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Self-Righteous Republic
May 8, 2013 | 258 comments
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Understanding the Forest, One Tree at a Time
March 22, 2013 | 2 comments
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A Stone’s Throw From the White House
March 14, 2013 | 11 comments
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Echoing the Last Lion’s Roar
February 1, 2013 | 5 comments
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Grits and Glitz
January 18, 2013 | 0 comments
The Slaughterhouse
Monkeying With Gibbon’s
America’s decline and fall — exclusively under center-right Republican administrations.
The Decline and Fall of the American
Republic
By Bruce
Ackerman
(Belknap/Harvard University Press,
270 pages, $25.95)
“Bruce Ackerman is worried,” the opening sentence of the publisher’s blurb accompanying his latest book informs us. “He is worried that the Office of the President has gotten too large and we will not retain our democracy if the president becomes too powerful.”
To borrow a reaction from Homer Simpson, “Doh!”
The delicate — and never static — institutional weights and counterweights that have sustained American democracy for more than two centuries always coexist in a state of tension. We have had weak presidents (think feeble bunglers like James Buchanan and Jimmy Carter), strong presidents (Washington, Lincoln, and Reagan, all of whom used strength of character, sense of purpose, and a positive set of values to prevail over forces of disunity or defeatism), and even a few dictatorial ones (Andrew Jackson and Franklin Roosevelt come immediately to mind). We have also had dramatic examples of weakness, strength, and overreach in the legislative and judicial branches. Power, after all, is an equal opportunity corrupter. It seduces susceptible executives, lawmakers, and judges alike — not to mention a wide, often sordid array of business, labor, social activist, and other special interests advocates. It can even fog the vision and warp the judgment of well-intended university professors who ought to know better.
Bruce Ackerman, who occupies Yale University’s Sterling Chair of Law and Political Science, is a good example of the latter. Although he seems to have slept through the enormous nanny state power grabs that have left our country in a state of deepening fiscal crisis, his liberal antennae are all aquiver over “three serious outbreaks of illegality over the past half-century — Watergate, Iran-Contra, and the War on Terror.” How serious the first two were is debatable and his blanket characterization of the War on Terror as an “outbreak of illegality” is downright goofy; it also may be no coincidence that Professor Ackerman’s selective catalogue of executive crimes is linked exclusively to center-right Republican administrations. But then, for Professor Ackerman, legitimate executive power is not so much a question of “how much” as it is of “what for.” Viewed from his particular ivory tower, presidential powers used to rally popular support for Ackerman-approved purposes are nice; the same presidential powers used for a non-Ackerman agenda are naughty.
Let him speak for himself. In this rather florid, perhaps unintentionally revealing passage of The Decline and Fall of the American Republic, the author lets it all hang out:
My discussion takes the form of classic tragedy: it’s not as if there is one aspect of the presidency that is a force for good, and another a force for evil. The very same features [his italics] that have made the presidency into the platform for credible tribunes of the People, like Abraham Lincoln or Franklin Roosevelt, are also conspiring, under different conditions, to make it into a vehicle for demagogic populism and lawlessness in the century ahead.
If all this sounds familiar to you, there’s a reason. It’s the kind of thing we always hear from liberal academia whenever public opinion and elective government are trending away from its own rigid norms of political correctness. As Professor Ackerman himself concedes, “Arthur Schlesinger sounded the alarm in his Imperial Presidency a generation ago,” specifically in 1973 when the country seemed to be undergoing an earlier center-right “silent majority” realignment. Professor Schlesinger, who rejoiced in his role as an intellectual camp follower in an administration where the Department of Justice was run by a ruthless younger brother of the president, was just as selective in his alarm about presidential power abuse then as Professor Ackerman is today.
If the Ackerman diagnosis is dubious, some of his proposed remedies amount to outright quackery, little more than a liberal academic’s wish list for unelected, unaccountable power. They include the creation — no doubt by a learned elite — of new Canons of Military Ethics (Professor Ackerman sees the current military establishment as a sinister threat to democracy), an appointive “Supreme Tribunal” (to serve as “judges for the executive branch, not lawyers for the sitting president”) and — I’ll bet you could see this one coming a mile away — a government-funded “National Endowment for Journalism” that would selectively reward Internet news outlets “to support investigative reporting that generates broad public interest” that “won’t be readily overwhelmed by the next authoritarian push from the [post-Obama] presidency.”
