 Welcome to Free Thoughts, a podcast project of the Cato Institute's Libertarianism.org. Free Thoughts is a show about libertarianism and the ideas that influence it. I'm Aaron Powell, a research fellow here at Cato and editor of Libertarianism.org. And I'm Trevor Burrus, a research fellow at the Cato Institute Center for Constitutional Studies. Our topic for today's episode is the presidency. Joining us is our colleague Gene Healy, vice president of the Cato Institute and author of Cult of the Presidency and False Idol. Gene, as I was prepping for today's episode, I looked back at Article II of the Constitution which describes the executive branch. And I was struck as I always am when I look at it just how short it is. There's really not much to it. So I was wondering, could you maybe start by telling us what the Constitution says the president is supposed to be up to and then maybe how we got to where we are today? It's interesting, some of the unitary executive advocates argue that the very brevity of Article II speaks to the vast powers that the president has. And by unitary executive you mean people who think that the executive is essentially a king almost or at least imbued with that. At one extreme, I mean narrowly, without getting too far into this, narrowly stated the proposition for unitary executive theory is that the president has the executive power. The whole thing is Justice Alito put it once. And that doesn't require that any particular interpretation of the executive power. It means at a minimum that if you're a unitary executive theorist you think the president can fire his secretary of state without going to the Senate for approval. It doesn't necessarily commit you to the view that because the president can fire his secretary of state he can therefore also wake up one morning and decide that we're going to war with Russia over the Crimea, Congress be damned. But at the extreme of that, a unitary executive theory in recent years has become associated rightly or wrongly with some advocates who take a much broader view of the executive power particularly in the ever expanding area of national security. But I think at its essence in Article II the president does have the executive power and the executive power is principally the power to execute the laws. It's not an accident that Article I contains most of the important powers and Article I contains Congress's powers. It's also not an accident that Congress has more power formally whether they choose to exercise it or not over the executive than vice versa. Congress can remove the executive that doesn't work the other way. Congress can, you know, that there's the old law professor Charles Black used to say that he told his classes that Congress could defund the White House and reduce the president's staff to one secretary for answering correspondence and he said his students thought he was joking but Congress under its formal powers actually can do that. Most of the important powers in government are in Article I and the federal government are in Article I and they're given to Congress and it's for that reason that actually perhaps not in his most prescient moment that Madison and others among the framers thought that in a Republican government the legislative branch was the most to be feared. They were actually concerned at the convention, some of them, with providing the president with means for protection so that he would not necessarily get swallowed up in this vortex. Interesting. So that seems to also tie in with the George Washington status too possibly which I think is always interesting when they're writing Article II. Also, they have George Washington in the room with them and everyone in the room knows that he's going to be president first so that seemed to probably influence maybe how they wrote the article and everything about the president's powers. Yeah, I think Washington was viewed as someone who could be trusted with power in part because the model of power he embodied was quite different than modern presidents. He's the man who would not be king in the famous phrase that he exhibited in the legend Cincinnati's like virtues of self-denial of power and I think that did go into how the executive was viewed. But if we look at the next presidents that we start immediately having these conversations about kings even at the end of Washington's term and then John Adams' term was constantly he was constantly attacked for wanting to imbue the president with tuition ability and trying to take too much power but it keeps growing and growing and this conversation of how powerful the executive is going to be and they're these king makers and these non-king makers it's just sort of motif we have from the very beginning. Yeah, there's some debate among presidential scholars, political scientists who study the presidency around this concept of what they call the modern presidency. This presidency that's a plebiscitary figure that draws power from being viewed as the one legitimate representative of the whole people, the tribune of the people, president with broad unilateral powers in foreign affairs and even domestic affairs and the debate is is there such a thing as a modern presidency because you can see at least the seeds of what we know and don't necessarily love in the modern presidency in early presidents you have Andrew Jackson making the claim that the president is the people's tribune in essence. You have James K. Polk showing that the separation of command of the army and the power to authorize war that the president's command of the army could on occasion make Congress's power to declare war something of an afterthought simply by sending troops into disputed territory and providing occasion making a war a fate of complete and you know of course you have Lincoln who exercised executive powers during the Civil War that are at least as broad as virtually anything we've seen