{"id":6966,"date":"2014-02-03T11:26:39","date_gmt":"2014-02-03T19:26:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/?p=6966"},"modified":"2014-02-03T11:26:39","modified_gmt":"2014-02-03T19:26:39","slug":"executive-tyranny-the-problems-bigger-than-obama","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/executive-tyranny-the-problems-bigger-than-obama\/","title":{"rendered":"Executive Tyranny: The Problem’s Bigger Than Obama"},"content":{"rendered":"

by Bruce S. Thornton \/\/\u00a0FrontPage Magazine<\/a>\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

Barack Obama is threatening to bypass Congress and use executive orders to achieve the policy changes he can\u2019t get through legislation. \u201cWe are not just going to be waiting for legislation in order to make sure that we\u2019re providing Americans the kind of help that they need,\u201d he said during the State of the Union address. \u201cI\u2019ve got a pen and I\u2019ve got a phone.\u201d Here seemingly is one more item in the indictment of Barack Obama\u2019s arrogant dismissal of the Constitutional order, and his contempt for mixed government.<\/p>\n

But once again, the problem isn\u2019t the ideology or personality flaws of Obama, as dangerous and extensive as those are. Obama is just a more extreme version of Progressive ideas permeating our politics for more than a century. The problem runs deep in our political order, and will require much more than just changing a few political personalities in order to restore the limited government and citizen self-government intended by the Founders.<\/p>\n

The \u201cimperial presidency\u201d Obama that\u00a0himself decried when George W. Bush was in power is a corollary of the expanded federal government that Progressives claimed was necessary to address the new economic and social circumstances brought about by an industrialized economy and social change. Only a big federal government could achieve the collectivist goals and utopian programs Progressives wanted to pursue, for as Progressive theorist Herbert Croly wrote in 1919,\u00a0 \u201cOnly by faith in an efficient national organization, and by an exclusive and aggressive devotion to the national welfare, can the American democratic ideal be made good,\u201d and \u201cunder existing conditions and simply as a matter of expediency, the national advance of the American democracy does demand an increasing amount of centralized action and responsibility.\u201d<\/p>\n

Such a centralized enlarged\u00a0government requires a chief executive much stronger than the President designed by the Constitution. He must be a \u201cleader of men,\u201d as Woodrow Wilson put it, and not just a political leader, but a transformer and creator of national opinion. Wilson\u2019s further remarks suggest an attitude towards leadership closer to the Italian fascism of Benito Mussolini than to the Constitution, and looks ahead to the messianic aura and rhetoric that has characterized Democrats like Franklin Delano Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, and worst of all, Barack Obama. \u201cWhoever would effect a change in a modern constitutional government,\u201d Wilson wrote in 1887, \u201cmust first educate his fellow-citizens to\u00a0want<\/i>\u00a0some change. That done, he must persuade them to want the particular change he wants. He must first make public opinion willing to listen and then see to it that it listen to the right things. He must stir it up to search for an opinion, and then manage to put the right opinion in its way.\u201d Rather than policy rising from the various interests of the people and communicated through their representatives, now it will be imposed from above by a wiser \u201cleader of men\u201d who better knows than the people do what \u201cright things\u201d are good for them.<\/p>\n

This is a vision of Presidential leadership far different from the Constitution\u2019s chief executive, who ceded the law-making power to Congress, and who acted as a check and balance on the excesses of that branch of government. Wilson believed such a limited executive was unsuitable for the new challenges the country was facing. \u00a0It now needed a president more powerful than the Constitution\u2019s chief executive, who was limited to being \u201conly the legal executive, the presiding and guiding authority in the application of law and the execution of policy . . . He was empowered [by the veto] to prevent bad laws, but he was not to be given an opportunity to make good ones.\u201d Now the responsibility of the president to \u201ctake care that the laws be faithfully executed,\u201d as the Constitution put it,\u00a0must be revised and expanded to\u00a0making<\/i>\u00a0the laws, according not to the people but to the powerful executive\u2019s notion of what defines good laws. Sounds pretty much like what Obama has been doing and threatens to keep on doing.<\/p>\n

