The Cult of the Presidency

If we are to de-deify government in our country, the best place to start is to knock the Presidency down a few pegs...nothing serious, just down to what it was constitutionally intended to be.

About the book:

The Bush years have given rise to fears of a resurgent Imperial Presidency. Those fears are justified, but the problem cannot be solved simply by bringing a new administration to power. In his provocative new book, The Cult of the Presidency, Gene Healy argues that the fault lies not in our leaders but in ourselves. When our scholars lionize presidents who break free from constitutional restraints, when our columnists and talking heads repeatedly call upon the “commander in chief ” to dream great dreams and seek the power to achieve them—when voters look to the president for salvation from all problems great and small—should we really be surprised that the presidency has burst its constitutional bonds and grown powerful enough to threaten American liberty?

The Cult of the Presidency takes a step back from the ongoing red team/blue team combat and shows that, at bottom, conservatives and liberals agree on the boundless nature of presidential responsibility. For both camps, it is the president’s job to grow the economy, teach our children well, provide seamless protection from terrorist threats, and rescue Americans from spiritual malaise. Very few Americans seem to think it odd, says Healy, “when presidential candidates talk as if they’re running for a job that’s a combination of guardian angel, shaman, and supreme warlord of the earth.”

Healy takes aim at that unconfined conception of presidential responsibility, identifying it as the source of much of our political woe and some of the gravest threats to our liberties. If the public expects the president to heal everything that ails us, the president is going to demand—or seize—the power necessary to handle that responsibility.

Interweaving historical scholarship, legal analysis, and trenchant cultural commentary, The Cult of the Presidency traces America’s decades-long drift from the Framers’ vision for the presidency: a constitutionally constrained chief magistrate charged with faithful execution of the laws. Restoring that vision will require a Congress and a Court willing to check executive power, but Healy emphasizes that there is no simple legislative or judicial “fix” to the problems of the presidency. Unless Americans change what we ask of the office—no longer demanding what we should not want and cannot have—we’ll get what, in a sense, we deserve.

Christians and power

"...This permanent orientation of Jesus, this express choice not to use power, places us Christians in a very delicate situation. For we ought to make the same choice, but we are set in a society whose only orientation and objective criterion of truth is power...Thus we Christians today are placed in the most difficult of all situations. We have to repudiate both the spirit of the age and the means that it employs. If we do not, if we yield even a fraction of these forces, we will betray Jesus Christ..." -- Jacques Ellul, What I Believe.

Demoted

Looks like Pres. Obama has been demoted from Messiah to Superhero.

Call for renewed social conservative emphasis

Fred Barnes wrote a piece in the Weekly Standard the end of May on the fledgling effort of Robert George, a professor of political science at Princeton, to form an organization to renew and invigorate conservatism in general, and the conservative foundation of the Republican Party.

Working formally through a new organization entitled The American Principles Project, Barnes writes that, "George wants to bring intellectual vigor to the Republican party and the conservative movement, especially on social issues like pornography and marriage. 'We need to connect our intellectuals with our activists,' he says."

Part of the effort will be to bring social research showing evidence that conservative principles are the correct ones on a varietyof social issues, from divorce, to the nature of marriage, to personal responsibility, and the life.

All well and good. If professor George wants to interject scholarly findings into a public debate which show the supremacy of conservative values, great. But if he proposes that social conservatism be the cornerstone of a renewed political conservatism, I think he's living in the 1980s.

If conservatism is to make a rebound in both the GOP and in national politics, it needs to emphasize liberty -- economic liberty, liberty of thought, liberty of association -- and take on the main threat to liberty, which is expanded government.

The problem with making social conservatism the cornerstone of a revived conservatism is that the culture has changed since 1980. Professor George doesn't seem to understand that the culture is now permeated with post-modernist attitudes, which makes absolute truth claims about values virtually irrelevant in the political arena. Whereas social conservatism was still the consensus when Ronald Reagan was elected, it's now prominent only in isolated islands. Granted, some of those islands are large, taking up whole regions of the country, but the consensus on these issues hasshrunk, and shrunk quickly, particularly in places like California.

I'm glad for the recent Calif. Supreme Court decision upholding Prop 8 on the civil definition of marriage, but it's a temporary victory. Gay marriage activists will continue to come back to the ballot box, and eventually they will win. This is the problem with trying to hold the line on social issuesby putting all our eggs into a political basket -- the politics have shifted.

What social conservatives need to understand is that in our increasingly secularized society, the state has become a false god, politics (both left and right) have become a false religion, and the media is a false prophet. The problems we face in our culture are not political, but spiritual -- they go to the core of who people are, and are reflected out into the culture.

Conservative Christians, by fighting battles in the political arena, have neglected God's resources. What's needed isn't arenewed political effort on these issues, but general revival. When I get a sense that Christians are spending more time in prayer discerning God's will than they are listening to talk radio and on the political battlefields, then I'll have reason for hope.

The issues can be debated, that's fine. But our politics and government are going to reflect the culture. Politics and government policies are not going to impact the culture. I fear that Prof. George may be 30 years behind the curve if that's his intent.

Government that even owns our devotions

There's a post today over at my favorite discussion site about the not-so-creeping take over of major portions of our economy by the government:

Why aren't our conservative "leaders" pointing out that a person can now get up in the morning and go to work for a government owned industry, he may have to buy his car from the government, the car loan, his house loan, all his loans may be from a government owned bank, that means he may have to buy his house from the government. If Obama has his way, when the worker gets sick his doctor will be the government.

In response, one of my online friends posted, "In the Soviet Union, the children were taught to look to Mother Russia - not God - for all they needed, and to thank Mother Russia - not God - for all they had. Nope, no parallels there."

Which got me to thinking: The reason statist regimes tend to be atheistic, and dictatorial in their policies, is that they will not tolerate any competition to the devotion and worship of the people. So, we're on that path, with "The Messiah" now running things from the Oval Office.