before or since but after Lincoln you do see return or congressional resurgence and a return to a congressionally dominated government with fairly anonymous presidents so I do think there is a transition in the 20th century largely inspired by progressive ideology that makes the president's something quite different than it was through most of the early constitutional period and most of the 19th century is this growth in presidential power during the 20th century a result of the president taking on more power himself or is it more result of Congress abdicating power to the presidency or both I mean I guess I'm asking is this as the president as an office done this for and to himself or has it been as Congress been kind of leading the charge to offer up its power to someone else it's both Arthur Schlesinger popularized the the term the imperial presidency in his 1970 71 book or that name he says that you know it was often as often a case of congressional abdication as it was power of power hungry presidents and part of that I think is something that maybe inherent to the constitutional design and unintended consequence which is Madison and others among the framers thought that each branch would that ambition would counteract ambition and that each branch would have sufficient incentive to fight for its own territory that the interests of the man would be aligned with the constitutional rights of the place and particularly in the 20th century you see sort of misaligned incentives because there's this phrase commonly you know you hear over and over again know that nobody wants to leave the presidency you know weaker than they found it and they generally don't presidents have every incentive to fight for an expansion of their powers whereas very few elections turn on the voters punishing congressmen for abdicating and constitutional responsibility I mean you can I think it probably hurt John Edwards Hillary Clinton and a few others in Democratic primaries in 2007 2008 that they had delegated the power to to launch a war in Iraq to George W. Bush but in general you know most congressmen get reelected and it's very rare that voters actually punish somebody for punting the question of war or in peace to to a president the incentive for individual congressmen in fact is often to duck that question whereas the incentive for presidents is to harness a mass and increase their power and so you've you've called this the cult of the presidency in your book which sort of came out at a time when presidential power seemed to be most criticized almost at least by the John stewards of the world and then we get Barack Obama which just continues that forward but can you describe a little about what the term called to the presidency means as you use it well it's an umbrella term it's a sort of shorthand for how Americans view the office this combination supreme warlord of the earth and national nanny and one of the points of the book is the the the old pogo principle we've met the enemy and he is us you can blame power hungry presidents you can blame the factless congresses but ultimately I think the ordinary voter and particularly the the intellectual elites bear a large share of responsibility the lion's share of responsibility for what the presidency has become because the ordinary voter and the you know pundits and scholars look to the presidency look to the office of the presidency to achieve things it was never designed to achieve they invest the office with a vast array of responsibilities the president is responsible for teaching the children well saving us from hurricanes stopping oil spills in the Gulf stopping school shootings and even for you know if there's a general sense of malaise in the land the president is somehow responsible for the tenor of the national spirit and when you invest when you expect a person or an office to deliver on that kind of responsibility one thing that's natural is that confronted with that vast job description presidents are going to seek power to try to meet that and I think that is one of the reasons that the that dynamic is the fundamental reason why the office has drifted so far from the comparatively modest vision of the presidency that animated the framers is it perhaps was it perhaps too much for the framers to hope for that we could have a president without an associated cult I suppose the sense that I mean you look back at the scope of human history is charismatic leaders and people flocking to them so it's been it's been kings and popes and various I mean just celebrity culture in slum party yeah I mean we we tend to find people who we then invest with great importance and then turn over you know that they're the ones who are going to solve I mean monotheism is an instance of this as well that that this is just there was no way we could have any amount of power focused in a single person whereas Congress is hundreds of people the the Supreme Court is nine people but you put a single person up there we're just going to direct all of these hopes and dreams and aspirations at that person that may be the case I'm reading a you know and maybe the decision against a plural executive at the Philadelphia Convention had a lot to do with this I'm reading a very interesting book right now called the once in future king by Frank Buckley at over at George Mason and he makes the case for a parliamentary system not that you know he recognizes we're not about to shift gears and adopt one but by close study of Britain and Canada in particular in their constitutional history he makes a fairly persuasive case that whatever our natural tendency to invest quasi spiritual longings in a governmental figure the specific form of the presidency and the separation of powers makes that tendency worse that parliamentary systems by separating the roles of head and state and head of government sort of fights against this this this tendency that you