Opinion: Be careful what you wish for | Opinion | record-eagle.com - Traverse City Record Eagle

By Porter Abbott

In a landmark essay, presidential historian Ron Chernow warned against believing that the founding fathers lived in "a golden age of political discourse,... dispensing wisdom with gentle civility." They were nothing of the kind. They fought like cats, with a "verbal savagery" that "may have surpassed anything seen today."

In other words, they were human beings.

This is an important point. The founders may have been all white, all male and all propertied, but they differed among themselves so fiercely that they knew from their own belligerence why democracy was commonly considered the most fragile form of government.

When John Adams wrote, "There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide," he was simply echoing Plato, who could write 2,000 years earlier that democracy invariably gives way to autocracy.

To make their challenge even greater, the founders sought to design a democracy founded on the Enlightenment premise: "All men are created equal." How do a bunch of fiery combative men design a democracy that could honor that premise and survive? In other words, how do fiercely competitive men design a government that requires the practice of compromise?

One answer, which we all know, was to create a balance of powers distributed among the three branches of government. So, should a president blurt out that presidential authority "is total," he would be dead wrong.

Yet such a deliberate imbalance of power is what's brewing. According to reports in The Economist and The New York Times, elements of one party are planning to expand the power of the presidency to encompass the numerous independent agencies that oversee and supervise everything from communications to elections to energy to trade to labor relations to transportation and more.

By design, these agencies stand outside the federal executive and regulatory departments. Their allegiance is not to the president or Congress, but to the facts in service of our country. The key word belonging to them all is "independent." As such, they extend the same principle of a distributed balance of power that is so essential for our democracy.

Russell T. Vought, who ran the Office of Management and Budget under Trump, is deeply involved in the effort to expand presidential power. "What we're trying to do," he has said, "is identify the pockets of independence and seize them." In the words of historian Laura Barron Lopez, "This is not the language of democratic reform. It is the language of authoritarian takeover."

So, whatever your view of candidate Trump, bear in mind that, when a country gives enough power to an autocrat, it's very hard to take that power back. One example of this is Hungary, where Viktor Orbán has managed to rewrite the constitution and gain "such complete control over elections and the judiciary that he can remain in power indefinitely." (Kim Lane Scheppele, Princeton)

Orbán was the star speaker at the 2021 Conservative Political Action Conference, where he was given a standing ovation.

About the author: Porter Abbott was a research professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he taught for 40 years. He retired to Northport in 2005.

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