Normally I would append this personal observation as a coda. My post on the Imperial Presidency below is too clean, too intellectual; a register I hide in when I need to process something that has not yet resolved itself emotionally. For all the veneer of historical distance, the current public discourse feels shallow to me, and often frankly wrong.
Tonight is July 4, 2026, the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. I feel as if I should be more celebratory, as if the day requires some deliberate act of patriotic demarcation. But Heidi is in Michigan visiting her father. Kyrian is with his girlfriend Dylan at Half Dome. Adin and I made steak-frites and watched 12 Angry Men.
It was his idea.
That surprised me. He had read it, he said. I had never seen it, so I was enthusiastic to catch a classic with my son. I am embarrassed to admit two things: first, that I had never seen it before; and second, that I confused Henry Fonda with Peter Fonda. Dynastic conflation. A minor sin, but still a sin.
The movie was sobering. More than anything, it was a reminder of the importance of doubt.
The current discourse is always so certain of itself. Brittle, like the holdout juror #3 whose certainty is not moral conviction but psychological armor. Watching the film made me wistful for an era I never lived in, a black-and-white era where the shades of gray created necessary contrast, where meaning was found in subtle distinctions. The missing glasses betrayed by the habit of rubbing one’s nose where the dents had formed.
Truth is not brilliant clarity. It is an awareness of human limitation.
The ancient Greeks knew the danger of hubris, the danger of forgetting what category of being we are. We are not gods. Nor are we base. We are suspended. And we strive. So I thought of pious Aeneas watching Henry Fonda’s juror #8 hold the line – not with the certainty of his convictions, but with moral excellence. Aretē. A lost word.
Maybe that character was more common in the 1950s. Or maybe it was simply more commonly presented. Movie scripts then did not always need to be clever, ironic, or certain. They could still exemplify decency. Perhaps “simpler” is the right adjective. It can be used pejoratively, but I do not mean it that way.
We now have such ready access to information and answers that we forget the power of doubt. We think information is power because it gives us a small feeling of control, even of certainty. Yet as a father, I know the most important questions can never be answered with any real confidence. Only with hope.
Adin, not even six months into his first career-oriented job, is already calculating when he should leave, when he should advance, how he should move thoughtfully without stalling. My guidance is tempered by positive uncertainty. His career anxiety as a proxy for generalized uncertainty. I do not really know. I tell him it will work out.
Will it?
I do not know.
So uncertainty is salved with faith.
Kyrian, too, is testing his future early. His adventure to Yosemite is his only summer excursion. Otherwise he shuffles off to an internship with Fortis Construction, a coveted opportunity and a rare one for a freshman to land. Yet he fights the idea of being desk-bound. His aspirations turn back toward becoming a firefighter or EMT. The weight of the future is heavy on them both.
Again, I have no answers. Only reassurance.
You will find a path.
You sure, Dad?
How can you be sure?
Despite all the information and data at our fingertips, despite the oracle in every pocket, the important answers remain elusive. Oracle. That should give us pause. Delphi did not give answers so much as riddles. The oracle required interpretation, and most men heard in it what they already wanted to hear. Croesus learned that lesson too late. So do most of us.
The slow conversion of the eleven other jurors is not collective enlightenment. It is an individual journey. Each man’s certainty is eroded by this doubt or that, but each erosion is personal. Certainty is replaced by clarifying doubt. Doubt shows them that they do not really know.
And so the only decent thing to do is acquit.
Not because the defendant was abused. Not because he never got a fair shake. Not because he was disadvantaged. But because they do not know the facts with certainty.
The movie reminds us that justice is not the same thing as fairness. The defendant receives no restitution. No one repairs his life. He simply benefits from doubt. But that doubt emerges from moral decency: from the refusal to judge another human being on suppositions masquerading as certainty.
That may be the better Independence Day reflection than celebration.
The American experiment has always depended on uncertainty. The Declaration did not resolve the problem of self-government. It announced it. It wagered that a people could be free from excessive governmental constraint and still remain capable of ordering themselves through character, judgment, restraint, and some stubborn residue of fellow feeling.
That wager is not obviously secure.
It never was.
Yet watching 12 Angry Men with my son, on a quiet July 4, I found myself returning to that old civic faith. Not faith in government, but faith that ordinary citizens may still possess enough human decency to pause before judgment, to doubt their own certainty, and to remember that liberty finally depends on the character of those who claim it.
