day.”
That our presidential system and our participatory democracy are opposed should not surprise us. Two hundred and thirty five years ago, Tom Paine lambasted the King of England for calling himself “father of his people.” Today, in a delicious reversal, we have Maureen Dowd calling on Obama to take up the role that George III abandoned, to be “the strong father” “who reassures and instructs the public,” and who acts as a “prism in moments of fear and pride, reflecting what Americans feel.” Like any good Rorschach test, Obama has revealed to us a great subconscious desire: we want our president to be King.
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Whether Obama should be King of America — let’s take that question off the table. (But remember, if Obama were King, we’d have cap-and-trade legislation and more fiscal stimulus. Do the liberal advocates for these policies harbor fantasies of regal power? Do the conservatives who fault Obama for pursuing them believe he already has it?)
The dangers of the modern, King-like president – or, as the political scientists call it, our contemporary “populist presidency” – are far less hypothetical. Indeed, one single fact is enough to make the case against our present system: in the year 2012, there’s a small but very real chance that Michele Bachmann will be become President of the United States of America. Think about this for a moment – it should terrify you. And yet, this isn’t about Bachmann at all. For if not her this time, then it’s someone like her – some other populist hack who captures our collective imagination (and let’s be clear, we have no dearth of such people) – at the next election cycle, or the one after that.
The symbolic power we’ve vested in the presidency has made it more vulnerable to capture by extremists today than perhaps at any point in our nation’s history. And at the same time, and for the same reason, the role is more important than ever before, raising the stakes when the bet is most risky. The threat of total political catastrophe – of the proverbial Bachmann becoming president – is baked into the system itself.
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It was never supposed to be this way. The Framers imagined that the president would play a modest role in the affairs of the country. Even the strongest advocate for executive strength, Alexander Hamilton, says in Federalist No. 69 that the president must have “no particle of spiritual jurisdiction, with no task but the “energetic execution” of Congress’s laws. Indeed, it’s not clear whether he was even supposed to be popular. In the Federalist No. 1, Madison expresses his deep concern, trenchant among all the founders, about the “men who have overturned the liberties of republics” by “paying obsequious court to the people, commencing demagogues and ending tyrants.” This, after all, is why we have the Electoral College, so that the president would transcend the whims of the public mood, rather than embody them. We regard the Electoral College as a byzantine holdover, but it’s important to remember its original function – it was to prevent people like Bachmann from becoming president.
Much has changed. As Yale law professor Bruce Ackerman has pointed out, in his book The Fall of the American Republic, nearly every reform since the Constitutional Convention has made the institution of the presidency more populist in nature. To list a few important ones along the way: in the 1790s, political parties were formed; in the 1880s, nation-wide campaigning began; in 1933, FDR’s fireside chats brought the president into the average American’s living room; the popular primary was formally established in 1968; and in 2004, in large part because of Howard Dean, online fundraising and internet messaging made it easier than ever before for outsiders to circumvent the party mainstays.
Of course, Barack Obama is no populist hack. He’s too Ivy League, too diffident. But his rise typifies many of the dangers we’re detailing. (Again, I credit Professor Ackerman with this point.) Here was an obscure and inexperienced state senator from Springfield, IL who bursts onto the scene by delivering a single rousing speech. He tracks to the left of the establishment candidate, Hillary Clinton, on the Iraq war. He out-fundraises and out-organizes his opponents by energizing partisans on the Internet. And he travels around the nation delivering anti-Washington rallies, filling up stadiums, and bringing his supporters to near convulsions and tears, along the way. For the democratic convention, he filled up a football stadium in Denver, CO, with 75,000 screaming followers – an inspirational picture of the future first African American president, no doubt, but an ominous image for anyone who fears popular demagogues. Obama is a constitutional lawyer with a penchant for compromise. But his 2008 campaign was – we shouldn’t forget – basically a high-tech barnstorming.
Each day we witness the clash between our modern populist presidency and the antique political system that was designed to contain him. The most democratic of processes — the American presidential election, which for 18 months plays out like the slow unfolding our national geist, on prime-time television — installs the least democratic of our leaders. Our president controls the military, but not the legislature. He is strong — “imperial” as Arthur Schlesinger said — and also weak — unable to pass even the most mild forms of the agenda he was voted in to pass. The fact that Obama has failed with cap-and-trade, the public option, the Employee Free Choice Act, etc. is balanced out by his asserted right to sentence U.S. citizen Anwar al-Awlaki to death without trial, or indeed any due process, for reasons he calls “state secrets.” Having more power over our Empire than our Republic, our president can kill anyone he pleases, but can’t pass a jobs act.
With all this in mind, we can start speculating about the end of the American Republic. What happens when a populist leader who is swept into office by a national mandate, and who controls our vast military, clashes with an obstructionist Congress? What if she decides that she’s politically powerful enough to ignore Congress’s consent? Everything — everything — unravels from there.
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Bachmann’s chances of becoming president are low, but non-negligible. As of July, Bachmann was leading the Republican field. Her numbers are lower now, but poll results at this stage are notoriously inaccurate. (Remember, Obama was 20 points behind Hillary Clinton at this time four years ago.) As readers and writers of this magazine, living in the northeast, at Harvard, or in NYC, or in DC, we’re at systematic risk of underestimating her appeal. In a head-to-head with Obama, she’s behind by only 4%.
But how would she win? As Nate Silver explains, she’d have to go through Iowa. And how would that happen? Let’s say – and go with this for a second – there was a terrorist attack on DC tomorrow. (And why won’t there be?) A number of predictable things will happen: anti-Islamic sentiment surges, the stock market crashes, and our utterly broken government looks sympathetic, and weak, like a child in need of saving. Perry and Romney give forceful denunciations of terrorism, but they seem out of their element, like Bush-era reruns, bullies and fakers, like men. Instead of a speech, Bachmann travels to the heart of the country and holds a rally. Tens of thousands of people come from all over, and her performance is weirdly extraordinary. She doesn’t mention terrorism. She talks about God, and America, and being a mother. She wins Iowa, her home state, by a landslide, and it’s all momentum from there. The front-runner now, she draws huge crowds as she tours the four corners of the country, regardless of what state she’s competing in next, and the media, whose fear of her and fixation on her is unashamed, only make her stronger. She wins the nomination and Obama, who’s overseen a terrorist attack and the worst economic situation since the Great Depression, doesn’t stand a chance. Bachmann is president.
Is this possible? In June, Intrade.com, the world’s best market for predicting political events, put the combined probability of Michelle Bachmann, Ron Paul, or Sarah Palin becoming president together at above 10%. Assuming for the sake of argument that this number is true, it follows (with a bit of a syllogistic stretch) that we’re roughly 10 rolls of the die away from one of these extremists becoming president. And ten roles of the die, in terms of electoral cycles, is 40 years. Or of course, it could be now.
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It’s hard to overstate how dysfunctional, claustrophobic and spectatorial our political have become. A few central players (your Paul Ryans, your Nancy Pelosis, and whoever has tweeted his penis recently) dominate our TVs time slots, in a socio-cultural space occupied by Kim Kardashian and Steve Jobs and the like. For most of us, the central experience of American democracy has become watching pundits on TV, who watch our president, as “we the people” sit in our living rooms, basically alone.
On the day a King or Queen walks into the presidency, we’ll be twice removed from the royalty we thought we chose. We built the throne. And now — to our embarrassment and relief — we have to watch her sit in it.