know no one in Britain you know ever looked to to Gordon Brown or David Cameron for the state of the national soul and that you know that they invested these national these longings for national identity on a fairly harmless monarch and so I think there's something to be said for that and Buckley also draws it out with attention to presidential systems in general which have been I think the political science on this is pretty clear at this point presidential systems controlling for everything else are particularly bad for developing countries there's a the scholar Juan Linz who died last year started making that case with the article in a book the the perils of presidentialism that developing countries that adopt that had adopted an American style system do you have have far more unstable governments that in many cases and are more likely to drift away from a democratic form of government than countries that adopt parliamentary regimes and that we may enjoy the level of individual liberty and representative government that we have in spite of our presidential system and in part because of our great wealth and our Anglo-American traditions but that the presidential system we've adopted is adopted is not something that seems to be helping yeah and I made that point before too that something to just sort of channel people's spiritual longings away from a guy who is megalomaniacal enough to want this job almost this weird thing that there's something about hereditary monarchy that's powerless that it has some something to commend it I would say which is a different question of the kind of people who want the job becomes the next question because after you make more and more power goes to it and you believe that you control the national conscience well then it seems like you're choosing some of the worst megalomaniacal people to even want this job in the first place yeah supposedly Alan Greenspan said something in his memoirs from a couple years ago that something to the effect of I've only ever proposed one constitutional amendment and I'm quite serious about it that anyone who wants the job should be forever barred from seeking office I think he said that of all the presidents he he knew Gerald Ford who kind of stumbled into it was the one who seemed most well adjusted and sane the presidential selection system has changed quite a bit also over the 20th century in ways that have also had unintended consequences and consequences that I think make it increasingly less likely that a Cincinnati-type self-denying figure will seek the office you have you know a push toward the primary process the relative decline of the importance of the smoke filled room and political conventions and public democratic contests for who becomes the major party standard bearer and while the I think the principles animating that shift were fairly they seem fairly innocuous ones and even laudable ones the effect is that more so than ever before to become president you have to announce at least two years before Iowa and you are going to spend that time raising raising money traveling throughout Iowa New Hampshire other places spending your time on the road and increasingly shielding any of your authentic opinions to the extent that you actually have them after a life in politics from any you know from from public exposure and whatever this process selects for it doesn't really select for intelligent public spirited people who want to for example reduce the powers of the presidency if you're going to run this gauntlet if you are going to do what it takes to grab that ring one of the last things I think you would that system would select for is somebody who goes through that process does what it takes and says okay now that i'm here I think I should have a lot less power yeah I think that also that the cost it puts on your family is that that's the one that always gets me your kids will never be able to live like a normal life they will not have a normal childhood they will go to places with secret service all the time and you think that this is all worth it so you might have a chance to direct the national spirit so you can save america that just is bizarre that's a good point the and you know it's one that you know at least our last two presidents had fairly young kids you know your first date is going to be with a secret service man in the in the background you're going to see john steward make funny your your dad on tv and you know you you have to worry about your your your father getting shot it's not something i'd want to put my kids through and I think it it it is pretty unusual I so so I do think increasingly the system selects for the kind of people that you don't want that you don't want having nuclear weapons one of the things that's always struck me is interesting about that and about this notion that you know we get these people who we don't want is that given given the two parties that we have in this country and the fact that it's we have a very partisan political system everyone seems to agree with that about half the time they they always you know if if the other if they're if i'm a democrat and the republican wins then we've gotten someone we don't want and it's terrible he's got all these powers and if i'm a republican and democrat wins i feel the same way but and then you couple that with the fact that presidents even if if my guy my party's guy gets elected i tend to be super enthusiastic when he's first elected and then by the end of his second term he's a bum he's just he's failed all the things that i hoped for but we never seem to learn our lesson we never say like well yeah my guy might get elected but the other guy might too so i don't want to give him that much power or i've gotten burned by the last three members of my own party to achieve the office but this next one he's going to be the one that's the one it seems very very weird there's the myopia of