Not certainty.
Faith.
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The Imperial Presidency
The American colonies before the Revolution were not yet a nation, but they were something rarer: self-governing political societies, each with its own legislature, local elites, religious textures, and stubborn sense of rights.[1] They were bound to the British crown by law and custom, but they were also bound to one another by a growing conviction that monarchy was incompatible with a free people. Not every colonist agreed. Loyalists remained numerous and sincere. But the revolutionary coalition did agree on one foundational premise: no king should stand above Americans again.
Our Revolution was born from that refusal. The political architecture that followed was designed to prevent the return of monarchal power. The Founders understood the dangerous attraction that power exerts on the ambitious. They understood equally well that the tyranny of a majority can be as fatal to liberty as the tyranny of one. Their solution was a federal republic with carefully checked powers and an equally careful avoidance of direct democracy’s intoxicating temptations.
We have not preserved that design. We have allowed it to erode under the pressure of comfort, entitlement, and political infantilization.
The Articles of Confederation sustained the states through the Revolution, but their provincial differences created constant headaches for George Washington, who spent the war pleading for money, supplies, and unity. The temptation came first, in the spring of 1782. Colonel Lewis Nicola, writing on behalf of officers weary of an indifferent Congress, proposed to Washington that the army might simply dispense with the title of “republic” altogether and crown him king. Washington’s answer arrived by return post, and it foreclosed the matter before it could properly be opened:
You could not have found a person to whom your schemes are more disagreeable.
Washington to Lewis Nicola, May 22, 1782
The mutiny came the following spring, and it was the more dangerous of the two, precisely because it was not about a crown at all. At Newburgh in March 1783, officers of the Continental Army circulated anonymous addresses hinting at a march on Congress, or worse, a refusal to disband. Washington appeared before them unannounced and disarmed the room not with a crown’s refusal but with an appeal to the very faith they were preparing to break:
…let me entreat you, Gentlemen, on your part, not to take any measures, which, viewed in the calm light of reason, will lessen the dignity, and sully the glory you have hitherto maintained—let me request you to rely on the plighted faith of your Country, and place a full confidence in the purity of the intentions of Congress
Washington, Newburgh Address, March 15, 1783
The effect was immediate. The incipient mutiny dissolved. Twice in eleven months – once by refusing a crown, once by refusing a coup – Washington closed the door on American monarchy before the Constitution existed even once. It is no exaggeration to say that the moral logic of his presidency begins in those two moments of restraint.
But the political logic had yet to be worked out. The Articles proved untenable. Financial disarray, interstate conflict, and Shays’ Rebellion convinced the states that something stronger was needed. The response was the Constitutional Convention of 1787, held in strict secrecy, where the framers debated a radical rethinking of governance.
The resulting document provoked immediate, fierce public debate. Anti-Federalists warned that the proposed presidency was little more than a disguised crown. Federalists argued in reply that the new structure’s checks and balances, and above all its elective nature, made monarchy impossible (Hamilton, Federalist Nos. 69–70). In truth, many Anti-Federalist concerns were answered with appeals to personal virtue: that officeholders would “jealously guard” their constitutionally assigned powers, and that the electorate, devoted to liberty, would refuse any leader who attempted to gather inappropriate authority. It was a noble hope that men of integrity and intellect would rise to power, and that the public would always vote against servility and dependence.
Tocqueville, observing America half a century later, saw how fragile this premise truly was, even as he admired the country’s associational life (Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 1835). But he also saw the danger: a democratic people might surrender liberty not to a tyrant, but to an administrative protector. The system could endure only if Americans remained practiced in self-government at the small scale, and suspicious of concentrated power at the national scale.
That distinction, small-scale trust, large-scale distrust, was the genius. Citizens were meant to form character in local institutions: congregations, lodges, guilds, volunteer associations, neighborhood networks. At the national level, ambition was to be restrained by ambition. The branches would compete; power would be fragmented; no single man would become the nation’s father, redeemer, or judge.
And yet that is precisely what we have made the presidency.
