'Democracy' According to Bush Republicans

The blogosphere was aghast this week at Harvard professor Harvey Mansfield’s egregious little rumination on the necessity of having a “strong executive” during “stormy times”. (No, I insist - read it for yourself.) After all, he says, don’t we need a war-chief who will brush aside weak, second-guessing legislators when the threats come to the fore? Wouldn’t you rather be ruled by the “best man” than the “best laws”? Haven’t we taken the whole civil liberties thing a bit too far, conflating them with inalienable inborn rights? Mansfield, in his own words:

The case for a strong executive begins from urgent necessity and extends to necessity in the sense of efficacy and even greatness. It is necessary not merely to respond to circumstances but also in a comprehensive way to seek to anticipate and form them. "Necessary to" the survival of a society expands to become "necessary for" the good life there, and indeed we look for signs in the way a government acts in emergencies for what it thinks to be good after the emergency has passed. A free government should show its respect for freedom even when it has to take it away. [emphasis added]

But don’t take it from a pro-rule of law, pro-civil liberties sissy liberal like me. He spells it out for us very clearly: “necessity” is an inherently elastic term, and can be used to justify almost any extralegal executive prerogative for any length of time.

I don’t particularly feel the need to scratch out a systematic theoretical rebuttal to this article (although I certainly will if some errant member of this blog’s tiny audience wants to defend it). The entire American project is a standing rebuttal to thinking of this kind. No privilege, no exceptions – no one is above the law.

But the most mind-boggling part of this piece is Mansfield’s bizarre repeated insistence that in dangerous situations, it’s better for a republican government to be led by the unchecked “wisdom” of a single individual rather than the mitigated, compromised wisdom of, say, Congress. It’s as if he’s missed the past six years’ incredible string of enormous screw-ups in the exercise of executive power. Personally, I don’t plan on even considering vesting more power in the imperial presidency until I’m convinced that the people in charge 1) can prevent a massive terrorist attack, 2) know the difference between good intelligence and bad intelligence, 3) prepare adequately for the wars they start, 4) believe in modern environmental and biological science, 5) are capable of responding to natural disasters, 6) do not staff high-level jobs with incompetent leader-worshippers, etc., etc., etc.

Mansfield’s affection for "Machiavellian" politics is frightening, especially if this is the Bush Administration's theory of executive power (as Glenn Greenwald suspects it is). But don’t take it from a habeas corpus-touting leftist whiner like me. Mansfield, in his own words:

Such [an executive] will have the greatest incentive to be watchful, and to be both cruel and merciful in correct contrast and proportion. We are talking about Machiavelli's prince, the man whom in apparently unguarded moments he called a tyrant.

“Apparently unguarded moments”? Is this Harvard faculty member really trying to remove from the excesses of executive power the unpleasant connotation of the word "tyrant"?

Seriously. This is all the more staggering because Machiavelli himself vastly preferred the limited republican model of government, seeing tyrannies as unstable and unsustainable. We can mark the imperial presidency of 2001-2009 as another point in his column.