If Schlesinger tended to give blame, or credit, to the character of the chief executive himself in defining the nature of presidential power, critics, like Garry Wills (who reviewed The Imperial Presidency in the New York Times November 18, 1973) countered that responsibility for elevating the president to the place of emperor lay squarely with the public that selected him for office.
#Autocracy or democracy imperial glory how to
If Schlesinger was right, 2016 saw another apex of the concentration of executive power.The essays collected in Warring for America: Cultural Contests in the Era of 1812 have much to tell us about the ways in which Americans in the first strong presidential period debated the question of how to constitute authority. While there is little reason to believe that history in fact turns on such precise algorithmic calculations, there is good reason to recognize that we are currently living in an era of expansive and expanding presidential power that, while exceptional, is not without precedent. If Schlesinger was right, 2016 saw another apex of the concentration of executive power. He charted the years from 1789-1865 as a period of ever-increasing presidential authority, followed by a period of decline up to 1940. Schlesinger believed that history operated cyclically and that Presidential war-making powers in the United States fell into a discernible pattern of 76-year rises, followed by 75-year falls. in his book of that title, first published in 1973. The term The Imperial Presidency was coined by Arthur Schlesinger Jr. *** American Democracy and the Imperial Presidency Can an “imperial presidency” arise in a democracy? Commentators on both sides of the political spectrum have urged attention to this issue for several decades now and, for many observers, the question becomes more urgent by the day. In the following post, Eustace highlights how essays in Warring for America explore the ideas of dictatorial power and populism in early American history. The cultural rifts of the early republican period remained vast and unbridged. The War of 1812 increased interest in the American democratic project and elicited calls for national unity, yet the essays collected in this volume suggest that the United States did not emerge from war in 1815 having resolved the Revolution’s fundamental challenges or achieved a stable national identity. As the imminence of war intensified the political, economic, and social tensions endemic to the new nation, Americans of all kinds fought for country on the battleground of culture.
At once postcolonial and neoimperial, the America of 1812 was still in need of definition. The War of 1812 was one of a cluster of events that left unsettled what is often referred to as the Revolutionary settlement. We welcome a guest post by Nicole Eustace, co-editor of Warring for America: Cultural Contests in the Era of 1812, to be published in September 2017 by the Omohundro Institute and UNC Press.
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