Under this last proposal, Internet users would “click a box whenever they read a news article that contributes to their political understanding. These reader ‘votes’ would be transmitted to [the new Endowment], which would compensate the news organization originating the article on the basis of a strict mathematical formula: the more clicks, the bigger the check from the Endowment.” Talk about checkbook journalism: ironically, this suggestion comes from the same author who repeatedly decries the impact of superficial, snap public opinion polls on the decision-making process of an American public supposedly growing more and more gullible. In most other respects, however, Professor Ackerman is all too consistent with his nostrums. Each of the three supposedly pro-democracy innovations cited above would involve further layers of government, shaped or staffed by unelected elites — many of them, no doubt, politically correct grazers from the groves of academe.
BELIEVE IT OR NOT, these are among the more serious suggestions Professor Ackerman makes in this slender tome, a réchauffé version of a series of Tanner Lectures he delivered at Princeton last year. If the volume itself is modest, its title is not. Consider this: while Edward Gibbon’s History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire weighs in at 1,309 pages of small, double column print in the 19th-century edition in my library, there are only 188 pages of actual text (plus an additional 82 pages of notes, index, and acknowledgments) in his grandly dubbed The Decline and Fall of the American Republic. But, then, titular overkill seems to be a habit with Professor Ackerman. One of his earlier books is modestly titled The Failure of the Founding Fathers — what a pity the Prof wasn’t there at the time to set them straight!
None of this is to say that growing government power is not a threat to our individual rights and our proudly independent American way of life. All three of the traditionally defined branches of the federal government — executive, legislative, and judicial — are prone to the abuse of power. Why do you suppose the Founding Fathers triangulated them in the first place? But the biggest threat of all doesn’t come from transient occupants of the White House, the court house, or the legislature. It comes from the unofficial but very real and permanent “fourth arm” of government: the ever-expanding roll of entitlements, requirements, and prohibitions dispensed and enforced by an ever-expanding number of federal departments, agencies, bureaus, endowments, and foundations manned by an ever-expanding army of unelected bureaucrats.
In the end, it is this fiscal and regulatory Leviathan — the ruinous modern equivalent of the subsidized “bread and circuses” of ancient Rome so brilliantly depicted by Edward Gibbon — that could lead to our own very real decline and fall.
About the Author
Aram Bakshian, Jr. served as an aide to Presidents Nixon, Ford, and Reagan and writes frequently on politics, history, gastronomy, and the arts.
Dee See| 5.25.11 @ 6:25AM
LET's drop the fake out euphemism dodge
'Nanny State'.
The only aspect of that, no doubt,
Tavistock Institute planted term
that rings slightly true are the whiffs
of EUGENICS programming in the notion
of institutionalized surrogate mothering.
Alan Brooks| 5.25.11 @ 10:05PM
As Reagan could only do better than Carter, Obama can only do better than Bush.
Scott| 5.26.11 @ 1:10AM
Name one thing Obama has done better than Bush. We're still in Iraq; we're still in Afghanistan; Gitmo is still open; the Patriot Act is still in place as is Medicare, Part D. Oh, wait, I know. Obama got us involved in a third war in Libya. That give you a thrill up your leg? Or was it ObamaCare? Yep, that's the ticket -- a plan to have your date of departure from the planet be determined by a Death Panel. Or maybe it's the $4.5 trillion dollar deficit Obama has rung up in 28 months. Go ahead, bozo, please enlighten us as to how Obama has done better than Bush.
Carol| 5.25.11 @ 7:12AM
Ackerman is an another elitist Ivy-league pinhead.
But the 2nd to last paragraph in this letter is so true and will be the downfall of our Republic.
Regulation - especially now with Cass Sunstein in his dream job of the Regulator King - will be end-all of America.
