Faith in Trying Times

What do you do when the vibes are not good?

“When the president does it, that means it's not illegal.”—Richard Nixon

The 1970s were a difficult time for U.S. democracy. The governing class of the country was revealed, rather thoroughly, to be corrupt—not just Nixon, of course, but also ordinary members of Congress, corporations, and intelligence agencies. Those revelations sparked a wave of reform and almost touching reaffirmations of U.S. democracy. Jimmy Carter summed it up by promising a government as good as the American people.

Today, the Supreme Court held that Nixon was, if not entirely right, not entirely wrong either. The invention of presidential immunity, however qualified it may be, stands as a watershed moment for U.S. democracy. It certainly weakens any claim to accountability through formal, judicial processes. It may not be the last rending of the fabric of what we were told the Constitutional order was, but it is very definitely a gash in what has already proven to be a tattered document.

Coming after a decade of constitutional turmoil that predated Donald Trump’s accession but which was certainly accelerated by it, the immunity ruling punctuates a sentence that was already clear: the contemporary presidency now wields far greater potential than the office described as “imperial” by the historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., in the early 1970s. That imperious office, in Schlesinger’s telling, had been largely constructed by congressional acquiesence in the Cold War measures that centralized political and military authority in the Leader of the Free World; Schlesinger would have downplayed the corollary assertion that the New Deal had similarly earlier concentrated much power in the executive branch, but it is, I think, indisputable—even if one views such centralization as desirable and necessary.

It is fashionable to say that Congress has not pushed back against the recent exertions of presidential authority, but I think this is somewhat overblown. It impeached President Trump twice. It passed bills to limit presidential powers with regard to Russian sanctions. It prevailed in passing a vauntingly ambitious Covid relief package that, if anything, may have succeeded too well—despite initial White House misgivings. To be sure, it could have done more, but rumors of the demise of the First Branch are somewhat overblown. Where Congress has faltered has been more in its refusal or inability to keep the Supreme Court onsides—in the way that reforming the judicial branch to keep it as a subordinate entity has been treated as a ludicrous, even dangerous position.

Further, many of the normative developments of the past decade have not been amenable to legislative action. If the Framers believed that the chief magistrate had to be a person of unimpeachable character, Trump has shown that the system can and will tolerate someone with a rather different approach. Donald Trump serves as the antithesis of George Washington, and the culture of honor that the Framers simply assumed would induce restraint, and which was in some modified, descended way, operative during the Obama and Biden administrations, has vanished.

The situation is grim. There are better than even odds that the brief respite of the Biden administration will be ended this November. Were the United States to turn in a pronounced illiberal direction, the consequences would be even greater for global society, and particularly democratic countries, than in the first term. The situation would grow even grimmer and persist for some time.

The question is where we go from here. Expansions of the executive’s political power coupled with shrinking regulatory agencies have sapped the institutionalized defenses of the New Deal and Great Society. Pressing issues, from the environment to the protection of civil liberties to the continuity of the government we have come to expect, require pressing action. Such tendencies would be magnified under a Trump administration but the state of the rest of the government and of the states means they will bedevil our politics even if the worst does not come to pass.

The details will consume our discourse for generations, even if, for a time, I suspect that such discourses may be worked out in quiet conversations rather than the bold disputations to which we have grown accustomed. The central principle, however, is clear. We must keep faith that progress is possible despite setbacks—even massive ones.

Hope is not a plan but without it there is no reason to persist. And in the decades to come, persistence will be necessary for carrying out the great work of rebuilding what has been left to rot or knocked down by the feckless or the vile.