The Lost Soul of the American Presidency: The Decline into Demagoguery and the Prospects for Renewal

This crucial, timely, and scholarly work—Stephen F. Knott’s The Lost Soul of the American Presidency—is a ringing alarm bell that all Americans should heed, that is if they can hear the warning over the ever-more-deafening background noise.At a superficial glance the book may present as a narrowly-focused political and historical fusillade against the current state of political affairs. But it’s considerably more than that. The Lost Soul of the American Presidency is not just a fresh bead of informed, principled “Never Trump” Conservatism drawn on the sitting executive. Knott goes much deeper than that.We Americans are, at this moment, in the throes of a Constitutional literacy and civics education crisis. But are these conditions unique? Look at the history and you realize, no they are not. Constitutional literacy and civics education seem to have been perpetually in crisis. And when we despair of the present, we are probably just giving in to knee-jerk, myopic declinism.Over the centuries the American body politic has, in important ways, seldom known and infrequently adhered to the true spirit of the Constitution. Knott furnishes ample evidence that voters, politicians, and intellectuals, have, over and over again in regard to the presidency, conducted themselves in ways out of step with the vision of the men who wrote and ratified the supreme law of the land.It’s disheartening to start with a sort of background, low-grade dread about how so many have so much to learn about the Constitution and then, after an injection of Knott’s analysis, graduate to a fresher and more acute perception of it. It’s even more disheartening to consider how much we also might need to unlearn first.Knott (who doesn’t use this term himself) clearly and comprehensively shows us how much we need to unlearn specifically about presidents and the presidency.The heart of Knott’s lesson here is that what we regard as the role of the president has become distorted. Maybe ruinously, irretrievably so. And the perversion of the office came about not in living memory but far earlier; back when the readout of our national odometer was in no more than double digits.The Founders knew well that their political posterity would be subject to faction, regional interest, and temptations to cohere around ambitious, would-be leaders. But the Founders failed to take into account how pervasive and influential political parties would become.Now, we can all know this academically. But it takes something like The Lost Soul of the American Presidency to fully appreciate the yawning, exploitable loophole this left in the Constitution—to the detriment of the political order as a whole and the office of the chief magistrate.The Constitution’s essential operation is to establish a system of checks and balances. The fashioning of the federal government into coequal judicial, legislative, and executive branches is just one dimension of that system. So is the division of the uncut sum of the nation’s sovereign power into the federal government and the states; the splitting of Congress into a House and Senate; the setting up the apparatus of district and appellate federal courts; the counterweighting of the will of individual voters to the Electoral College; and, originally, rewarding the vice president’s seat not to a presidential candidate’s hand-picked and often like-minded lieutenant, but instead to the election’s runner-up. (Aaron Burr, whom we can also blame for eliminating from the senate rulebook the “previous question motion”—which could force measures to a floor vote instead of allowing for unlimited debate, and thus the kind of strategic inaction we see now by Sen. Mitch McConnell—gets the credit for this perversion of the founders’ original intent. Is any other single man responsible for so much warping of our political system?)The Constitution’s separation of powers doctrine was meant to limit and diffuse government power over several distinct institutions. Under this model, government power is more difficult and often more time-consuming to wield. Certainly, more so than it would be under monarchies, authoritarian states, and even under parliamentary systems often recognizable as “free” and “democratic.”The Constitution’s separation of powers doctrine is furthermore intended to impose a certain level of consensus- and compromise-building among political actors, helping to assure that those with minority opinions (or other minority status) cannot typically be so easily dominated by the majority. The way American governments were conceived was meant to assure that decision-making is sober and deliberative, that the decision-makers are known and accountable, and that the pace of change is generally slow. It has been argued (for one by Joseph J. Ellis) that this baked-in conservatism was one of the pillars of genius of the American Revolution, which did not attempt to drastically reorder society or redistribute property, and thereby did not wind up a short-lived experiment that consumed most of its own along the way, like the French First Republic.But, as Knott points out, the Constitution’s rocky, windy, 25 M.P.H. speed limit is no fit for leaders possessed of doublewide egos and transformational ambitions, and who have a mind to drive a whole lot faster. The same can be said not only of individuals, but of political movements as well.The sort of politician who naturally craves power, delights in the exercise of it, and is convinced of the urgency of attaining and holding on to it, will by nature seek the presidency. The sort of political movement demonstrating the same characteristics will by nature attack, and chuck aside, any systemic obstacles intentionally placed in its way. Unite a politician of this stripe with a political movement bearing the same character, and you get the kind of presidents and political parties we have today.Knott empirically builds the case that we have actually been saddled with these kinds of presidents and political parties for almost all of American history. He professionally and dutifully countenances George Washington’s human flaws and missteps, but by Knott’s lights our first president nevertheless bestowed upon the United States initial, buoyant highs of presidential leadership in the true Constitutional spirit.The Lost Soul of the American Presidency goes on to squarely place the first belly-churning drop in altitude from Washington’s highs when Thomas Jefferson’s self-described “Revolution of 1800” was ushered in.Readers should take care not to seize upon this accusation as a pattern