august 5–18, 2019 | new york 25
opponents’ power, and in which compromise through the existing
republican institutions, particularly Congress, has become close
to impossible. Think of Pompey’s and Caesar’s armies not as actual
soldiers but as today’s political-party members and activists,
mobilized for nonviolent electoral battle and dissatisfied, espe-
cially on the right, with anything less than total victory. The battles
in this Cold Civil War take place all the time on the front lines of
the two forces: in states where fights over gerrymandering and
vote suppression are waged; in swing states in presidential elec-
tions; in the courts, where the notion of impartial justice has been
recast in the public mind as partisan-bloc voting; in Congress,
where regular order is a distant memory, disputes go constantly
to the brink, the government is regularly shut down the entire
country’s credit threatened, and long-established rules designed
for republican compromise, like the filibuster, are being junked as
fast as any Roman mos maiorum.
And the American system has a vulnerability Rome didn’t. We
have always had a one-man executive branch, a head of state, with
exclusive and total command of the armed forces. There is no need
for an office like Rome’s dictator for when a systemic crisis hits,
because we have an existing commander-in-chief vested with
emergency powers who can, at any time, invoke them. The two
consuls in Rome shared rule and could veto each other; what
defines the American presidency is its individual, unitary nature.
Over the past century, moreover, as America’s global clout has
grown exponentially, and as the challenges of governing a vast and
complicated country have spawned a massive administrative state
under the president’s ultimate control, what was once designed as
an office merely to enforce the laws made by the Congress has
changed beyond recognition.
So what happens when a populist celebrity leverages mass
resentment of elites to deploy that power—as Marius and Sulla and
Pompey and Caesar did—in ever more expansive, innovative, and
authoritarian ways?When you think of how the Founders conceived
the presidency, the 21st- century version is close to
unrecognizable. Their phobia about monarchy
placed the presidency beneath the Congress in the
pecking order, stripping him of pomp and majesty. No newspaper
bothered even to post a reporter at the White House until the 20th
century. The “bully pulpit” was anathema, and public speeches van-
ishingly rare. As George F. Will points out in his new book on con-
servatism, the president of the United States did not even have an
office until 1902, working from his living room until Teddy Roos-
evelt built the West Wing.
Some presidents rose above this level of modesty. Lincoln tempo-
rarily assumed far greater powers in the Civil War, of course, but it
was Teddy Roosevelt who added celebrity and imperial aspirations
to the office, Woodrow Wilson who began to construct an adminis-
trative state through which the executive branch could govern inde-
pendently, FDR who, as president for what turned out to be life,
revolutionized and metastasized the American government and
bequeathed a Cold War presidency atop a military-industrial com-
plex that now deploys troops in some 164 foreign countries.
Kennedy—and the Camelot myth that surrounded him—daz-
zled the elites and the public; Reagan ushered in a movie-star
model for a commander-in-chief—telegenic, charismatic, and, in
time, something of a cult figure; and then the 9/11 attacks created
an atmosphere similar to that of Rome’s temporary, emergency
dictatorships, except vast powers of war-making, surveillance,
rendition, and even torture were simply transferred to an office
for non- emergency times as well, as theorists of the unitary exec-
utive—relatively unbound by Congress or the rule of law—formed
a tight circle around a wartime boss. And there was no six-monthtime limit; almost none of these powers has since been revoked.
Some hoped that Barack Obama would wind this presidency-
on-steroids down. He didn’t. His presidency began with a flurry of
executive orders. He launched a calamitous war on Libya with no
congressional authorization; he refused to prosecute those who
were involved with Bush’s torture program, who continued to rise
through the ranks on his watch; he pushed his executive powers to
fix a health-care law that constitutionally only Congress had the
right to; and, in his second term, he ignored Congress’s legally man-
dated deportation of 800,000 Dreamers by refusing to enforce it.
He had once ruled such a move out—“I’m president, I’m not king”—
and then reinvented the move as a mere shift in priorities. To
advance his environmental agenda, he used the EPA to drastically
intensify regulations, bypassing Congress altogether. To push his
cultural agenda, his Justice Department refused to defend the
existing marriage laws and abruptly interpreted Title IX to cover
transgender high-school kids without any public debate.
