Rorotoko

In a nutshell

The first and biggest part of my book is about how we take the president for granted as the symbolic, cultural and institutional center of democracy, and how we take voting for the president to be the essence of democracy—and why those two commonsense assumptions about how our political system works are actually bad for democracy. My book argues that our habit of putting the president at the center of democracy and asking him to be its superhero works to deskill us for the work of democracy. And, it argues that the presidency itself has actually come to work against democracy—against the sovereignty of the People upon which our Constitution’s authority rests. Bad for Democracy tells the story of how this came to be—how the symbolism developed and took root, how the institution developed and began accumulating more and more power, and how, under the new theory of the Unitary Executive, proponents are actually waging a war against democracy, in the name of “democracy.”

The conclusion outlines my ideas for how we can turn back this 200+ year historical trend, and take democracy back, by the People, for the People. I want us to rethink democracy along the lines of an open system. Wikis and time banks are both good conceptual models and tools for this project. In this way of building democracy, our representative government is just one part of the project—it’s the formal institutions that create and administrate the laws and policies we all abide by. We can find creative ways to have far more wide-ranging and substantive input into those processes, and we can find a far broader range of non-governmental activities that can benefit from democratic deliberation, input and action. I think if we start creatively working, both formally and informally, to make democracy something more broadly participatory and wide reaching, we can build a political system around, on top of, and into our current formal representative government that we find more rewarding, more representative, more engaging, and more satisfying.

The wide angle

As I finished my last book, National Manhood, a historical look at how notions of middle-class manhood and citizenship developed in the early United States, two movies about fictional presidents appeared—Contact and Airforce One. I ended up writing about those movies and their presidents in the conclusion to that book, because they offered so many interesting examples of some of the claims I was making about the symbolic work of the presidency in the early national period and focused some interesting questions about the perdurability of that symbolism. That exercise made me think it might be worth examining the development of the presidency over time and its impact on democracy in the United States. I’ve been working on this project, off and on, for almost a decade. Whenever I gave talks on presidentialism, people from a range of political positions—liberal, conservative, libertarian, green—were excited about the arguments, and eager to see me develop them into a book.

Political scientists and presidential historians continue insisting that Presidents are weak—that they only have the power to “persuade,” following Richard Neustadt’s influential arguments, first published in 1960 and updated in 1980. Following this wisdom, political scientists and historians paid little attention to the campaigning of political conservatives and jurists on the subject of the unitary executive beginning in the early 1980s. That theory’s proponents—many of them members of the Federalist Society—spent the 80s and 90s arguing for this theory in law journals and think tank forums. And their theory has been implemented and defended by every president since Reagan. Because George W. Bush was the first openly to advocate for the unitary executive, many have assumed that this is his unique perspective. It’s important to pay attention to its longer history; we need to understand this model of executive power—and its aims—if we mean to combat it.

Proponents argue that the Framers created a Unitary Executive in the Constitution, but that’s a claim that is very easy to rebuff. One delegate to the Constitutional Convention, New York’s Alexander Hamilton, may have personally preferred it. But other participants in the Convention resoundingly rejected his pro-monarchical views. In Madison’s notes on the Convention, it’s evident that the Framers worked to avoid giving the president any kind of power that might deliver the country to a system of one-man rule. They did worry about the unpredictability of the legislature—the “democratic branch”—and that’s why they gave the President veto power. But they also admired the legislature as the best place for self-government to be conducted, and were very clear about their aims to construct what they termed a “Congressional government” where the “democratic branch”—the legislature—would be primary.

The Unitary Executive is in fact a controversial US corporate model where the CEO is also the Chair of the Board. It is a twentieth-century model for undivided corporate power. Since the Bush presidency, political scientists have begun training their attention directly on the rationales for and implications of the Unitary Executive—its proclivities toward unilateral powers and actions—and its hard turn away from the “weaker” skills of persuasion. They are examining the expansion of executive unilateral powers, and debating about whether those powers really work to consolidate the president’s individual legacy. I’m less concerned with individual legacies in this book than in paying attention to what happens to our democracy in the face of those expanding unilateral powers.

[O]ver time, citizens have been reconceived less as democratic actors then as passive consumers. For generations now, we have not been taught to think about democracy as our responsibility and our job, so it doesn’t really occur to most people that there’s anything they can do now—besides vote.