Arthur Schlesinger named this condition in 1973, in the long shadow of Watergate, calling it the imperial presidency: an executive that had, through a half-century of crises real and manufactured, accumulated powers the Constitution never contemplated and Congress had ceased to defend.[2] Schlesinger’s diagnosis was institutional. He traced the migration of war powers, budgetary discretion, and secrecy from Congress to the White House, administration by administration. What he did not ask is the prior question: why did the people allow it? An institution does not seize power so much as it is handed power by a citizenry that has already decided it would rather be governed than be free. The imperial presidency is the furniture. The civic abandonment that follows is the room it was moved into.
To many, Donald Trump carries the visible veneer of monarchy; the gold leaf, the absolutist cadence, the instinctive reach for personal authority. His manner violates our civic aesthetics. He looks like the very figure the Founders most feared.
Trump is not the introduction of kingliness into American life; he is simply the first president brazen enough to match the costume to the architecture. And to redecorate the architecture to match the costume. The horror is not that one man behaves like a sovereign, but that the system beneath him has been remodeled, over the course of centuries, into something a sovereign could reign over. Trump is a symptom, not a cause. He is the noxious tenant in a palace built by administrations long before him. Schlesinger’s furniture, reupholstered in gold. He just has the audacity to wield the power with brash openness.[3]
The tragedy is we brought this upon ourselves. You get what you deserve. The American people – seeking security, prosperity, and moral reassurance – gradually abandoned the Framers’ ethic of civic self-reliance. We came to expect the federal government to solve our private crises, tame our economic cycles, cure our social ailments, and steady our collective anxieties. What began in earnest during the Great Depression is now a default assumption: government ought to fix things. (And culminates in nonsense like Graeber posits, “perhaps the world does owe you a living.”)
But this was never the vision of the Founders: It was their greatest fear.
Hamilton had already named the mechanism, years before any of them held office. Nations under continual threat, he wrote, will find that “even the ardent love of liberty will, after a time, give way” to the demands of safety, until a people “become willing to run the risk of being less free” merely “to be more safe” (Hamilton, Federalist No. 8, 1787). Jefferson, watching Washington’s example settle into precedent, was more anxious still:
The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield, and government to gain ground. As yet our spirits are free. Our jealousy is only put to sleep by the unlimited confidence we all repose in the person to whom we all look as our president. After him inferior characters may perhaps succeed and awaken us to the danger which his merit has led us into.
Jefferson to Edward Carrington, May 27, 1788
Jefferson recognized Washington’s character allayed concerns on presidential power, but was a realist in forecasting the future potential abuse of office. Thus, he placed the burden of preservation of liberty on civic responsibility, on each and every citizen being capable of bearing the weight of their own lives rather than outsourcing adulthood to an administrative state.
Democracies seldom fall to coups; they dissolve through the ceding of personal responsibility in the face of crisis. Madison understood this with unnerving clarity: public crises offer convenient justification for expanding authority, and once expanded, authority rarely recedes (Madison, Federalist No. 41).
The Founders assumed the American citizen would resist that decay through small-scale trust to cultivate virtue, and large-scale distrust to contain ambition. “Ambition must be made to counteract ambition,” Madison insisted (Madison, Federalist No. 51). Citizens were to form their civic character in towns, congregations, lodges, guilds, and voluntary associations: the spaces Tocqueville called “the mother science of democracy” (Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 1835). At the national level, the system depended on rivalry and restraint formalized by checks, balances, and staggered elections. The republic’s stability required both levels functioning simultaneously.
There were earlier challenges, but the Great Depression shattered the equilibrium. The collapse was not simply financial. It was anthropological. Banks failed. Families scattered across the continent. Churches and fraternal societies, once the backbone of mutual aid, collapsed under demand. Local employers vanished. Reciprocal networks dissolved. America did not merely suffer poverty, it suffered disembedding. In Calasso’s terms, the civic ritual that once bound Americans to one another was unstitched.
The disappearance of ritual does not bring freedom, but a new form of bondage: to procedures, to impersonal mechanisms, to the perpetual improvisation of those who no longer possess a form.
Calasso, The Ruin of Kasch, 1983:59
Herbert Hoover was the first to use the powers of the president to mend the unraveling. Hoover argued in his 1931 and 1932 radio addresses that while “the Government alone cannot produce prosperity,” it must act to “liberate the inherent resources and strength of the American people” in the face of crisis (Hoover, Radio Address on the Hoarding of Currency, 1932).
Rothbard captured the truth: Hoover was the progenitor of the New Deal; Roosevelt merely amplified what Hoover had begun (Rothbard, America’s Great Depression, 1963). Hoover pressured industry, coordinated national planning, and expanded federal intervention. Benevolent intent, but a constitutional rupture.