Equally foreign to the Constitution is Wilson\u2019s\u00a0notion that government \u201cis a living, organic thing, and must, like every other government, work out the close synthesis of active parts, which exist only when leadership is lodged in some one man or group of men.\u201d Further contradicting the Constitution\u2019s structure based on mixed government and on balancing and checking clashing passions and interests, Wilson writes, \u201cYou cannot compound a successful government out of antagonisms.\u201d Thus we must \u201clook to the President as the unifying force in our complex system, the leader both of his party and of the nation.\u201d The Constitution recognized the various\u00a0conflicting interests of the people, and sought only to keep one faction from dominating over another and limiting individual freedom by seizing control over the coercive power of the federal government. The Progressives, in contrast, want to aggrandize more and more central power in order to unify the national interests as they define it, and smooth out those messy, inefficient factional rivalries in order to achieve the improvement that \u201csome one man or group of men\u201d have decided is best for the country.<\/p>\n

These un-Constitutional attitudes toward a powerful executive have been constant among Democrats and even occasionally some Republicans. What Obama has been doing during his presidency with his \u201cpen and phone\u201d is novel only in its brazen scope, nakedly political motivations, and blatant disregard for Congressional prerogative. But in spirit it is consistent with the Progressive movement\u2019s impatience and disdain for the Constitution, its belief that a giant federal government armed with coercive regulatory power requires a stronger, if not messianic, President, and its assumption that technocrats of superior wisdom and virtue are better placed to determine the people\u2019s best interests than are citizens and their representatives. Most Democrats today share the same assumptions, particularly Hillary \u201cIt takes a village\u201d Clinton.<\/p>\n

This history, moreover, reminds us just how far gone all of us are in accepting uncritically these assumptions. The\u00a0Weekly Standard<\/i>\u2019s Jay Cost, for example, recently offered advice for those seeking \u201can equality agenda.\u201d He says all the right things about the dysfunctions of a federal government held hostage to special interests and bureaucratic corruption. His solution is to \u201cfocus on empowering individuals directly, rather than via bureaucrats or interest groups. Block grants to state and local governments (where the citizenry can exercise greater control), vouchers, and easily accessible tax credits are all ways to level the economic playing field as well as the political one, for they all can empower individuals to make their own life choices.\u201d<\/p>\n

All these ideas are infinitely better than anything Obama has proposed for solving income inequality. But why even concede that \u201cincome inequality\u201d is a problem at all, or that an \u201cequality agenda\u201d is a legitimate concern of the federal government? After all, to paraphrase Ronald Reagan, the federal government doesn\u2019t \u201cempower individuals,\u201d people, families, and civil society do. The federal government just needs to get out of the way, and leave people the freedom to rise to whatever level their talents, hard work, virtue, and luck can take them. And it is na\u00efve to think that the feds will give states and people a dime without attaching their own conditions and rules. Jay Cost is one of the smartest political commentators around, but he cedes too much to the anti-Constitutional agenda to \u201csolve problems\u201d by amassing power at the expense of individual freedom.<\/p>\n

Obama is just the extreme version of a widespread belief among many in both parties that an enormous, intrusive federal regulatory and redistributionist regime is necessary for \u201csolving problems\u201d that in fact are best left to individuals and state and local government. The only argument between the parties these days is over the amount and pace of expansion\u2013\u2013spending, for example, $800 billion on food stamps over the next decade rather than $808 billion. This belief in problem-solving big government is more insidious and thus in the long run more dangerous than Obama\u2019s \u201cpen and phone.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

