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.