Franklin Roosevelt entered office not as a manager but as a redeemer. His inaugural declaration ensorcelled a frightened people, its cadence more spell than speech, steadying their nerves and preparing them to accept extraordinary federal authority:
The only thing we have to fear is – fear itself.
FDR, Inaugural Address, March 4, 1933
His fireside chats, delivered with his patrician Hudson Valley diction, forged a direct emotional bond between executive and citizen unprecedented in American history. Regulatory agencies proliferated and centralization of power grew. Executive Order 6102 required Americans to surrender their gold “to the Government of the United States” (Executive Order 6102, April 5, 1933), an act inconceivable before the Depression but then accepted as necessary.[4]
Voluntary associations (far more structured and civically generative than the looser “third spaces” discussed currently) began eroding as federal, state, and municipal bureaucracies expanded to assume many of their core functions.[5] What Rotary, the Elks, church guilds, women’s auxiliaries, and neighborhood improvement clubs once handled through local initiative – mutual aid, dispute resolution, recreation, welfare relief, informal insurance, even job placement – was absorbed by the administrative state. As governmental agencies professionalized these tasks, the incentives for communities to maintain their own parallel institutions weakened.
Roosevelt’s achievement was subtle and insidious: he reshaped the expectations of the people. Americans began looking upward for safety, employment, even moral reassurance. The presidency became the symbolic center of civic life. The citizenry became dependent, infantilized. Congress, expected by Madison to guard its legislative power “jealously,” surrendered it willingly. And in doing so, helped construct the modern imperial executive.
From that point, we race ahead with tragic predictability.
Lyndon Johnson transformed the administrative state into a domestic magisterium (Johnson, “Great Society” Speech, 1964).
Richard Nixon normalized the culture of executive immunity:
When the President does it, that means that it is not illegal.
Nixon, Frost Interview, May 19, 1977
Ronald Reagan revived the language of America’s founding virtues, yet he magnified the presidency’s aura; his mastery of television turned the executive into a national mirror, reinforcing the expectation that meaning, momentum, and reassurance flow downward from one man rather than outward from the people.
George W. Bush transformed himself into a vindicator-president, wielding the moral absolutism of the post-9/11 moment to obtain the AUMF’s open-ended wartime powers (Authorization for Use of Military Force, 2001). This authorization was broad by design. Its scope is defined by what the President determines as necessary and it remains a standing license for executive war-making across the globe.
Barack Obama, laureled with a Nobel Peace Prize awarded for aspiration rather than accomplishment, surrendered none of the wartime and surveillance authorities he inherited. Instead he perfected a morally anesthetized unilateralism, presenting executive power not as a danger to liberty but as the virtuous instrument of a president too enlightened to wait for Congress:
I’ve got a pen and I’ve got a phone.
Obama, White House Press Conference, January 14, 2014
He framed executive action not as bypassing Congress but as ethically necessary in the face of legislative failure even at moments when his party controlled one or both houses of Congress.
And then came Trump. His declaration at the 2016 Republican National Convention exposed the structure entirely:
I alone can fix it.
Trump, RNC Acceptance Speech, July 21, 2016
He was not an aberration but an unveiling. The throne commands obedience, even when the sovereign does not know how to sit upon it. Trump merely sat upon what others had already built.
Biden proved that charisma is optional. The architecture itself is what matters. Executive power can be exercised bureaucratically, and with a constant moral hum that tells citizens what must be affirmed and what must not be questioned. The presidency no longer needs a kingly personality. It only needs a populace trained to seek permission, reassurance, and absolution from institutions.
And then came Trump again.
Trump’s return to the political stage did not reintroduce chaos so much as expose how thoroughly the country had adapted to it, and how many Americans had grown weary of the moral paternalism that dominated elite institutions under Biden. If Trump’s first ascent exposed the structural power of the modern presidency, his second demonstrated that a critical mass of the electorate had come to see the executive not as administrator but as champion, counterweight, and cultural weapon. The presidency had become the last symbolic monarchy in a culture hollowed of civic responsibility and overrun by institutional moralism. His reappearance clarified what Biden’s interlude had obscured: the imperial presidency no longer requires a kingly personality, only a populace desperate for someone to smash the catechism that replaced civic life.