by Bruce S. Thornton \/\/\u00a0FrontPage Magazine\u00a0 Barack Obama is threatening to bypass Congress and use executive orders to achieve the policy changes he can\u2019t get through legislation. \u201cWe are not just going to be waiting for legislation in order to make sure that we\u2019re providing Americans the kind of help that they need,\u201d he said […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[22,117],"tags":[12,66,624,897,231,916,570],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p466Sb-1Om","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":2534,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/its-the-philosophy-stupid\/","url_meta":{"origin":6966,"position":0},"title":"It’s the Philosophy, Stupid","author":"victorhanson","date":"July 15, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"by Bruce S. Thornton Advancing a Free Society The Democrats\u2019 position in the negotiations to raise the debt limit and deal with runaway government debt can be summarized in one mantric phrase: the rich must \u201cpay their fair share\u201d in taxes. White House communications director Dan Pfeiffer, for example, said\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Bruce S. Thornton"","block_context":{"text":"Bruce S. Thornton","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/our-contributors\/bruce-s-thornton\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1138,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/its-the-president-stupid-the-referendum-on-barack-obama\/","url_meta":{"origin":6966,"position":1},"title":"It’s the President Stupid: The Referendum on Barack Obama","author":"victorhanson","date":"November 10, 2010","format":false,"excerpt":"by Bruce S. Thornton RightNetwork.com The people have spoken, and what they have said concerns more than just the wrong-headed policies the Democrats have inflicted upon us in the past few years. This election was never just about policy \u2013\u2013 it was also about Barack Obama and the repudiation of\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Bruce S. Thornton"","block_context":{"text":"Bruce S. Thornton","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/our-contributors\/bruce-s-thornton\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":418,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-clear-alternatives-in-the-presidential-debate\/","url_meta":{"origin":6966,"position":2},"title":"The Clear Alternatives in the Presidential Debate","author":"victorhanson","date":"October 6, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"by Bruce Thornton FrontPage Magazine Forget all the pre-debate handicapping and advice about what Mitt Romney needed to do or what Barack Obama had to avoid. Last night\u2019s debate clarified the stark choice facing American voters on November 6. On the one hand, we heard a candidate who endorses limited\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Bruce S. Thornton"","block_context":{"text":"Bruce S. Thornton","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/our-contributors\/bruce-s-thornton\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":7851,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/to-hell-with-the-constitution\/","url_meta":{"origin":6966,"position":3},"title":"\u2018To Hell With the Constitution!\u2019","author":"victorhanson","date":"September 11, 2014","format":false,"excerpt":"by Bruce S. Thornton \/\/ FrontPage Magazine\u00a0 In 1902 Theodore Roosevelt intervened in a strike by Pennsylvania coal miners, exceeding his Constitutional authority as president. When this was pointed out to him by Republican House whip James E. Watson, Roosevelt allegedly yelled, \u201cTo hell with the Constitution when the people\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Our Contributors"","block_context":{"text":"Our Contributors","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/our-contributors\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"Photo via www.newrepublic.com","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/09\/Obama-Teddy.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":862,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/obama-a-creature-of-the-corrupt-university\/","url_meta":{"origin":6966,"position":4},"title":"Obama a Creature of the Corrupt University","author":"victorhanson","date":"April 5, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"by Bruce S. Thornton FrontPage Magazine The November presidential election was the favorite topic at the Freedom Center\u2019s West Coast Retreat last weekend. Amidst the prognostications and arguments about which Republican would or should get the nomination, or how pessimistic or optimistic conservatives should be about defeating the President, the\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Education"","block_context":{"text":"Education","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/education\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":6636,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/barack-obama-and-the-bad-ideas-of-progressivism\/","url_meta":{"origin":6966,"position":5},"title":"Barack Obama and the Bad Ideas of Progressivism","author":"victorhanson","date":"October 17, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"by Bruce S. Thornton \/\/\u00a0FrontPage Magazine\u00a0 Barack Obama\u2019s serial gross incompetence has elicited all sorts of explanatory theories. He\u2019s a closet socialist, an Alinskyite radical, a secret Muslim, or an anti-American internationalist. Though some of Obama\u2019s words and deeds give support to all these speculations, I prefer a simpler explanation.\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Bruce S. Thornton"","block_context":{"text":"Bruce S. Thornton","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/our-contributors\/bruce-s-thornton\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6966"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6966"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6966\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6968,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6966\/revisions\/6968"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6966"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6966"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6966"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}