No Democrats regarded these moves as particularly offensive—
although partisan Republicans were eager to broadcast their
largely phony constitutional objections as soon as the president
was not a Republican. And Congress had long since acquiesced to
presidentialism anyway, wriggling out of any serious input on the
war on terror, dodging the difficult task of amending the health-
care law, bobbing and weaving on the environment. And although
the worship of Trump is on a whole different level of fanaticism,
if you didn’t see some cultish elements in the Obama movement,
you weren’t looking very hard. Like Roman commanders slowly
acquiring the trappings of gods, presidents have long since slipped
the bounds of republican austerity into a world of elected mon-
archs, flying the world in a massive, airborne chariot, constantly
photographed, and now commanding our attention every single
day through Twitter.But obama was obama, and trump is trump,
obliterating most of what mos maiorum remained after
his predecessor. Like Pompey, who bypassed all the
usual qualifications for the highest office of consul,
Trump stormed into party politics by mocking the very idea of
political qualifications, violating norms with abandon. He had
never been elected to office before; he was a businessman and a
brand, not a public servant of any kind; he had no serious grip on
the Constitution, liberal-democratic debate, the separation of
powers, or limited government. His tangible proposals were slo-
gans. He referred to his peers with crude nicknames, and his
instincts were those of a mob boss. But he offered himself, rather
like the populares in Rome, as a riposte and antidote to the politi-
cal and cultural elite, the optimates. A brilliant if dangerous
demagogue, he became the first presidential candidate to run not
as the leader of a political party, or as a disciple of conservatism
or liberalism, but as a fully fledged strongman who promised
unilaterally to “make America great again.” It is hard to equate
any kind of republican government with a leader who insists, of
any American problem, “I, alone, can fix it.”
No one in the American system at this level has ever behaved
like this before, crudely trampling on republican practices, scoff-
ing at the rule of law, targeting individual citizens for calumny,
openly demonizing his opponents, calling a free press treason-
ous, deploying deceit impulsively, skirting the boundaries of
mental illness, bragging of sexual assault, delegitimizing his own
government when it showed even a flicker of independence—
and yet he almost instantly commanded the near-total loyalty of
an entire political party, and of 40 percent of the country, and
this loyalty has barely wavered.
If republicanism at its core is a suspicion of one-man rule, and
that suspicion is the central animating (Continued on page 76)Y ___ DD ___ AD ___ PD ___ EICTRANSMITTED________ COPY ___ DD ___ AD ___ PD ___ EIC1619FEA_AndrewSullivan_lay [Print]_35565047.indd 25 8/2/19 7:36 PMaugust5–18, 2019 | newyork 25opponents’ power, and in which compromise through the existing
republican institutions, particularly Congress, has become close
to impossible. Think of Pompey’s and Caesar’s armies not as actual
soldiers but as today’s political-party members and activists,
mobilized for nonviolent electoral battle and dissatisfied, espe-
cially on the right, with anything less than total victory. The battles
in this Cold Civil War take place all the time on the front lines of
the two forces: in states where fights over gerrymandering and
vote suppression are waged; in swing states in presidential elec-
tions; in the courts, where the notion of impartial justice has been
recast in the public mind as partisan-bloc voting; in Congress,
where regular order is a distant memory, disputes go constantly
to the brink, the government is regularly shut down the entire
country’s credit threatened, and long-established rules designed
for republican compromise, like the filibuster, are being junked as
fast as any Roman mos maiorum.
And the American system has a vulnerability Rome didn’t. We
have always had a one-man executive branch, a head of state, with
exclusive and total command of the armed forces. There is no need
for an office like Rome’s dictator for when a systemic crisis hits,
because we have an existing commander-in-chief vested with
emergency powers who can, at any time, invoke them. The two
consuls in Rome shared rule and could veto each other; what
defines the American presidency is its individual, unitary nature.
Over the past century, moreover, as America’s global clout has
grown exponentially, and as the challenges of governing a vast and
complicated country have spawned a massive administrative state
under the president’s ultimate control, what was once designed as
an office merely to enforce the laws made by the Congress has
changed beyond recognition.
So what happens when a populist celebrity leverages mass
resentment of elites to deploy that power—as Marius and Sulla and
Pompey and Caesar did—in ever more expansive, innovative, and
authoritarian ways?
When you think of how the Founders conceived
the presidency, the 21st- century version is close to
unrecognizable. Their phobia about monarchy
placed the presidency beneath the Congress in the
pecking order, stripping him of pomp and majesty. No newspaper
bothered even to post a reporter at the White House until the 20th
century. The “bully pulpit” was anathema, and public speeches van-
ishingly rare. As George F. Will points out in his new book on con-
servatism, the president of the United States did not even have an
office until 1902, working from his living room until Teddy Roos-
evelt built the West Wing.