not being able to think past the next election cycle that was nicely illustrated in a 2012 video that i think it was a gawker put together going around the democratic national convention and uh asking prominent democratic figures i think including harry reid uh so do we think that mit romney can be uh trusted with the uh governmental kill list uh and watching their you know it's like they'd never thought of that uh so so there is that and there it is perplexing that this perennial cycle of uh you know exuberance and deep disappointment doesn't stop people from falling in love with the romance of the presidency every four to eight years over again depending on you know which side of the political aisle you're on uh you'd think after a while people would be able to have a a bit of a longer attention span and realize that this process is not ever going to guarantee anything other than perennial disappointment and the accumulation of state power and in your addendum to call to the presidency or sequel or however we want to call it a false idol because we really saw that i think in barack obama in the level that at least in my lifetime i haven't seen and maybe in a long time this absolute fervor for a man and then increasing disappointment yeah i was in i was in law school when in denver when um obama was first running for president and the the convention the democratic convention was in denver and the the way that my law professors and many of my fellow students spoke about him and they would they had their badges that would get them into the convention and we all class got out early so everyone could go to this thing and they'd hold it up and there was just this kind of combination of you were going to witness you know something like your you know the return of the beetles or something like that plus the way that people talk about the second coming or you know that that scene in the movie independence day when the people are on the roof of the building completely overcome with joy that the aliens are coming like it was this just outpouring of optimistic emotions in a very unseemly yeah i saw three people crying um and it was just i mean it was it was weird and off-putting so where are we now in that story here in uh in downtown dc chinatown where i was it was like uh you know the yanks had just liberated paris uh uh where are we now in that uh in the while we're in the uh far past the post honeymoon you know it's you have uh schizophrenia on both sides of the the aisle so the on the right you have uh the presidency becomes such a focal point of all american hopes and dreams uh you know i say in the false idol of the e-book that uh when obama said i'm like a rorschach blot uh he was he was more accurate than he knew and especially uh having taken the presidency you know people see in this figure what they you know what they what they want to see on the right you have people who uh are you were initially convinced that this was the second coming of uh in a bad way of lbj and f dr uh you have uh these theories that obama uh you know at tutored by uh sol elinsky or bill errs or whoever has been engaged in a long running plan uh perfectly executed scheme to destroy the american way of life and at the same time and sometimes even in the same breath you see otherwise intelligent figures on the right say that uh the man's total incompetent who uh you know took power when he barely knew where to find the stapler in the senate office and uh you know he's he he's engaged in a decades long conspiracy to destroy the american way of life and he uh he's really not doing a good job but so that's on the right on the left uh you you went through this uh initial uh beetle mania phase where uh you know everything was going to be terrific the oceans rise would stop and we'd find a cure for cancer in our time and uh uh fundamentally transform the u.s economy and so on and so forth to the this really there's a sense of disgust and betrayal in some quarters that the president is just not tough enough uh and uh you know ignoring the fact that uh you know for however much power the presidency has accumulated the the still particularly domestically the the president can't simply like captain Picard just you know make a hand gesture and say make it so and and fundamentally change uh american law and life and everyone who doesn't go along with him as obstructionist yeah he's supposed to lead the whole ship so so it makes you wonder why anyone would want this job because presidents tend to end up more or less their perennial disappointments uh and the only thing that's uh well you can probably guarantee two things uh the political scientist theodore lowey uh had one of lowey's maxims which was uh every president contributes to the upgrading of the reputation of his predecessors uh and that's the only sure contribution that any president will make so uh probably an idea reflected in that billboard uh a while ago in texas with the big picture of george w bush that said miss me yet uh people uh you know we're going through everybody now looking back at uh h w and what a great president he was and uh you know clinton uh who if you read the wall street journal in the 1990s uh was uh running a socialist himself right yeah and even in some of the things they ran running a murder incorporated out of arkansas was a rapist and uh uh the worst crook ever and uh now people look back on him fondly so i think uh i look back on him fondly yeah you know in retrospect he seems a little bit like warren g harding he provided a lot of entertainment and uh you know there there weren't really any great leaps forward in uh to speak of in government power during the clinton years uh the other thing that the presidency uh in addition to what lowey said that you can reliably say about each successive president uh for the most part you know the office they do leave the office stronger than they found it and