Anytime you see Obama having fun somewhere - know that Sunstein is taking care to make sure our lives are regulated so much that freedom will be a word from the past.
donserge| 5.25.11 @ 8:30AM
The downfall of our republic is coming from within...once the people found out they could "vote" themselves largesse from the public treasury.
JP| 5.25.11 @ 8:33AM
Congress can squeeze the Executive any time it so chooses. Congress also has jurisdictional oversight of the federal courts. The Senate can redrawn districts, impeach wayward jurists, and remove the courts jurisdiction from a number of legal areas. But Congress rarely does either nowadays. Congress has one and only one reason d'etre these days - picking the pockets of the taxpayers.
Maddox| 5.25.11 @ 9:16AM
That is the truth and the reason there is little hope of saving what is left of our country and freedom. It was good for all but a few wanted more.
Bill| 5.25.11 @ 8:58AM
"three serious outbreaks of illegality over the past half-century" might just as easily include the fallout of the New Deal, the Democratically-run Vietnam War, and the Obama administration's bailout policies.
Stuart Koehl| 5.25.11 @ 9:48AM
Much as I admire the scope of Gibbon's work, and his incomparable literary style, I have to say that his basic hypothesis of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire is almost totally discredited today, particularly his assessment of the later Roman Empire and its Byzantine successor state, which is a caricature verging on calumny. It has taken the work of an entirely new generation of classicists to get out of the shadow of Gibbon and reveal the Rome of late antiquity not as a decadent revenant of its former glory, but a unique and dynamic culture in its own right.
Therefore, I am not particularly worried when liberal historians and apologists start drawing parallels between Rome and the United States. If we should last half as long as Rome and Byzantium, we will be doing very well indeed, and there are far worse cultures for us to emulate.
Occam's Tool| 5.25.11 @ 4:36PM
I much prefer "Lost to the West" on the Byzantine empire, myself. It's written simply in terms a layperson can follow.
Stuart Koehl| 5.25.11 @ 5:44PM
It's not bad. Try "Sailing from Byzantium" though--it's accessible and superb.
Occam's Tool| 5.25.11 @ 8:25PM
Thanks. I'll grab it.
Occam's Tool| 5.25.11 @ 8:31PM
Stuart: I kind of aim for Byzantium's length rather than the Roman Empire (of course Empire plus Republic was a pretty good run).
Stuart Koehl| 5.25.11 @ 10:38PM
Most people think the Empire went to seed after Nero, but in fact its best days were still ahead. Gibbon himself described the period from 96-180 (the reigns of the Emperors Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian, Antoninus Pius and Marcus Aurelius) as the time when the largest part of humanity knew the longest period of peace and prosperity on record--which may be a bit of an exaggeration (especially if you were a Dacian or a Jew). Even in decline, the Empire lasted as a unified entity until well into the fifth century, and Justinian came within an ace of bringing it all back together again (blame bubonic plague, not strategic overstretch).
Conservatively speaking, then, the Empire lasted more than 450 years, which means we might have, at a minimum, another two centuries if we follow Rome's trajectory--and perhaps a thousand years after that if we morph into an American equivalent of Byzantium.
I'm not losing sleep over visions of American decline, because, frankly, there isn't anyone even remotely capable of either bringing us down or stepping into our place.
Petronius| 5.25.11 @ 10:19AM
Crediting Gibbon to explain away our current SitRep is only half right. G.B.Shaw nailed it back in the 1920's. His prescient remark after Wilson's departure that "America will advance from barbarism to decadence with a brief period of civilization in between," reflects our current condition and direction. What the two authors share is similar insight into the collective mindset of western society from the infantile at one end to the criminal at the other. Those who are honorable and know better are their targets as we are despised by both.
Doctor Right| 5.25.11 @ 10:33AM
Whenever anyone mentions "Iran-Contra" as a serious scandal, I immediately write them off as complete morons.
This tempest-in-a-teapot fantasy was nothing more than a failed Liberal attempt to discredit a wildly popular and enormously successful Conservative President and stop him from stopping Communism.