This is the Federalist nightmare realized. When small-scale trust collapses, citizens stop looking outward to one another and begin looking upward to a single redeemer. Congress abandons its obligations. The presidency becomes the locus of identity, grievance, hope, and rage. Power centralizes not because one man wills it, but because a subordinated people expect it.
And so the uncomfortable truth stands naked. Without Hoover’s technocratic benevolence and FDR’s charismatic centralization, there is no Trump. Every cry about despotic impulses is an indictment of a system both parties built with steady hands. Hoover began the centralization; Roosevelt sanctified it; Johnson broadened it; Nixon concealed it; Reagan mythologized it; Bush empowered it; Obama moralized it; Biden normalized it; Trump merely used it.
All of them abused it. And we let them.
The imperial presidency arose out of fear, dependency, and civic abandonment. The end we lament was fed by the belief that the world owes you something and that government exists to spare you the burden of being an adult.
And no one since Washington has had the moral rectitude to simply walk away and live a life of quiet dignity.
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[1] I borrow the term “folkway,” from David Hackett Fischer’s Albion’s Seed, which maps four distinct British cultural streams, Puritan New England, Cavalier Tidewater, Quaker Midlands, and the Scots-Irish Backcountry, and shows how each carried forward its own idea of liberty. The critical point for my argument is not that these groups were harmonious. They were not. They disagreed about nearly everything: authority, hierarchy, God, law, violence, and the proper shape of a decent human life. Yet for all their differences, each group had inherited a deep-set aversion to subjection, especially to a distant monarch who claimed dominion without direct reciprocal obligation.
Each folkway’s “no monarch” meant something slightly different:
New England’s Puritans opposed the Crown when it threatened ordered liberty, their right to govern themselves through covenant, town meeting, and moral discipline. They didn’t dream of radical equality; they sought to preserve their moral community against an intrusive imperial hand that neither understood nor respected their project. Their anti-monarchism was a defense of local sovereignty, not universal liberation.
Tidewater Cavaliers rejected monarchy the moment George III appeared to treat gentlemen like commoners. Their “hegemonic liberty” meant self-rule as a ruling class. They fought not to democratize America but to prevent Parliament from reorganizing the hierarchy with the Virginians at the bottom. A perceived humiliation they would resist with aristocratic fury.
The Quaker Midlands clung to reciprocal liberty, a negotiated freedom of conscience and pluralism. They resisted monarchy because imperial policy broke the tacit covenant of non-coercion that sustained their commercial, polyglot world. They were the last to choose war, but once the Crown made peaceful dissent impossible, even Quaker opposition collapsed. Their turn to resistance was reluctant but morally resolute.
The Backcountry Scots-Irish needed no complex theory: natural liberty meant that no distant lord – no king, governor, nor sheriff – would tell an armed man where to live, whom to fight, or what land he could take. “Monarchy” was simply the name for whoever was trying to fence them in this year. Their anti-monarchism was visceral, personal, and combustible.
The Revolution, in other words, was not born from a shared constitutional philosophy; it was a convergence of four incompatible liberties that all read monarchal consolidation as existential threat. They united in opposition to monarchy only because monarchy was the one thing they all felt threatened by, each for their own reasons.
This collision of liberty-types explains why George Washington became the indispensable figure. John Adams observed that Washington’s ‘tall Stature, like the Hebrew Sovereign chosen because he was taller by the Head than the other Jews,’ ranked among his many ‘Talents’ but Washington’s elevation was not cosmetic. He embodied the Tidewater gentry’s hierarchical discipline and his formative military service came from the French and Indian War, where he learned the limits of militia enthusiasm, the shock of irregular combat, and the brittleness of British arrogance.
His measured character, self-denying, severity moderated by patience, was precisely what allowed him to stand at the intersection of four contradictory folkways and still be obeyed. In another time and place, he might have been merely a dutiful provincial officer. In 1775, he became the one man each liberty-tradition could follow without fearing the others.
These distinct folkways did not fight the same kind of war, and Washington spent eight years trying to stitch their incompatible methods into something like a national strategy.
New Englanders fought as organized, community-anchored militias, extensions of town government. When they skirmished at Lexington and Concord or stood at Bunker Hill, they fused orthodox linear battle with home-grown tactical improvisation. Their fighting style mirrored Puritan society: disciplined but locally governed, coordinated but never quite centralized.
