20 The Managerial President Paul Gottfried

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 a historical destiny to be ecstatically embraced, an executive regime is what we supposedly were meant to be. An entire school of American historical writing, which has dominated public education since mid-century, elevates presidential power to the skies. Identified with academic celebrities Arthur Schlesinger, Clinton Rossiter, William Leuchtenburg, James M. Burns, and John Morton Blum, this American historiography treats what was best in our past as the work of activist presidents.[1] Individually and collectively, these presidents led our country toward what intellectuals wanted it to be: a social democratic experiment bringing the benefits of our reformed society to a still unredeemed world. This mission is essential to presidential government as conceived by mainstream historians, and all the major conflicts into which our leaders thrust 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 have never been as anticommunist as they are antifascist and Teutonophobic, the story line has stayed 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 Gregory Fossedal’s isolationist impulse reject America’s rendezvous with destiny.[2] In Schlesinger’s scenario, the U.S., as fashioned by Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, and Truman, defines and upholds a “vital center” positioned between two ominous extremes: communism and what is a kind of generic “Right.” The latter is a sufficiently sweeping category to take in a medley of evils, from anti-New Deal Republicans to Francisco Franco and the shattered remnants of Nazi Europe.[3]

It would be tedious to dwell on this characterization of presidential America for an obvious reason: We all know it well. Most of us have had it drummed into our heads by middle- and high-brow cultures 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 the furnishings around in our own national home. In the extreme example of this thesis put forth by Harry Jaffa and Gary Wills, our greatest president—the sanctus omnium sanctorum Abraham Lincoln—had to reconstruct our regime and national purpose to provide us with a “second birth in freedom.” That is the way these historians understand the Civil War: as a bloody rite of passage into a new America dedicated to democratic equality.[4]

Such arguments about a presidential America prevailed despite a very different founding, one that mavericks M.E. Bradford, Murray Rothbard, George W. Carey, and Forrest McDonald all have focused on.[5] These and other scholars bring up the embarrassing fact that the authors of the Constitution and The Federalist Papers assumed they were establishing a legislative republic. This republic would be dominated at the federal level by Congress, not by the president, and certainly not by what Alexander Hamilton called the “weakest of the three branches,” the Supreme Court. The preeminence of the legislature seemed inevitable in a republic, and the Founders devoted more attention to that body than to other branches of government, discussing its powers and limits in Article I. The assignment of a presidential veto, in Article Two, was not intended to allow the president to push around Congress but, as indicated in Federalist No. 5, was thought necessary “to allow him to defend himself.”[6] The need for such a defense, explained Publius, is undeniable in “purely republican regimes” in which “the tendency of the legislature” to overwhelm the other branches 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 always 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 a different assumption—namely, that presidents would be irreparably weak in republican government—caused the Founders to assign countervailing powers to the executive in dealing with Congress.

A more considered defense of American executive power, made by Straussian authors Martin Diamond and Harvey Mansfield, is that presidential government, though not mandated by the American Revolution or Constitution, came along in the course of time, and that, these authors say was a happy turn of events.[7] That turn has contributed to a more just society and to a more peaceful and democratic world, where 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, and New Deal initiatives. Without strong executives at the right moments, they tell us, American democracy and democracy in general would not have survived.

It is fairly predictable what old republican critics of such a view would say in response. In fact, the tracts of Murray N. Rothbard, Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr., Justin Raimondo, Albert J. Nock, and H.L. Mencken all serve as illustrations. To wit, that overreaching executive power has made a mockery of the rule of law; that socialism by any other name tramples on republican liberty; and that if the U.S. had stayed out of World War I and 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 more than six hundred thousand lives as well as the end of the old republic. Although these respondents would differ in their judgments 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 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 these 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 to Lincoln’s seizure of dictatorial power to the activist, interventionist executives of this century. Though most would disagree with the triumphalist depiction of this process, they would accept the evolutionary course it highlights, from a congressional republic to a presidential empire. The same process is the object of study in James Burnham’s postwar monograph on American congressional government. In the late ’40s Burnham celebrated the legislative branch as “the one major curb on the expanding executive and unleashed bureaucracy If Congress ceases to be an active, functioning political institution, then political liberty in the United States will soon come to an end.” While Burnham ultimately opted for the imperial presidency as a corollary of the American empire that he thought necessary to oppose Soviet expansion, he nonetheless recognized its Caesarist, anticonstitutionalist feature: “Caesar is the symbolic solution—and the only possible solution—for the problem of realizing the general will, that is, for the central problem of democratist ideology.” Furthermore, once the “structure of government” in the modern world, including the U.S., moves away from “the rule of law,” the only alternative by the “soaring executive” is Caesarism. For the rule of law represented by an effective Congress to be restored, “individual members of Congress [must] have the courage to say no against the tidal pressures from the executive bureaucracy and the opinion-molders so often allied with them.”[8]

This author has no problem with Burnham’s strictures about presidential power or with his distinction between a republican rule of law vested in Congress and the ensuing presidential Caesarism. 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 in the Alien and Sedition Acts, by Andrew Jackson during the Nullification Controversy and by Abraham Lincoln, 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 extraordinary assertions of presidential will.

