The "Factional Presidency"

I've been working out some ideas for the last class session of the semester in my course on the U.S. presidency.  I'm going to tell the students that I am thinking out loud, because this is really not well-developed yet. But here's the story I want to tell. It's familiar until the end, when I introduce something I haven't seen before.

The elevator speech version is that in the postwar period we built a powerful presidency, a president-centered national government. On the institutional side, we did this because of new global commitments and conflicts, the need for management of the expanded administrative state, Congress's inability to lead in management of the national economy, and as a response to the rise of radio and television.  Presidents gained the capacity for unmediated communication to the public; in mediated communication the president became the focal point for the dramas that played out in televised news.

On the political side, this all played out in a period of broad "consensus politics."  Until the mid-1960s the Cold War consensus on foreign policy mostly held.  Until 1980, roughly, the Keynesian consensus on economic policy held. This was one of the fundamental political conditions for the rise of the modern presidency--regardless of party presidents could be counted on to operate somewhere near the mid-point of the consensus on foreign and most domestic policies. In effect, this was a "check" on presidential power, even as that power expanded. There were other institutional and political checks. Parties still controlled nominations; the Congress still had formidable, autonomous centers of power in the committee chairs; voters didn't perceive huge differences between the parties, and many did swing and split tickets through this period.

In this era scholars of American government championed presidential power as a key to breaking gridlock on pressing issues, and it was even sort of sensible for Richard Neustadt to write, as he did in his classic Presidential Power (1960), that "What's good for America is good for the president, and vice versa."   

Where are we now? The institutional conditions that fed, even required, the growth of presidential power remain, and the substantial resources controlled by the executive branch are still in place.  But the political conditions that made the growth of presidential power broadly tolerable and politically manageable have collapsed. From Reagan forward, with GHW Bush as a possible exception, every president in this deeply polarized polity is perceived as a factional leader. They emerge from a fractured polity, and the exercise of their substantial powers in service of what are perceived as factional agendas drives further divisions. Thus we see sharp and growing differences in presidential approval by partisanship (see the figure below), and we see the broader manifestations in Clinton Derangement Syndrome, Bush Derangement Syndrome, Obama Derangement Syndrome, and Trump Derangement Syndrome, with all of these presidents' opponents bitterly opposed to their leadership across the board. What this "factional presidency" does to American politics is qualitatively different than the politics presidents of that earlier era made.  The aggressive exercise of expansive presidential powers, long championed by liberals and conservatives alike as a necessity given the demands of foreign policy and the rise of the administrative state, now seriously threatens political stability and order.  The factional presidency is a result of the many forces that have driven partisan polarization; it is also now a primary driver.

Or something like that. Here's something from Gallup on presidential approval by party, from Eisenhower's first year through Trump's first year.

Disgrace

Shortly after Donald Trump’s election to the presidency I decided to watch again President Barack Obama’s talk at the funeral for  the men and women of the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Grace Church in Charleston, Christians murdered by the white supremacist Dylan Roof. I urge you to call it up, https://www.nytimes.com/video/us/100000003767801/obama-delivers-eulogy-in-charleston.html,and ask even those who despise Obama to watch with an open mind and heart. I occasionally disagreed with him, and at times I thought he might not be up to the job, but in that moment Obama displayed his fundamental humanity and the power of his leadership in grief, and ultimate consolation. Amazing grace, indeed. I think it was the best eulogy spoken in the US since the doomed Robert Kennedy’s brief 1968 Indianapolis speech upon learning of Martin Luther King’s death. Somehow in that moment Kennedy found these words: “My favorite poet was Aeschylus. He wrote, `In our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.’” 

At that time I tried to imagine President Trump speaking after some inevitable, horrible tragedy. I couldn’t, and that led me to understand just how much we had lost with Obama’s passing from the scene and the elevation of this terrifying, self-absorbed demagogue to the presidency.  And now this disgrace. The London attacks were greeted by a Trump “tweetstorm”: repeated mischaracterizations of the words of the mayor of London, a Fox and Friends-worthy assertion that gun control is ineffective since the attackers used vehicles and knives (a tweet followed in a day by the shooting of five in Orlando by a disgruntled worker), an attack on “political correctness,” and a revival of the language of banning immigration from countries chosen by the president. He disgraced himself, his office, and all of us with this ridiculous, ill-considered rant.

It’s now clear what Trump will do when the next terror attack occurs in the United States. He will feed the fear.  He will attempt to leverage the panic into arguments for his agenda and power for himself. Any attack will lead him to argue that he was right and the critics were wrong, and any outcome will serve his narrative—the absence of attacks will be evidence of his effectiveness, any occurrence will be used to attack those with different views.

The old federalism cracking?

If we look at state GDP/capita, counting up from the lowest GDP/capita state (Mississippi) to the state ranked 30th (Utah), we find that Trump won 18 of those 21 states (if we account for Maine’s split electoral vote in 2016, 18+ of those states were Trump states). Senate representation from those states is 31 Republican, 11 Democrat (counting King of ME as a Democrat). On the other side of the equation, of the top 15 states in GDP/capita, 11 supported Clinton. Three of the Trump states in the top 15 are Alaska, Wyoming, and North Dakota, which would be poor on this measure if not for the good luck of sitting on fossil fuel deposits. The other is Texas, also heavily dependent on fossils but far more diverse economically. Senate representation from those high GDP/capita states is 22-8 Democratic. If you drop out the three small petro states the Senate margin is 21-3.  It is well-known that GOP-leaning states are by far the biggest winners when we look at federal dollars flowing to states compared to federal revenues coming from states. Of the top 10 “winners” (led by South Carolina, which gets around $8 back for every dollar paid in) nine were Trump states. The big picture question is whether you can forever shackle the most dynamic and economically vibrant and cosmopolitan regions of the country to the poorest, while—through the various mechanisms of our politics that empower rural areas vis-à-vis urban areas—imposing the politics of the poorer regions on the nation as a whole. There’s a really interesting puzzle here for the economic historians and historical institutionalists out there. At what point do the underlying economic dynamics so far outstrip the political institutions that the whole thing falls apart?  

Do we have comparative cases in which the more economically vibrant regions of a country find themselves disempowered by institutions and rules that privilege poorer and declining areas?  (I know a bit about the power of agricultural interests in some places, but that’s as far as my knowledge goes.)  How do these tensions play?  

In the US, I wonder if there’s a radical break in the nature of federalism coming. The mid-20th century pushes for decentralization came from racists, and then, a bit later, from conservatives, often from relatively poor states, who would soon learn that they needed the Yankees very badly.  What happens when the impetus for decentralization comes from the major population centers and core economic drivers of the country?