Distribution of Power is a Feature of Our Constitutional System, Not a Bug
The Founders Did Anticipate Moments Like the One We Find Ourselves In, And They Designed a System to Manage It
Matthew Walther has an interesting article up at The Dispatch (which is behind the paywall) in which he examines the parallels between the late Roman Republic and our own day. He concludes that one of the reasons the Roman Republic fell to despotism is one of the same reasons our system often seems dysfunctional. It was easier for Octavian (Caesar Augustus) to centralize power in his own hands in the last decades B.C. than it is for Donald Trump, or a person like Trump, to do so today. This is because of the gridlock in our system created by overlapping and intersecting hierarchies, conflicting authorities, distribution of power, etc.
Walther's tone of mildly conspiratorial pessimism (i.e., the idea that “there is no American republic,” and the focus on elites) detracts from what I think is key in his argument. He seems not to fully grasp the upside of the “array of intersecting authorities… each of which claims legitimacy from a different source and none of which has the final say.”
The American Founders were keenly aware of the inherent flaws in previous republican governments and spent considerable time worrying about the causes of the collapse of the Roman Republic,1 Athenian democracy, and the various other attempts at free government up until that point. The American Constitution was an attempt to solve for these causes. And one of the key features of this was the distribution of power and authority. There is the built-in tension between the federal and state governments: power is divided and distributed in such a way as to contain illiberalism rather than allowing it to spread. The separation of powers is also a separation of functions: different branches of government have different scopes and authorities, which are designed to come into conflict and slow the spread of any nascent authoritarianism.
People sometimes suggest that the Founders didn't anticipate a moment like the one we find ourselves in today, in which more than a century of democratizing, combined with the growth of the executive bureaucracy and the incentives of new media technology, have resulted in an increasing centralization of power in the hands of the president and the administrative state which serves him. To be sure, in all features (the Founders didn't predict the smartphone), they may not have. But in the essential features, I believe they did. They understood that democratic peoples have a taste for populist demagogues. They understood the principles of bureaucratic administration (one of Caesar Augustus's greatest strengths was his competence as an administrator).
The American Founders did not design a system to prevent all overreaches or excesses. They designed a system which could contain and correct overreaches and excesses. It is not a system designed to "get stuff done." It is a system designed to hedge against tyranny.
Too many commentators today - especially on the left and New Right - are unfamiliar with the work of Nassim Nicholas Taleb, and specifically in this case his work on antifragility. They fall prey to many of the fallacies he examines, including the conflation of bigness with strength,2 and of the streamlined ability to "get things done" with robustness. Taleb shows that both of these (bigness and the removal of redundancies or checks) create fragility in a system. The most robust systems are decentralized and contain many of the features of overlapping authority and tension that serve to slow things down in American government. It is in fact a virtue of our system that we can't make rapid changes, and that the plans of men like Donald Trump or Barack Obama are often thwarted.
Walther concludes that Trump will fail to bring about the tyrannical hellscape his greatest detractors fear, for this reason and for reason of the fact that Trump is not a man like Caesar Augustus. Some commenters on the article worried that while that may be so, he may be a Marius or a Clodius or a Milo (a harbinger of worse to come).3 Maybe this isn't the end of a late republican period, but the beginning of it.
But I think this pessimism is unwarranted, for a couple of reasons. First, I think democratic peoples are often slow to learn and need to learn the hard way, but I believe they are capable of learning over time. Americans will have to learn the hard way that populist demagogues are a mistake, and I think a bad Trump presidency may be just the thing to teach it to them. With any luck, we will have a reflexive distaste for authoritarianism for a generation.
But second, and more important, I believe that our system is ready to handle the current moment. It is, in fact, handling it. That is not to say that this handling will always be pretty, nor that there won't be violations of the Bill of Rights or the Constitution. It is not to say that in every regard, at every point, our system will hold. But it is to say that we will come out of the current moment with our system more or less intact. We will not be living in an autocratic state. We will not be living in a late republic, but in a republic which has suffered a challenge and undergone one of its shameful but periodic departures from sound government, but which is nevertheless still standing. We have had presidents who abused the rights of citizens in the past. We have had presidents (Obama, Biden, FDR, Wilson) who violated the Constitution. We have had corruption in the past.
But we have never had a president who successfully centralized power to themselves in the way that dictators in various parliamentary systems did in the past. Wilson tried. FDR tried (although I think FDR had no interest in becoming a dictator, in the end). After Wilson, Harding and Coolidge promised a return to normalcy, ended War Socialism, released political prisoners, and stood up for the rights of black Americans. After FDR, we passed the 22nd Amendment. Trump is a weaker man than Wilson and FDR, and he will be no match for the distribution of power inherent in our system.
And after Trump, I think Americans will want to forget about the whole thing and pretend this shameful moment didn't happen. But we will muddle on, more or less. And at the end of the day, that is all we can really hope for and all we really need. There are no perfect regimes on Earth.
There are those today who, not having read anything about the Founding Fathers and being generally historically illiterate, imagine the Founders just read John Locke and spent little time studying classical politics. This is so obviously false as evidenced by the letters of Madison, Jefferson, Hamilton, Washington, and co., the lists of the books they purchased for their libraries, their writings on politics, etc., that it is difficult to take seriously anyone who claims the Founders didn't know about Polybius or Aristotle or Cato. Even the most cursory reading of history would inform one that they didn't decide to use pseudonyms like "Brutus" and "Publius" because they thought Roman names sounded cool. But a few irresponsible writers have pretended (for their personal benefit) that the Founders didn’t ground their debates in the history of Greece and Rome, and too many young Americans just take it on fact that this is true. There is so much historical evidence about what Jefferson and Madison and Hamilton read and thought that I struggle even to believe this is really an open question, but the history education in this country is so bad that I suppose it must be.
Unlike “size” or “vast scope,” “bigness conveys the proper amount of clumsiness and slowness.
Trump is too much of a fool and a weakling to be a Sulla.