unless you think that the office of the presidency is perpetually too weak uh that might not be a good thing so who are the great presidents then according to popular historic we're talking about how political scientists view this and also how the public views this who are the ones that we look back on as great presidents what what typifies their administrations well there is you know the what the scholars who participate in these periodic presidential ranking surveys look at as the great presidents and there i think you've got real evidence of perversity among intellectual elites you have you know if you look at the top ten on uh you know i think is Arthur Schlesinger jr's father uh who did one of the first of these in the 40s and you know we have them uh you know every few years or so a bunch of different uh bodies that do them the sienna research institute sometimes magazines do them uh wall street journal did one uh 10 years ago trying to correct for liberal bias and they're all pretty consistent even the wall street journal one that they tried to have a politically balanced panel of uh presidential scholars and uh law professors they all uh come out uh mostly the same and the top ten presidents you have a disproportionate number of war leaders uh crusaders people who uh tried to revolutionize the political order in some way and the ones that do very badly are the ones that didn't do much and kind of bored people um and if you think the purpose of the presidency is to entertain presidential scholars then that might mean something but uh i think a perfect illustration of this is that on almost every presidential ranking survey uh Woodrow Wilson is in the top 10 and his successor Warren Harding is last or or next to last um and you know Wilson probably the worst president in American history uh took us into a destructive and an unnecessary war you know ran roughshod over civil liberties during the course of that war was a horrible racist degree segregated the federal government you go on and on Warren G Harding um dismantled much of the uh Wilson wartime economy uh is too little recognized as a decent president on civil liberties he pardoned and commuted sentences of Wilson's political prisoners people like Eugene Debs who had been put in jail for making his under the espionage act for making a speech praising somebody who advocated draft resistance and uh but you know Warren G Harding he had the teapot dome scandal and uh that uh you know they hold that against them but doesn't seem to me that the teapot dome scandal uh killed a hundred thousand american dough boys so maybe they're uh maybe they should re-engineer their rankings uh us news a few years ago did an issue on america's 10 worst presidents and uh william henry harrison uh made the the bottom 10 he was president for a month yeah he barely did anything but give the longest inaugural address in in uh presidential history and keel over uh so he he didn't have any opportunity to to to do anything bad uh what you see over and over again is that the there is no respect for any kind of presidential Hippocratic oath any concept that first do no harm might be the uh the way to go and you you know behind it all you do see uh quite a bit of contempt for the idea of peace and prosperity for you know in harding's case there's a lot of people sneer at uh his neologism normalcy which just stood for uh getting back to a not a period of non-emergency non-crisis government where you can go on and live your life and not be uh enlisted in grand national crusades well if you look at the presidential rankings that's a an idea that a lot of scholars hold in deep contempt wondering if you could talk a bit about what this all seems related to um which is kind of the the culture of power worship that i mean is particularly prevalent in in this town in washington um where there's there's almost a sense that that the powerful are better than the rest of us simply because of their power or or ought to be respected and that respecting the powerful is is part of being a a good and fulfilled person um i'm i'm thinking this week the new york times columnist david brooks penned a column and he's penned a lot of columns of this sort he's already laughing just a very mention of his name where where he talked about the importance of of basically freedom in subservience that that living under the powerful and doing what they want is an important part of living a good life and this seems i mean this seems obviously very bound up in what we've been talking about yeah it's a perennial theme of david brooks is that he he's distrustful of uh i wrote one a few weeks ago about millennials and their individualistic attitudes because i'm paraphrasing here but it's close so they're like you know a nation like this is not so easily led which you would think would you know not not be a bad thing um uh there i i think you do see some of that that's reflected in the presidential rankings that uh you know the the notion that uh and it certainly david brooks is uh work is a lot like that the book on the bourgeois bohemians um there it's a really amusing work of what he calls comic sociology but there is also a note of there's something gross about people who you know want slay chower stalls and eat a ruggola and uh you know enjoy the the simple or not so simple pleasures of life you saw this uh after september 11th uh on left and right there is a notion that um you know we we're going to have war and uh the moral equivalent of war uh there people that seem to think you know the the worst thing that george w bush ever said after 9 11 was that um not that we would rid the world of evil but that we you know people what what americans should do is uh you know relax go enjoy america's great destination spots or go to disney world uh that was a statement of bushes that was attacked by john mccain was attacked by barack obama joe biden you name it