O, say can’t you see?

Dangerously unbalanced powers and grab bag of doom and gloom

November 14, 2010|Troy Jollimore, Globe Correspondent

The nature of the power embodied in the US presidency has evolved over the years, and if Bruce Ackerman’s “The Decline and Fall of the American Republic’’ is right, the results of that evolution are unfortunate. The contemporary view that tends to see the president as the center of our country’s government and the locus of its political power is something new and quite different from what was intended by the founders.

Ackerman, a professor of law and political science at Yale who has written more than a dozen books on American politics, makes clear that his fear is not that the nation is in imminent danger of ceasing to exist as a country. What seems more likely is that its distinctively republican form of government could be lost, crushed under the weight of an unbalanced political structure. In particular, Ackerman worries that the office of the presidency will continue to grow in political influence in the coming years, opening possibilities for abuse of power if not outright despotism.

What accounts for this sea change? In part it is a combination of pressures that have distorted American political culture in the direction of extremism and a “politics of unreason.’’ This culture forces presidential candidates to eschew subtle and nuanced views in favor of extreme positions expressed through frequently meaningless sound bites. At the same time, the president’s power to enforce his decisions without being countered or checked by other branches of government continues to grow. This is most obvious during periods of national peril, which have inspired recent presidents to claim various emergency powers that are potentially dangerous and, at times, possibly unconstitutional. And that trend continues during more peaceful periods.

Moreover, the potential for abuses of power by the executive branch is not the only threat to the republic. Equally troubling are changes in the relationship between military and civilian authorities, which runs counter to our constitutional commitment to civilian control of government. This change, too, is the result of multiple complicated factors: The fact, for instance, that “key ‘civilian’ positions are increasingly colonized by retired officers whose basic values have been shaped by their successful military careers,’’ and, more worryingly still, the centralization of power in the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff that resulted from the Goldwater-Nichols act of 1986. In times of crisis, Ackerman warns, the republic could potentially be endangered both by an over-empowered executive branch and by an unconstrained and over-politicized military.