After the Civil War, when a largely Republican Supreme Court struck down Reconstructionist legislation, brakes 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 of the old Democrat Grover Cleveland, presidential power was at least as restrained as it was in the early republic. It is only in the twentieth century that, save for the Harding-Coolidge anomaly, the presidential momentum has seemed unstoppable. Presidential bureaucracy has reached the density of a middle-sized municipality; presidents initiate war basically at will; and a national media and its academic adjunct advocate even further extensions of presidential prerogative, providing they fit progressive models of social reconstruction. Despite these developments, This writer would suggest a modification of the received conservative view of presidential power. The apparent enhancement of executive authority points to 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 scruples about running down and even unseating presidents when it suits their ends. They will turn around, as Schlesinger and other “liberals” did, and decry the imperial presidency—even when associated with liberal presidents Johnson and Nixon—if they decide they want someone else in the White House. Most of our opponents are no more pro-presidential than the Earl of Warwick was pro-monarchical. They support executives whom they and their friends can jerk around or whom they happen to fancy. It is unfitting to compare such devious opportunists or mere agenda-pushers to divine-right monarchists or to those who, like the German legal scholar Carl Schmitt, believed honestly in executive dictatorship.

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 strategists to take charge. Those who extolled Clinton’s policies would likely have turned on him if he had issued executive orders ending federal antidiscrimination enforcement. What has happened is that most federal administrations are now tied to the executive, so the chattering class prize that branch as the one especially concerned about human rights as opposed to mere republican liberty. This contention is not gainsaid by the fact that President Clinton saved his political neck and enhanced his popularity by exaggerating the size and ferocity of the Religious Right. The relevant question is whether President Clinton would have remained a powerful political force if he had decided to act in a way that offended the media and other parts of the political class. Would he still have enjoyed his level of support inside and outside of the government if, say, he had embarked on the restoration of a constitutionally limited republic, i.e., one that took the Tenth Amendment seriously?

Such rhetorical questions must be asked if we are talking about a plebiscitary caesar of the kind described by James Burnham. Such a leader must have real scope for his actions and is the same as someone who merely presides over a managerial empire. This is not to deny 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 Scandinavian monarchs, photogenic front men for a managerial dictatorship. While Danish and Swedish kings in the past crushed local liberties and instilled servile habits, their descendants function as decorative art for socialist governments. They make public appearances and dutifully read speeches that are prepared for them by unfailingly leftist administrations. In a way, that prefigures the current American presidency: place-holding 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 president, both the possibility and the temptation to abuse that office exist. If the abuser cultivates journalists and the permanent administrative state, he should be able to get away with considerable mischief. Each time the president steps forth to call for collective atonement for racism, sexism, and homophobia, he encounters diminishing public objection and resonant 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 liberties 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 current political correct occupant of the Oval Office. Whatever else may have caused this suspension of ethical judgment, it is related to our cult of the president. The German president, who is a largely powerless windbag given to preaching on the burden of German history, does not have the resources to become a Clinton-like deity. He is a proper figurehead intended to be little more. We would do well to imitate this practice and not to allow our executives their present cultic status.

The most that can be said in favor of energetic presidents is that they resemble willful monarchs of centuries past. Because of their unfettered energies and contempt for constitutional restraints, they have increased not only their own influence but the imperial sway of their country. This does not justify adulation for the presidency in general or for its recent depraved place-holder, any more than, say, admiration for 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 Charles Krauthammer and the Weekly Standard would be that an emasculated presidency leaves the U.S. vulnerable.[9] 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 endorsed by the conservative opposition. 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 surely fail unless sufficient actions are taken to rein in the 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 it can behave arbitrarily in either case.

One of the most cloying tributes to presidential arrogance ever devised is the deprecation of Dwight Eisenhower in the revised edition of Clinton Rossiter’s The American Presidency. According to Rossiter, Eisenhower

came to the office with practically no thoughts about its powers and purposes. . . . He had swallowed a good deal of the propaganda directed at Roosevelt and Truman, and the result was a first year in office during which his view of his powers was not much different from that announced long ago by William Howard Taft.