uh there's uh this deep background notion that uh peace and prosperity living your life and uh determining your own purposes rather than being led in a uh what mccain calls a cause greater than yourself uh that that that's just contemptible you know we can't uh we can't decide our own purposes in life uh we need a grand government crusade uh to to unite us all and the grandest uh government crusade of all is war and uh i think the growth of presidential power has very much been wrapped up in in war i think the you know i pulled a quote from false idol from chris matthew is one of the most sycophantic people i know uh this day he was inaugurated with with the mall filled with people african americans and everyone else obama just sent us all home why are we in this fight with him just tell us commander give us our orders and tell us where we're going give us a mission yeah i think that pretty much symbolizes that perfectly yeah this uh i say in the book that uh for some reason a lot of this tends to happen on chris matthew's show hardball uh you had uh evan thomas for newsweek saying you know obama is floating above all of us he's going to unite us all he's sort of sort of god i didn't know that he actually said that yeah this seems to be a big problem for us as libertarians right because i mean no matter how good the policy proposals that we make are and no matter how much we can show that you know reducing the size of this program would reduce would lead to better results or increasing choice or you know expanding the reach of the market and shrinking the reach of politics would be good at a very basic level our view of good governance and good citizenship is 180 degrees from this is that there's that we shouldn't be ruled and and that we shouldn't be told what to do or at the very least if we're going to be told what to do by people we shouldn't be told what to do by people who can use guns to back it up if if we want to listen to a charismatic leader that's fine but it ought to be voluntary and so is this just i mean this just seems like a fundamentally different way of of viewing the world yeah i think this is similar to something we've talked about erin and i have talked about for years we don't offer any great projects for people to go behind and we don't talk in this rhetoric and something erin i've talked about for years is the west wing is an example of the show where the guy is always doing this right i've i've argued before that the west wing which i quite enjoy as a tv show i think you and i disagree on that but i i enjoyed it um would have been i mean it needed to have a mythical president or i mean or a a statist president so to speak because if it had had a strictly libertarian president it would have been an awfully boring show every episode someone would have wandered into his office said here's a problem and he would have said nothing i can do about that what do you want from me yeah uh right there uh there isn't anything uh in the libertarian program that uh you know you you're sort of left with uh the rallying cry is get on with your life go forth and prosper yeah leave me alone live your own life together yeah i i think you know perhaps that is uh a fundamental aspect of human nature that uh you know libertarianism doesn't quite have a an answer for um i you know it does seem to be worse among the intellectuals and what david brookes calls non-ironically i think the thought leaders uh because if you do look at uh if you the public is actually somewhat better on this because if you look at polling data on various presidents uh you know truman left office uh deeply unpopular uh a lot of presidents leave presidents invariably disappoint but not all of them leave office totally unpopular uh reagan left office with above 50 approval ratings as did clinton uh warren harding was wildly popular while he while he was uh around uh so while presidents are are in office it's not as though there's a giant groundswell of uh people out there that uh it's like the old adage about neoconservatives being uh you know ahead with nobody uh you know occasionally you can stir up war fever but in general if you want to be a successful president in the terms of you know being popular while you're in office uh you do better uh not making a whole lot of trouble uh but these presidents you know like truman uh who were wildly and wilson who were wildly unpopular uh while their grand crusades and failed wars were going on uh they tend to get upgraded by historians and in popular memory because we remember that they did something uh so you know i don't know if i have an answer to that fundamental problem i'll just say that whatever this uh longing is in human nature it seems to be uh more uh vocally expressed among the people the scholars who fill out presidential report cards and the pundits who follow the white house than it does uh among ordinary people it also might be the case that if you are an intellectual type and you think the rest of the people are benighted in some way and and and stupid it's stupider than you are at least that you think that's just what people need to pull them out of the darkness is someone to lead them to glory in some way yeah and some of it is is uh ordinary boredom i think uh the uh i quote uh fred barns uh after uh from the weekly standard after uh 9 11 uh in the cult of the presidency where he wrote a piece early on talking about how it was just so boring in the 90s you know nothing was going on we didn't have uh you know we didn't have anyone leading us we didn't have any wars to fight any so the union was gone yeah so we got nobody to fight and the the uh you know he looks back to you know when he got to washington uh during the first gulf war and how awesome it was and how cool it was to to have this to cover oh that's a you know kind of perverse and disgusting attitude uh but uh you know i think it's it's more prevalent