Tidewater elites gravitated toward the Continental Line, valuing hierarchy, drill, and “proper” European warfare. Their militias doubled as instruments of internal control against Loyalists, slaves, and the restless poor. For them, fighting meant sustaining a gentleman’s army to secure a gentleman’s peace.
The Midlands fought in two incompatible registers: Quaker pacifists who resisted coercion and withdrew from politics, and radical frontier Germans and Ulster settlers who fought with ferocity indistinguishable from their southern backcountry cousins. The region’s military contribution was schizophrenic, half conscientious objection, half scorched-earth.
The Backcountry waged irregular and often brutal war: ambushes, raids, personal vendettas, and village-level civil war. At King’s Mountain, Cowpens, and through the vicious partisan struggle in the Carolinas, they blended indigenous “skulking” tactics with border-country retributive violence. To them, the Revolution was not Boston’s ideological quarrel but a fight for personal autonomy and local dominance.
Washington, trained on the frontier but formed as a Tidewater aristocrat, understood all these modes of war without fully belonging to any. His genius (vastly underappreciated in current discourse) was to accept that a true national army would be a composite creature: disciplined Continentals at its core, reinforced by militias whose behavior ranged from rigidly controlled to barely governable. His Fabian approach relied on not losing, conserving the regular army while unleashing regional strengths where they mattered. He tolerated what he could not eliminate, shaped what he could not command, and absorbed what he could not understand. A true stoic.
That is why the disparate folkways could fight under one banner. Not because they shared a unified theory of freedom, but because Washington – tall, steady, schooled by frontier disaster, and morally anchored in ways his peers recognized even when they chafed – allowed each group to see its own reflection in the cause.
The miracle, if we can still use that word, is not that these disparate groups overthrew the British king; it is that they managed to tolerate each other long enough to do it.
[2] Schlesinger, The Imperial Presidency (1973). Schlesinger wrote as a partisan of the New Deal alarmed at what Nixon had done with tools FDR, Truman, and Johnson had built. His villain was Nixon’s temperament, not the architecture itself, which Schlesinger was generally inclined to defend when wielded by presidents he approved of. This is the limit of an institutional history written by a participant in the institution’s expansion: it can describe the accretion of power with great precision while remaining unable to ask whether the accretion was ever legitimate, regardless of who held it. I call it naive hypocrisy and reject his implicit premise that the imperial presidency is a problem of the wrong men holding the right office, rather than a problem with the power of the office itself.
[3] It is one of the enduring ironies of American history that the earliest presidents were also the first to wear kingly trappings.
John Adams is the first and funniest example. Biographers routinely remind us that Adams was allergic to vanity, suspicious of charisma, and temperamentally incapable of flattery. Yet once he entered the presidency, he began acting like a man who had wandered into a European court and desperately wanted to play along. He championed elaborate honorifics for the executive (“His Highness the President” being the most notorious suggestion), dressed in diplomatic regalia and presided over formal levees that looked suspiciously like royal audiences. His defenders insisted he was only protecting the dignity of the office. His critics suspected he enjoyed it a bit more than he admitted.
Adams’s impulse toward ornamentation was not corruption but philosophy: he feared democracy’s leveling instincts more than monarchy’s theatrical ones, and believed that visible dignity in the executive might restrain popular passions. The irony is painful and perfect: the man who intellectually despised kingship helped establish the aesthetic template that every future executive would be tempted to inherit. Anti-Federalists could not have scripted a better vindication of their anxieties.
Then came Abraham Lincoln, the most complicated case. Unlike Adams, Lincoln disdained pomp; he dressed plainly, walked awkwardly, and his countenance was sadness embodied. Yet he wielded executive power on a scale that dwarfed every predecessor and set precedents future presidents would normalize. He suspended habeas corpus, authorized military arrests of civilians, expanded the army without congressional approval, tolerated sweeping press suppression, and sanctioned military tribunals far beyond constitutional warrant.
His justification was brutally simple: save the Union or watch the experiment die.
This is the tragedy of Lincoln: he became a king to preserve the affiliation, and in doing so sowed the seeds of future executive monarchs.
John Wilkes Booth believed he was striking down a tyrant; his cry of “Sic semper tyrannis!” in Ford’s Theatre was less Brutus avenging the Republic and more a deluded actor playing Caesar-killer for an audience of one. But the fact that Booth could plausibly frame the assassination as tyrannicide shows how far the presidency had already drifted from its republican moorings.
