In doing some research into the peculiarly American sect of fascism that holds the Department of Justice and certainly holds sway if not control of so many courts, the "unitary executive" theory of government, I read this passage from John Dean's 2007 book Broken Government: How Republican Rule Destroyed the Legislative, Executive, and Judicial Branches. But before I give it I want to make clear that I certainly don't buy into the pose of high-mindedness that is represented by that conservative so often seen on the MSNBC liberal ghetto hours these days, George Will, though if you take his arguments of principle with salt, temporarily suspending your disbelief in view of their largely ignoring the actual history of his conventional form of conservatives, he revealed something telling about the difference between the somewhat less thuggish-mob connected right of the past and the total degenerate thugs we have today.
Conservative commentator and columnist George Will saw that agenda coming before Bush even formally announced his intentions to run for the presidency. Recall that it was Dick Cheney who became one of the first tutors to Governor George Bush in 1999, when he began his bid for the White House. On a visit to Bush in Texas that year to talk with the team he assembled to work on his presidential campaign, Will noticed what the governor and his staff were reading and how they were thinking. "They are recasting conservatism by expunging the traditional conservative ambivalence about presidential power," Will reported at the time. "Hence the presence on the cluttered desk of chief speechwriter Mike Gerson of Terry Eastland's book Energy in the Executive: The Case for the Strong Presidency. Eastland's title comes from Alexander Hamilton's Federalist Paper No. 70, " 'Energy in the executive is a leading character in the definition of good governent.'" Will explained the philosophy that would turn out later to be Bush's guiding principle: "Eastland's thesis is that 'the strong presidency is necessary to effect ends sought by most conservatives.'" Strikingly, Will concluded his report with a savvy prediction, " A second Bush presidency would be more muscular than the first in exercising executive power." Will, clearly, anticipated this direction long before 9/11, which shows what terrific cover the issue of terrorism has provided for Bush and Cheney. Will's reading of the Bush team's goals provides strong evidence that, even in a hypothetical world in which 9/11 did not occur, we still would have witnessed a concerted grab for executive power by Bush and Cheney.
I will break in here and say that I think the difference between Will and Eastland is the difference between someone who wants to preserve a measure of distance between the country and outright mob-rule thuggery associated with button-down, traditional Republican conservatives (the kind who used to be Republicans in New England) and those who want an outright gangster-fascist hold on power by their faction. I have not thought it out but I wonder if there are strong echos of the coalition between the northern mercantile class, as embodied in Alexander Hamilton and the most ruthless of the Southern slave power as championed by Madison in the framing of the Constitution. If you take that as the mold that formed these things today, I will note that despite what that asinine Broadway musical that is playing, I'd guess, mostly to the tourist trade, now, says, Hamilton was hardly a genuine abolitionist, holding slaves, himself, being married into the family holding the most slaves in New York and, in his Federalist Paper propaganda, pointed out the financial advantages to the old monied class of the North in protecting the institution of slavery in the South.
Terry Eastland's call for conservatives to embrace a strong presidency, and George Will's perception of its significance, reveal a milestone in conservative thinking. Will said that, as the Republicans took note of the emboldened post-Watergate Congress, "congressional supremacy [became] the conservative aspiration. " Conservatives suspected that if "Congress really [could] be a co-equal branch, [then] controlling it might even be preferable to holding the presidency, which is the engine of energetic government." Here Will makes a very important point. "Energetic government" is emblematic of liberal and progressive administrations, not conservative ones. The conservative canon that emerged during the post-World War II period developed by conservative thinkers like James Burnham, whom George Will has always held in esteem, opposed strong presidents, particularly those who overpowered Congress. Why, then, the turnabout? As Will explained, "Those ideas died during the Republican debacles as the 1995 government shutdown and the rout of Republicans during budget negotiations with Clinton. These [experiences] gave Republicans their own monomania: they must win the White House, and do so with an executive unapologetic about wielding power."
Works like Terryh Eastland's book, and the unabashed insistence of movement conservatives (principally the authoritarian conservatives like the religious right, social conservatives, and the neoconservatives) on increased presidential power, do not fit very comfortably with the traditional conservative values like those of George Will. He hastened to remind his readers, "Conservatives are viscerally suspicious of power made potent by being concentrated in one person, and are wary of the plebiscitary idea of democracy inherent in the idea of a 'presidential nation.' " Eastland's book aimed to overcome such conservative concerns by providing an intellectual and constitutional foundation for all conservatives to embrace a strong presidency. It is, however, a very weak base, deeply flawed as history and constitutional law, and closer to cheer-leading for presidential hubris, excessive secrecy, and monarchical-like authority than a solid justification for a strong presidency. Not surprisingly, it was reviewed allmost exclusively by conservative publications like the Wall Street Journal and the Washington times and the National Review. One line in the Wall Street Journal's review, which is taken from Eastland's book, is particularly worth noting: "At the end of Ronald Reagan's presidency his approval rating was the highest of any president since World War II. 'Like dying rich,' said columnist Charles Krauthammer, 'this is a great moral failure.' " Conservative advocates of a strong president as envisioned by Eastland no doubt believe a president who has performed truly well during his term of office will be thoroughly despised by the American public but admired by the Charles Karuthammer types. Apparently, this is the model that Bush and Cheney have chosen to follow.
First, Will's opposition to, "the plebiscitary idea of democracy [in this context the direct election of the president] inherent in the idea of a 'presidential nation.' " in the context of the presidency since 2000 couldn't be more clearly wrong. Both Bush II and now Trump are a direct result of the Electoral College and, in the case of Bush II the fiat of right-wing members of the Supreme Court who, I have little doubt, George Will had little trouble with being on the court, certainly appointed by presidents he supported and endorsed. The distance between the old-line conservatives as Will claims to represent and the overtly fascist thugs is not nearly that great. Which doesn't necessarily mean that what they have to say about how we got here from there is unimportant or even not useful.
The unitary executive theory, perhaps all the more for its Hamiltonian inheritance, is a proven danger to egalitarian democracy, it's even, as can be seen in Will's resistance to it, a danger to non-democratic republicanism. One of the most important things we will have to do to save egalitarian democracy is to smash it.
The passage about the late and truly vile and cruel and dishonest Charles Krauthammer gives away a lot about the real nature of the Republican-fascists who now are in control of the government. A leader such as Krauthammer esteemed in his imagination would have been hated by The People, presumably because they did things that harmed them, that killed and maimed them in pointless wars, that impoverished them, that ground them down in ways that I can imagine a Krauthammer taking delight in, of cheating and swindling them, of leaving them vulnerable to the predations of the gangsters who sponsor Republican-fascism. A president who had been good for the American people was anathema to the Krauthammers because they are, at their core, founded in favoring the privilege of the privileged and the pain of those who aren't. In one example in circulation right now is Republicans like Chip Roy in Congress histrionically weeping like Lindsay Graham for the right of drug companies to sell life sustaining drugs that cost sixty dollars a year in other counties for twenty thousand dollars a year here. If George Will is truly opposed to that kind of thing as opposed to the overt fascists in the Republican House caucus, it would be news to me. I strongly suspect if it had been a drug that Charles Krauthammer had needed to sustain him in his disability, it might have been different for even him, IN THAT ONE, PERSONAL, that one, isolated instance. I think the real definition of American conservatism has always been in its either indifference to or delight in the misery of the poor, the minority, women other than those of the upper class. That was as true in the 1980s, the 1880s and the 1780s as it is today.
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