With every new presidential election comes the same old warning: this is the most important election in our history, because if the other guy wins, doom and ruin will follow.
Such pronouncements are entirely self-serving and profoundly cynical – particularly for a nation that enjoys relative peace and prosperity. But that hasn't stopped the major party candidates from sounding the warning sirens with greater and more apocalyptic frequency this time around.
If we strip away the rhetorical excess and partisan blinders, however, it's possible to see that there are great issues at stake in November. They have to do with the nature of the presidency itself.
In an essay for Reason, Cato's Gene Healy writes about how the office of president has become far more powerful than it was ever intended to be (largely because Congress has ceded its own authority to an expansive executive branch). As Healy notes, this concentration of power in the hands of one man has enormous consequences for everyone else – including our federal system of government:
Over the past several decades, as our politics took on a quasi-religious fervor, we've been running a dangerous experiment: concentrating vast new powers in the executive branch, making “the most powerful office in the world” even more powerful. Fundamental questions of governance that used to be left to Congress, the states, or the people are now settled, winner-take-all, by whichever party manages to seize the presidency.
Worse still, recent presidents have deployed their enhanced powers to impose forced settlements on highly contested, morally charged issues on which Americans should be free to disagree. In the age of identity politics, the modern president has become our culture warrior in chief. Unless and until he's disarmed, we'll have “uncivil war” and American carnage from here to the post-apocalyptic wasteland.
Those rhetorical excesses aside…there really is a zero-sum mentality at work in our politics. Call it a sclerotic byproduct of two party hold on power, voter alienation from the means and responsibilities of self-government, or a republic on its last legs – this is a dark, dismal view of our civic life.
Healy gives ample reasons for how presidents, Democrat and Republican alike, have seized, exploited, or invented ways to insert themselves into areas the federal government has no business (or constitutional backing) once generally avoided.
While partisans cherry pick instances of officious federal busybodies meddling where they shouldn't, the big story is they all do it, with more frequency and ill-intent.
And in Healy's view, things could get much worse following this November's elections:
The increasingly influential “national conservatives” have nothing but scorn for those who want to limit government power and force the feds to mind their own business. Their aim is to seize power and wield it against their cultural enemies, waging war on the Conan Principle: Crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and hear the lamentations of their transwomen.
The only way to avoid such wholesale abuse of liberty is for the rest of America to wake up and demand something better – of ourselves and our elected officials:
One hopes that Americans will rediscover the “better angels of our nature,” put politics in perspective, and rediscover what unites us. Pending that moral awakening, our more pressing need is for structural reforms that limit the harm we might do to each other amid the fog of partisan war. Chief among those is reining in the powers of the culture warrior in chief.
We should hope this awakening occurs. We should demand more seriousness from our candidates and elected officials, and remove our consent and support for public buffoonery. Elected office is a public trust – not a jobs program and most certainly not a cut-rate reality show.
Those all require that voters take their roles in our civic life just as seriously. This is the first, most difficult obstacle to overcome. And it has been for much of our history. As H.L. Mencken said many decades ago: “Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the positions of American Liberty News.
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