Some presidents rose above this level of modesty. Lincoln tempo-
rarily assumed far greater powers in the Civil War, of course, but it
was Teddy Roosevelt who added celebrity and imperial aspirations
to the office, Woodrow Wilson who began to construct an adminis-
trative state through which the executive branch could govern inde-
pendently, FDR who, as president for what turned out to be life,
revolutionized and metastasized the American government and
bequeathed a Cold War presidency atop a military-industrial com-
plex that now deploys troops in some 164 foreign countries.
Kennedy—and the Camelot myth that surrounded him—daz-
zled the elites and the public; Reagan ushered in a movie-star
model for a commander-in-chief—telegenic, charismatic, and, in
time, something of a cult figure; and then the 9/11 attacks created
an atmosphere similar to that of Rome’s temporary, emergency
dictatorships, except vast powers of war-making, surveillance,
rendition, and even torture were simply transferred to an office
for non- emergency times as well, as theorists of the unitary exec-
utive—relatively unbound by Congress or the rule of law—formed
a tight circle around a wartime boss. And there was no six-month
time limit; almost none of these powers has since been revoked.
Some hoped that Barack Obama would wind this presidency-
on-steroids down. He didn’t. His presidency began with a flurry of
executive orders. He launched a calamitous war on Libya with no
congressional authorization; he refused to prosecute those who
were involved with Bush’s torture program, who continued to rise
through the ranks on his watch; he pushed his executive powers to
fix a health-care law that constitutionally only Congress had the
right to; and, in his second term, he ignored Congress’s legally man-
dated deportation of 800,000 Dreamers by refusing to enforce it.
He had once ruled such a move out—“I’m president, I’m not king”—
and then reinvented the move as a mere shift in priorities. To
advance his environmental agenda, he used the EPA to drastically
intensify regulations, bypassing Congress altogether. To push his
cultural agenda, his Justice Department refused to defend the
existing marriage laws and abruptly interpreted Title IX to cover
transgender high-school kids without any public debate.
No Democrats regarded these moves as particularly offensive—
although partisan Republicans were eager to broadcast their
largely phony constitutional objections as soon as the president
was not a Republican. And Congress had long since acquiesced to
presidentialism anyway, wriggling out of any serious input on the
war on terror, dodging the difficult task of amending the health-
care law, bobbing and weaving on the environment. And although
the worship of Trump is on a whole different level of fanaticism,
if you didn’t see some cultish elements in the Obama movement,
you weren’t looking very hard. Like Roman commanders slowly
acquiring the trappings of gods, presidents have long since slipped
the bounds of republican austerity into a world of elected mon-
archs, flying the world in a massive, airborne chariot, constantly
photographed, and now commanding our attention every single
day through Twitter.But obama was obama, and trump is trump,
obliterating most of what mos maiorum remained after
his predecessor. Like Pompey, who bypassed all the
usual qualifications for the highest office of consul,
Trump stormed into party politics by mocking the very idea of
political qualifications, violating norms with abandon. He had
never been elected to office before; he was a businessman and a
brand, not a public servant of any kind; he had no serious grip on
the Constitution, liberal-democratic debate, the separation of
powers, or limited government. His tangible proposals were slo-
gans. He referred to his peers with crude nicknames, and his
instincts were those of a mob boss. But he offered himself, rather
like the populares in Rome, as a riposte and antidote to the politi-
cal and cultural elite, the optimates. A brilliant if dangerous
demagogue, he became the first presidential candidate to run not
as the leader of a political party, or as a disciple of conservatism
or liberalism, but as a fully fledged strongman who promised
unilaterally to “make America great again.” It is hard to equate
any kind of republican government with a leader who insists, of
any American problem, “I, alone, can fix it.”
No one in the American system at this level has ever behaved
like this before, crudely trampling on republican practices, scoff-
ing at the rule of law, targeting individual citizens for calumny,
openly demonizing his opponents, calling a free press treason-
ous, deploying deceit impulsively, skirting the boundaries of
mental illness, bragging of sexual assault, delegitimizing his own
government when it showed even a flicker of independence—
and yet he almost instantly commanded the near-total loyalty of
an entire political party, and of 40 percent of the country, and
this loyalty has barely wavered.
If republicanism at its core is a suspicion of one-man rule, and
that suspicion is the central animating (Continued on page 76)