TRAJECTORY OF POWER

Grim history of the autocratic presidency.

Checks and balances? An artifact of a past age, suggest political scientists Howell and Moe. It has been a project of the Republican Party since Ronald Reagan, they write, to shape the presidency “into an institution that has the power, the capacity, and, in populist hands, the motivation to tear democracy apart.” Each Republican president since Reagan has taken pains to expand the power of the executive branch, but it has taken the presidency of Donald Trump to pose that existential threat. There are checks in the legislative and the judicial branches, but in the case of the former, the dominant trend has been an overriding concern “to win elections and govern (if need be) with only minority support.” In this climate, impeachment is impossible: A Republican Congress will not impeach a Republican president, and unless the Democratic Party gains two-thirds of the seats, “Congress’s ultimate weapons in taking on a strongman president is basically useless.” The Supreme Court also seems indisposed to rein in the president. The authors note that there is modest hope in the administrative or bureaucratic state that is charged with carrying out presidential orders but can find many ways to slow or subvert the process. The administrative state, the authors hold, is liberal—but then, “all developed democracies have liberal administrative states,” and although most are more liberal than ours in terms of the social safety net and a progressive taxation system, conservatives have targeted the administrative state for precisely that reason. Thus the Trumpian program to replace career staff with loyalists and to dismantle civil service job protections puts the liberal administrative state in peril, and, the authors conclude, “all the while, American democracy will be severely eroded.”

A consequential account of the possible death of democracy—by a thousand cuts—in the name of authoritarianism.