Woodrow Wilson represented something darker still: the president as theologian-king. Cold, ascetic, professorial, Wilson possessed the worst vices of the intellectual unmoored by humility: a rigid mind armed with moral certainty, a racial worldview draped in academic gentility, and an unshakable conviction that Providence had assigned him the guardianship of national virtue.
He declared the Constitution outdated, a relic obstructing the “living” needs of the modern state. That contempt gave him license to centralize wartime authority beyond any president before him: economic control boards, federal propaganda machinery, and sweeping censorship under the Espionage and Sedition Acts. Dissent became sin; opposition became error; error became something to be administratively corrected. The administrative leviathan he built (boards, bureaus, permanent commissions) became the architecture of the modern regulatory state, a machinery that future presidents could command without ever needing to persuade the people or Congress.
Worse, Wilson was not merely a Southern man poisoned by his era’s racism; he was its federal architect. He re-segregated the civil service “for efficiency,” institutionalized racial hierarchy in federal employment, and repeatedly screened The Birth of a Nation in the White House, praising it as “like writing history with lightning.” No president before or since has more energetically sacralized racial ideology as civic policy or aligned the executive office with a moral crusade grounded in prejudice.
He governed not as a monarch of temperament but as a Calvinist pontiff, convinced that the enlightened few (himself foremost) were ordained to shepherd the irrational many. Wilsonism was monarchy laundered through academic piety.
Taken together, Adams, Lincoln, and Wilson reveal how every emergency justified a new expansion of presidential authority to resolve the problem of the moment. The Founders knew human beings were fallible and attempted to impose mechanical limits on ambition, but the institutional guardrails were always dependent on moral restraint. Adams gave the office its costume, Lincoln its emergency logic, and Wilson its bureaucratic indifference. Three steps in the evolution toward a monarchical executive who can impose his will upon the citizenry which forget it is meant to be free.
[4] Rothbard’s account makes clear that Roosevelt’s inaugural invocation operated atop a financial system already in a state of structural insolvency rather than one derailed by mere “fear.” In the days leading up to March 4, 1933, bank suspensions accelerated into a nationwide paralysis: by March 3, every bank in 48 states was either closed or under severe withdrawal restriction, and the Federal Reserve’s gold reserves had fallen so low that the system was within hours of failing to meet its statutory obligations under the gold standard (Friedman & Schwartz, A Monetary History of the United States, 1963, pp. 324–327). Rothbard argues that this collapse was the predictable outcome of decades of credit inflation under fractional reserve banking, compounded by Hoover’s interventions, not merely a psychological phenomenon awaiting cure through confidence (Rothbard, America’s Great Depression, 1963).
While Rothbard bluntly notes that Roosevelt’s line, “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself,” functioned not as reassurance but as a political and monetary sleight-of-hand (recasting structural insolvency into a solvable emotional crisis and thereby legitimizing extraordinary federal action), nevertheless it worked. His first Fireside Chat on banking (March 12), delivered with the intimacy of a personal appeal, produced an astonishing measurable effect: by March 15, according to Federal Reserve data, more than half the cash hoarded before the Bank Holiday had been redeposited, and deposits exceeded withdrawals for the first sustained period in months (Federal Reserve Bulletin, April 1933). Within a week, thousands of banks reopened, and confidence returned with remarkable speed.
Rothbard interprets this not as evidence of Roosevelt’s healing genius but as demonstration of the seductive danger of charismatic authority, noting that the same emotional mechanism that calmed the public also smoothed the way for Executive Order 6102, which he characterizes as the most sweeping peacetime confiscation of private wealth in American history (Rothbard, The Case Against the Fed, 1994, pp. 64–70). In Frank Herbert’s terms, Roosevelt embodied the archetype of the benevolent charismatic leader who banishes fear only to become the vessel into which a people pour their agency. The monetary system was stabilized; the constitutional equilibrium was quietly broken.
Roosevelt, mastering the new medium of radio with an ease that no president before or since has matched, deepened this enchantment through his fireside chats. These broadcasts did not merely inform; they reshaped emotion, creating a direct and intimate channel between executive and citizen that bypassed Congress entirely. It was political sorcery of a modern kind, Snow Crash without the glossolalia, where the medium carried not just message but authority.
Protective Arts 