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Trajectory of Power: The Rise of the Strongman Presidency
A penetrating account of how, over many decades, conservative backlash to the administrative state led to the rise of a strongman presidency that threatens American democracy.
Overview
A penetrating account of how, over many decades, conservative backlash to the administrative state led to the rise of a strongman presidency that threatens American democracy.
Abstract
A penetrating account of how, over many decades, conservative backlash to the administrative state led to the rise of a strongman presidency that threatens American democracy.
In Trajectory of Power, leading political scientists William Howell and Terry Moe provide a sweeping account of the historical rise of presidential power, arguing that it has now grown to the point where, in the wrong hands, it threatens to subvert American democracy and replace it with a de facto system of strongman rule, whether led by Donald Trump or someone else.
The book shows that, for much of the twentieth century, Republican and Democratic presidents pursued power in very similar ways and almost always within democratic bounds. But Republican presidents since Ronald Reagan, in a transformation that has grown increasingly extreme over time, have gone beyond the “normal” incentives that have traditionally shaped presidential behavior—and still shape the behavior of Democratic presidents—to pursue a presidency of such expansive unilateral power, and with such disregard for basic democratic requirements, that it puts democracy at serious risk.
Trajectory of Power traces this divergence in approach to the backlash of conservatives against the administrative state, and to their epiphany that a war on big government could only be waged through a presidency of extraordinary power. With this vision in mind, Reagan’s Justice Department pioneered the Unitary Executive Theory, which justified vast expansions of unilateral presidential power and was further radicalized over the decades as the Republican Party became more ideologically extreme, more populist, more anti-system, and ultimately more supportive of a strongman presidency.
Timely, urgent, and original, Trajectory of Power reveals how the presidency has been profoundly transformed during the modern era—and why it now puts our democracy in imminent danger.
About the Contributors
William Howell
William Howell is inaugural Dean of the School of Government and Policy at Johns Hopkins University, where he also holds an appointment in the Department of Political Science. William has written widely on separation-of-powers issues and American political institutions, especially the presidency. He currently is working on research projects on separation of powers issues, the institutional foundations of effective government, and emergent threats to democracy.
Terry Moe
Terry M. Moe is the William Bennett Munro Professor of Political Science at Stanford University and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. He has written extensively on the presidency and public bureaucracy, as well as American politics and political institutions more generally. He has also written extensively on the politics of American education.
About the Publication
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