for the rest of the book. This is no lionization of the “big government” instincts of the Federalist Party and reflexive disparagement of “small government” Jeffersonians. As Knott moves us forward in the timeline, it’s Democratic presidents—Wilson, FDR, JFK, Johnson—highlighted as most responsible for setting the presidency on the path towards Constitutional decay that ultimately leads to Donald Trump.We might label Knott’s problematic, populist executives—whom he characterizes as both self-aggrandizing and proposing dead-on-arrival transformative projects like ending war, ending poverty, “ridding the world of evildoers,” and even remaking man himself—as “Lost Soul Presidents.” (Knott himself never resorts to such a cute, reductive term. In fact, he often credits even those he identifies as the most Constitutionally-repugnant of the bunch with at least some aspects of favorable legacy.)What Lost Soul Presidents threaten, Knott contends, is the total erosion of the separation of powers doctrine. The regime of minority representation that the Constitution idealizes and tried to put permanently in place goes out the window as well. When these are not preserved, national stability is just one of a host of casualties the country suffers.When a president and a Congress (and arguably a federal bench, but it’s beyond the scope of the book to comment too in depth about that) all come to share the same partisan objectives, throughout history they have demonstrably abandoned their institutional duties to check and balance each other. They may also willingly abandon their oaths of office, imposed to encourage compliance with the letter and spirit of the Constitution in other respects.The prospects for disorder here are worse than a president becoming a rubber stamp for a runaway Congress. It can be a Congress becoming a rubber stamp for a runaway president—an elected leader who isn’t, after all, designed as a lawmaker-in-chief, but instead an administrator-in-chief. Yet when these two separate branches of government both converge under the sway of a single ambitious political party or movement, it proves too enticing not to demote Congress—with all its attending friction and minority prerogative—and instead fix as much legislative prowess as possible in the executive. The Constitution gets turned upside down and inside out.Lost Soul Presidents, and the blows they issue to Constitutional integrity, do more than just bruise what sentimental attachments to the Founders we might have. And they do more than simply theoretical damage to American politics. When multiple political parties, who go in and out of power, adopt the same tactics to elect their presidents of choice and sustain them in power—capturing two or three branches and subsequently jamming through wildly fluctuating, even contradictory, policies and styles of leadership—we, the governed, suffer from whiplash. (So do our foreign allies, as we can see most pointedly since January 2017).Government comes to oscillate between serving some of us and punishing some of us. All the volatility strips people and institutions from the capability of planning for the future. Elections and transfers of power become ugly, divisive, and potentially violent. The parties themselves can at best pursue short-term goals. New administrations and new congresses, before they can move on to new business, must first sacrifice portions of whatever political capital they’ve arrived with in undoing the work of their predecessors.Where once inspiring and uniting national figures were possible, now no one is above politics. All must pick a side. And when they do, they suffer derision from political enemies and, all too often, are made subjects of a worshipful savior complex from political friends. Americans whipsaw between reviling the federal government and expecting too much from it. We lose any common national interest. We are left bereft of political and, alongside it, social coherence.Even more disturbing, Knott elucidates how, in a government system at least theoretically built on the popular consent basis, the path of least resistance for the most power-hungry presidents and parties involves stooping to demagoguery, censorship, voter suppression, the aforementioned impossible-to-keep-promises, debasement of the press, use of official police powers to surveil and harass enemies, viciously personal demonization of political opponents and the ends they pursue, the spread of conspiracy theories, and dirty tricks.The most highly operative power moves under this state of affairs plow right through unpopular minorities. For instance, the Jefferson-Jackson dynasty, often celebrated for helping abolish voting rights’ property requirement, was partially built on the back of disenfranchising blacks and smearing the “elites” in favor of industry and banks. Progressive Era presidents like Roosevelt allowed Japanese internment and looked the other way when Jewish refugees from increasingly Nazi-dominated Europe sought sanctuary in America.What are the qualities of the few presidents who, according to Knott, were most in proper relation to their intended Constitution role? The Lost Soul of the American Presidency rates George Washingtonian dignity very highly, perhaps as the most invaluable. Dignity, being or at least appearing above the fray, allows a president to serve as the ceremonial head of state that can lend stability when societies need it most. A good president, fulfilling the duties of office without bias for party, race, region, or socio-economic subset, will have to defy opinion and make unpopular decisions. Dignity allows the president to withstand the fallout that will inevitably follow, as Washington did after the controversial Jay Treaty that turned so many Americans against him midway through his second term.Other presidential qualities Knott singles out as deserving of accolades are rhetorical restraint (perhaps best seen in Lincoln’s refusal to demonize secessionists), personal humility, and the adequate integrity to substantively place the nation’s interests above his own. Knott lambastes those who would be “change agents” and bids us to reconsider the legacies of “boring” and “caretaker” presidents—this latter point being one of the book’s most original and interesting. Where else but in The Lost Soul of the American Presidency will Gerald Ford and William Howard Taft receive nominations for presidential excellence? Yet Knott makes a compelling case. Historians paying tribute to Lincoln is hardly uncommon. But Knott leads us to focus on some of the Rail-splitter’s lesser-appreciated qualities, while also burnishing the reputations of John