than none i mean war is a hell of a lot more interesting than the tax code yeah and you get the same thing in world war one buildup which is of course the most almost apotheosis of the state leading people to destruction but so many people sitting around being like it's been so long since we've had a good european war it's been at least since the napoleonic wars you know it's about time you got to join the military especially for the second born son and somehow achieve glory and the only way you can do that is on a battlefield everyone's itching for war even you know in 1910 they're just waiting for what's going to set it off which is again incredibly perverse yeah it's the animating principle of national greatness conservatism the uh like teddy roosevelt uh put a war as a great tonic for the national spirit and uh we need these uh unifying crusades to pull us out of our shabby little lives uh and uh you know how how you defeat that notion is uh yeah that's a tough question why does it have to be invested in politics i mean why can't we have national greatness through technological accomplishments through you know we we as a people are going to to eradicate hunger via you know entrepreneurship and expanding knowledge i mean there are all of these projects they're all like they're amazing things that have happened so over the course the last hundred years that have dramatically improved the quality of our lives but we rally around the things that result in dead bodies and but it doesn't it doesn't seem like it has to be that way and just like it doesn't have to be it wouldn't have to be the president that we rally around we could rally around all sorts of different figures why why do we invest it in the political well i suppose because uh you know it doesn't require anything of us i mean we could have rallied around steve jobs but you sort of would have you know he didn't really need your help uh other than to sell you a product so a lot of the uh the impulse to do it you know i i i guess the what what people in favor of this impulse would say is it doesn't uh celebrating human achievement uh that's you know uh accomplished through the actions of individuals inventors and entrepreneurs doesn't really require anything of us uh you know i think it'd be a better country if like some other countries instead of having our presidents on our currency we had uh you know people who accomplish something yeah people who you know brought us light uh and but you know i other than cheering your sports team which is a far healthier thing than cheering your political party uh you know there's the libertarians don't have any uh political way to tap into this impulse i think one of them would be free writing sense of accomplishment uh that has to be something that the psychologically gratifying right so we could say what we need to do things together which when someone says that who's not barack obama i say yes we do uh apple was not done just by steve jobs it was done with a bunch of other people but also that means that a bunch other people can't free ride off of apple success right uh they can't feel a sense of accomplishment by having participated something because they didn't actually participate in it maybe by buying an apple product but people can really get shareholders out that's but everything it's pretty inclusive it doesn't have a bunch of free riders but when you start talking about national greatness and people who get like a sense of pride of being an american uh they're free writing if you know if they haven't done anything that great they're free writing off of the sense of community that other people achieved the interesting thing is modern war doesn't really require much more of us than uh you know it's not a so you have a lot of uh of bloggers who uh seem to think they were uh you know combat blogging by uh attacking uh peaceniks on the internet but you know modern war does not uh with the volunteer military uh does not really require you to do too much more than pay your taxes uh so it's odd that you know this collectivist impulse is uh you know is viewed as somehow satisfied when it's not like we're going to war on terror bond rallies and saving scrap metal um but yeah so where do we where do we go from here what do you see this going is there a uh solution to this process or is it just going to get worse I don't think it's going to get worse I mean one of the well one of the the things that uh the the part of uh the cult of the presidency that people liked the least was the last chapter when I said I thought pretty forthrightly that look I can give you a five-point plan about how to save this and uh you know I'll I'll go through the motions but it's not going to work um um that was the least popular part part of the book because having proposed the uh problem I didn't give anybody any solutions because they want to be inspired and led oh the solutions are hard and uh you know most of the uh most of them run up against the fundamental problems so uh you know you could propose uh strengthening the war powers resolution but you've got the problem that uh you know the war powers resolution which has been almost entirely useless and perhaps even pernicious uh you know was only passed in a unique historic window of opportunity with an embattled president nixon where you could actually override a presidential veto um and it's gone on it hasn't really constrained presidents at all obama became the second president to wage a war beyond the the 60 day limits at first was president clinton but in most presidents have many presidents have used it in fact to argue that uh the the resolution authorizes short sharp uses of force which by its plain terms it doesn't but they use the 60 day limit to say that well you know you said we could use it uh you could just wage war for up to 60 days with a free pass most statutory restrictions are for reasons like that are