Well, the idiots failed. Reagan is more beloved than ever, and he stopped Communism dead in it's tracks in Central America.
Is "Professor" Dipstick concerned about the sale of the Lincoln bedroom for campaign cash under Clinton? How about the sale of satellite technology and secrets to the Red Chinese, also for campaign cash, and also under Clinton? The President's lying under oath and subornation of perjury (Clinton, again)? How about the massive power-grab under Obama? The illegal redistribution of confiscated wealth to unions, also under Obama?
These "academic" historians are mostly a joke.
It's a delicious irony that hardly anyone will but this ass-clown's book.
Appleby| 5.25.11 @ 11:12AM
Monkeying with Gibbon's what?
Either finish the phrase, or remove the apostrophe.
Or you could go to the thread about career planning for dummies.
Cpm| 5.25.11 @ 11:54AM
Most well read people see "Gibbon's" and know instantly what it refers to.
Occam's Tool| 5.25.11 @ 8:29PM
Cpm: be kind. Appleby is very sweet and very bright. As she points out, however, Canada is a craphole, and those folks educated her.
Madam:
See my post below. This book is generally considered THE Classic of the 18th century on the Roman Empire.
Occam's Tool| 5.25.11 @ 4:35PM
Dear Appleby:
Decline and Fall of The Roman Empire, by Gibbon. Available in a Beautiful Unabridged Folio Society edition, like the one above my desk.
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Dee See| 5.26.11 @ 7:37AM
"Remember folks, 'Free Trade', Globalism
and EUGENICS (---and btw TREASON) are ALWAYS
intertwined. --------ALWAYS."
-ALAN WATT
(fearless and indispensible online coverage)
You heard the man --------ALWAYS.
In the wake of more than a century of very
largely staged history, including world wars,
assasinations, Great Depressions, genocide
and all around cultural subversion and, as
we write, the destruction of our sovereignty
and the cover-up of, without question, the
greatest world nuclkear disaster in history
----there's STILL something one and all can do.
Next time you see a FREE TRAITOR ---do your
duty and call them on it ----fearlessly, relentlessly, unceasingly.
Hence LIBERTY----------------------
Stuart Koehl| 5.26.11 @ 4:42PM
I heard about how much lead was in DC's water, but here is indisputable proof of it.
edward del colle| 5.26.11 @ 4:12PM
sir petronius has nailed it, spot on! post world war I western society lived at amuch lower level of civilisation than before. it was a tidal wave in that direction. education standards are so low these day, that any critical thinking about the disaster we are experiencing with the current marxist is troubling. masses of our citizens remain almost childlike in their cresulity and gullibility, as they were maybe in 217B.C.!!!
Stuart Koehl| 5.26.11 @ 4:42PM
Education standards are so low, in fact, that some people have given up on proper capitalization and punctuation. QED.
edward del colle| 5.26.11 @ 4:46PM
are you a bit of a jackass stuart, QED.
Stuart Koehl| 5.26.11 @ 8:43PM
Ooo. That was witty, I guess. So, are you just affected, like e.e. cummings, or do you really not know how to write?
Dee See| 5.26.11 @ 11:29PM
The sycophants, rectum worshippers, bought off
and just plain clueless ------------aside!
MARCH on the New York offices of the FED,
and headquarters of the Rockefeller/Carnegie/Ford---and GATES
ultra rich, culture subverting, republic sabotaging,
EUGENICS driving 'benny violent' TAX FREE
foundations ---this July 4th.
HUAC meets NUREMBERG for 2012.
TELL EVERYONE!
marshcope| 8.14.11 @ 5:02PM
I assume Mr (or Dr.) Koehl, in his picture of the wonderful later Roman empire has read Juvenal, who portrayed Roman society as a cesspool. How it lasted 300 more years is a puzzlement(as Monkut the King of Siam sang). An interesting project of the current era to keep an eye on is Iowa, which the current governor wants to make "the healthiest state in the nation." Besides No Smoking I assume mandatory teeth brushing, bathing, broccoli, and jogging will be ordered in Iowa (strength through joy in Iowa.)