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Y files: The Gathering Storm

Yglesias:

These escalating rounds of constitutional hardball (into which we ought to fold warrantless wiretapping and assassination of US citizens & the debt ceiling crisis) seem to me bound to result over time in either de facto parliamentary government or de facto plebiscitary dictatorship. The former result would be much better, but the latter is much more likely.

To indulge the part of my life that *isn’t* related to cooking, technology, or Instagram—which is to say, the stuff that I earn a paycheck for—I think this is absolutely right. The United States is a constitutional democracy, but our history is rife with small and large scale authoritarianism, from the Alien and Sedition Acts, to the Jim Crow South and the anti-black police state that existed in states like Mississpi. What’s more, Americans have never been *opposed* to investing power in the presidency, and presidents have never seen fit to *relinquish* the powers that they possess, even if they stood against them at one point in their political careers.

Add to this the tendency to treat the president as a national father figure, and it’s not hard to envision a scenario where extreme gridlock—coupled with an external crisis and attacks on the legitimacy of Congress—results in a president who assumes broad dictatorial powers, and a public that accepts it. It’s worth reading Clinton Rossiter’s Constitutional Dictatorship for a theoretical account of presidential power and how it develops in emergencies.

Source: yfiles