unequal to the task we're not going to transmute into a parliamentary government and that wouldn't even that would not solve most of our problems I don't think so it's not something that and I continue to hold out hope that uh for example the obama presidency would heighten the contradictions that you would have uh somebody who uh pumped up expectations for what the presidency could achieve even far beyond what they did the irrational heights they'd reached before uh and then failed spectacularly you'd think uh that would maybe condition people to invest less uh invest fewer hopes in the presidency um but you know I'm not sure that's going to happen either there are uh long term trends though I mean it's very easy for for us particularly as libertarians I think to to say things are always getting worse uh but a longer term view uh I think there are some secular trends that are encouraging at least um the and one of my point too is the decline in trust in government um this is something that uh when these the trust in government numbers come out that they're in this town is it's usually recognized as a crisis people don't trust government as much as they used to uh and you know this this is one of the longest running polling questions it dates to the I think the second eisenhower administration how much of the time do you trust the government in washington to do what is right most of the time always just about never and they usually combine the most of the time and just about always answers and that gives you the trust in government index and when they started taking it in the late eisenhower early new frontier era you had over 75 percent of americans saying that they trusted the federal government in washington to do what is right most of the time or just about always was reflected in the popular culture was reflected in the culture of journalism investigative journalism uh did not really exist to the extent that it does today and uh you you know someone ridiculing the president like uh john stewart would probably be arrested like lennie bruce in the in the early 60s or at least would not be would not have a popular platform um you and after they start going down in the number start plummeting uh when the vietnam war starts going badly in 66 or thereabouts uh they never recover after watergate uh they pot them out during the 70s they spike a little bit after 9 11 but quickly go back to uh watergate era levels um now declining public trust isn't always a good thing it's not good when you see the numbers say interpersonal trust between americans uh is going down and uh you know there's some relationship between the two um but you know scholars who study trust in the trust in government number have correlated it with uh fewer wars less tolerance for military adventurism uh and even uh from the domestic side for libertarianism there's a scholar named mark heatherington who's showed that uh you know it really means that a new new deal in a new great society is no longer possible it's a conclusion that he didn't like being a liberal democrat but uh he says this is pretty much you know obama care barely squeaked uh to the heritage health care foundation the heritage health care plan plan basically uh barely got passed uh you're not going to see uh he says a new new deal a new great society because the public doesn't trust the federal government enough to allow that so that's a trend that i think uh constrains president somewhat in some ways given the shock of 9 11 in those horrific images it's a little bit astounding that we did not see worse abuses than we did uh you know we shouldn't be happy about the ones we did see um but you could you could foresee it in an atmosphere of more trust going even worse so i take some you know i i have a grain i take a grain of optimism from that trend i think that uh if you look at the reverence with which presidents were treated uh before uh watergate uh there's a passage uh from the there's a selection of the watergate tapes where uh haulderman and nixon are talking about um you know should we squelch the pentagon paper should we prove should we try to keep the washington post in the new york times for releasing this and haulderman says to nixon you know this is a very bad thing if this gets out uh it you know it means that the implicit infallibility of presidents which is an accepted thing in america you know will no longer be taken for granted and uh you know i say in the book that you no one today would talk about the implicit infallibility of presidents nobody believes that and uh it's a it's a ludicrous idea but it was something that you could talk about as recently as you know 1972 that that was a widely accepted thing in america um you know where there's no putting that genie back in the bottle and that and that's a good thing so uh i think another trend uh will be um the relative decline of uh american military power uh that we will not be we're in no danger of not being the dominant military power on the globe for our lifetimes but i i think international uh changes uh are going to force the united states to behave a little bit more like a normal country in international affairs and since the growth of the imperial presidency coincides with america's rise the world dominance uh i think that's gonna be a good thing and i think it will restrain uh further growth of president presidential powers somewhat but you know as for returning to uh something like the modest presidency of the harding and coolage years uh that does not seem to be in the cards uh anytime soon thank you for listening to free thoughts if you have any questions or comments about today's show you can find us on twitter at free thoughts pod that's free thoughts pod free thoughts is a project of libertarianism dot org and the kato institute and is produced by evan banks to learn more about libertarianism visit us on the web at www.libertarianism.org