Rossiter scolds Eisenhower “for asking congressional approval in 1955 for the authority to defend Formosa and the Pescadores.” Because of his quaint belief that the president was “under a stern moral obligation” to ask congressional support for the deployment of troops abroad, Eisenhower was willing to “cripple the striking power of the presidency in a sudden crisis.” Rossiter believes that “history will likely judge Mr. Eisenhower’s leadership to have been the most disappointing of all” because of his failure to expand executive power in two areas: “his abdication of both 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 throughout the union.”[10]

Rossiter despises Eisenhower for not going far enough both to impose federal control over learning and to reconfigure the social life of the American South. But what he blames on Eisenhower’s “modest conception of the presidency”—the failure to engage in grandiose social engineering—no longer hinges on the person of the chief executive. Rossiter’s plans for the American presidency can now go forward at an accelerated rate, because it has been turned over to bureaucrats, judges, and opinion-wrenchers. The presidency has at last been turned into a bureaucracy under Caesar’s banner, with a debauched chief of state cast into a mock imperial role.[11]

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[1] Among works that best represent this presidential hagiography are James MacGregor Burns, Roosevelt: The Lion and the Fox (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1956); Arthur M. Schlesinger’s trilogy, The Age of Roosevelt (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1956–1960); William E. Leuchtenburg, Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal (New York: Harper Torch Books, 1963); idem, In the Shadow of FDR: from Harry Truman to Ronald Reagan (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1983); idem, The National Experience in two parts, contributors John M. Blum, Edmund S. Morgan, Willie Lee Rose, Arthur M. Schlesinger, Kenneth M. Stampp, and C. Vann Woodward, 5th ed. (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1981), particularly the second volume; Richard E. Neustadt, Presidential Power (6th printing, New York: New American Library, 1964); and Clinton Rossiter, The American Presidency (New York: New American Library, 1956).

[2] See Gregory Fossedal, Exporting the Democratic Revolution (New York: Basic Books, 1989).

[3] Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Vital Center: The Politics of Freedom (reprint, New York: Da Capo Press, 1988).

[4] Cf., for example, Harry Jaffa, Crisis of the House Divided (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982) and Equality and Liberty (New York: Oxford University Press, 1965), particularly pp. 82–84; and Gary Wills, Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words that Remade America (New York: Touchstone Books, 1993).

[5] See, for example, George W. Carey, The Federalist: Design for a Constitutional Republic (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990), esp. pp. 154–73; Murray Rothbard, Conceived in Liberty, vol. 4, The Revolutionary War: 1775–1784 (Auburn, Ala.: Mises Institute, 1999); and for me the most compelling indictment of the Wilsonian experiment in presidential dictatorship, “War Collectivism in World War I,” in A New History of Leviathan, Ronald Radosh and Murray N. Rothbard (New York: G.P. Dutton, 1972). See also Forrest McDonald, The Presidency of George Washington (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1974); and M.E. Bradford, A Worthy Company: Brief Lives of the Framers of the United States Constitution (Marlborough, N.H.: Plymouth Rock Foundation, 1982); Original Intentions: On the Making and Ratification of the United States Constitution (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1993).

[6] Roy P. Fairchild, ed., The Federalist Papers, 2nd ed. (Baltimore, Md.: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981), pp. 322–23.

[7] Cf. Martin Diamond, “Challenge to the Court,” National Review 19 (June 13, 1967): 642–44; Harry Jaffa, “The Case for a Stronger National Government,” in A Nation of States: Essays on the American Federal System, Robert A. Goldwin, ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963), pp. 106–25; and Harvey Mansfield, Taming the Prince: The Ambivalence of Modern Executive Power (New York: Free Press, 1989).

[8] James Burnham, Congress and the American Tradition (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1959), p. 344. See also Frank S. Meyer, “The Revolt Against Congress,” National Review 1 (May 30, 1956): 9–10.

[9] See, for example, William Kristol, “On the Future of Conservatism,” Commentary 103 (February, 1997): 32–33; and Charles Krauthammer’s “The Lonely Superpower,” The New Republic, July 29, 1991, pp. 23–27.

[10] Clinton Rossiter, The American Presidency, p. 124.

[11] For a study of the managerial ascendancy in American government and its effects on the presidency, see my After Liberalism: Mass Democracy in the Managerial State (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999), esp. pp. 49–71.