Quincy Adams and Dwight Eisenhower. His treatment of the Obama presidency, I felt, bore too little careful, contextual thought: both Obama and Clinton governed more from the center than they are given credit for, yet their political opponents were so suffused with passionate hatred for them that they were never given credit for trying to rise above party. There was, legitimately, something of a cult of personality around Obama. But I think it’s not fair to say that Obama was the architect of this, and that the gravest sin he can be condemned for on this point is welcoming it as wind at his back. The media strategies and statements of Obama’s Knott chooses as evidence of the man’s populism feel overreaching.Tremendously valuable in the book are details about Jefferson’s worldview and his administration (I had not previously known about his proposals for “ward-republics,” nor duly considered his Francophilia and other personal manias in light of Living Constitutionalism). Knott gives us an insightful and disturbing account of parallels between Trump and JFK. The book is a handy primer on how 20th Century intellectual fads affected Constitutional interpretation. For instance, a sort of pop Darwinism arguably motivated Wilson to decry the Constitution as a relic of “horse and buggy” days, ill-suited to the appreciably faster pace even of 1910s communication and industry.Metal becomes brittle when it is repeatedly, rapidly warmed and cooled. Knott warns the same phenomenon is happening to our republic, catalyzed by a long succession of overheated presidents who promise to heap piles of gold on their political base and poison the opposition with lead. And yet repeated exposure to this cycle has made us expect it, led us to favor Men on White Horses who pledge sweeping change. In a society that worships innovation and “disruption” of business as usual, merely competent, humble candidates would be dismissed out of hand.Knott admits the genie is out of the bottle, but proposes some fixatives, like parties amping up the practice of superdelegates to make it harder for insurgent candidates to come away with convention nominations, and calling on presidents and presidential candidates to draw back on 24/7 contact with the public in new forms of media and popular forms of communication. Americans, he admits, will not welcome any diminution in individual power to elect a president, so it’s possible the disease has been diagnosed too late to save the patient. If hyperpartisanship is such a big part of the problem, we might ask, how can we trust party leaders to generate candidates who will rise above party?Useful in this book would have been some accounting for where else Americans might look for social and political leadership at a national level if not the president. Knott’s more perfect president would by necessity have to disappoint voters on occasion, and be far more aloof to them. Voters’ sense of the value of sacrifice, fair play, and true Constitutional orientation would have to be continuously stoked in order to prevent the re-rise of demagogues. Figures like Lincoln and Hamilton both called for the founding of some kind of “civic religion” to make Constitutional duties durable and widespread. But even these greats couldn’t get beyond the concept stage with such an enterprise. And the atomization of American culture today, with its endless distractions, indulgences, and affection for ironic detachment over sincerity (perhaps a generational trait now starting to ebb away).I won’t be able to stop thinking about this book, and questioning what the presidency can and properly should be, for a long time.But Knott can’t be given his due without also acknowledging his always clear and excellent writing, his eye for detail in anecdotes, his laudable commitment and concern for racial equality (is this due to his military background?), and giving us a study that, at a well-paced 230 pages before citations, is tremendously pithy.

Steve Knott’s The Lost Soul of the American Presidency is an important and extremely timely book. I had the good fortune to read it during President Trump’s impeachment trial. The book proved both disturbing and reassuring. It is disturbing since the long-term trend of our republic does not appear to be moving in what he sees as the right direction – the renewal of the constitutional president. It is reassuring because we have seen low points before and come back from them.Over the past week, we have heard a lot about the Founding Fathers. There has been much talk on the floor of the Senate about what Alexander Hamilton and James Madison intended in the Federalist Papers. My colleague, Steve Knott, contrasts the constitutional presidency envisioned in our Constitution and promoted by George Washington and Alexander Hamilton with the popular presidency of Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, Donald Trump and several of our other presidents. He describes this difference as between a presidency that seeks to unify the country, promote the rule of law and protect minority rights and a presidency that seeks to reflect what is popular. Knott contrasts a president’s role as head of state with his/her role as head of government and, even more, as head of party.Knott lays out how this divide, which began with our third president, Thomas Jefferson, has marked our republic since. He describes many of our presidents from this perspective. He notes that a president’s chance of getting on Mt. Rushmore are 50-50 depending on which side of this divide you are on. He describes Washington and Lincoln as constitutional presidents and Jefferson and Theodore Roosevelt as popular ones. He makes clear though that the constitutional presidents are less likely – at least in their lifetime – to be seen as the stars, and cites Dwight Eisenhower as an example.Knott also recognizes the role of technology for our presidents. John Kennedy was able to use television to enhance his popularity. Barack Obama and Donald Trump have used social media to do the same.This is not a book about President Trump, although it does have a chapter on him. Instead, it is a book that sees President Trump as the outcome of this conflict between the constitutional president and the popular president. As such, it looks at our challenges and opportunities from a new perspective.Steve Knott has written a book that is more than an academic study of American presidents and their adherence to the Constitution. It is controversial as it calls for a less powerful and all-encompassing president. But, at the same time, it reminds us of the importance of the rules our Founding Fathers gave us in the Constitution.