Wednesday, October 03, 2007
Sandy Levinson
Bart DePalma asks me a completely fair question: How do I define "dictatorship"? He suggests that dictators by definition cannot be elected, that they come to power through coups, killing off the opposition, or however. As an empirical matter, that may often be the case, but I don't think that the concept excludes election. After all, the Roman model of dictatorship was an elected one. It was precisely the election that made the dictatorship
legitimate.which was no small advantage. One can speak of at least aspects of the same phenomenon with regard to the Nazi takeover in 1933.
So my concept of "dictatorship" does not necessarily require that one initially gain power illegitimately. Rather, it has to do with with a quite different aspect of politics, which is
accountability. My concern about the present system of government (and this concern is not, contrary to what some of you think, limited to my particular concerns about President Bush), is that we give, through (presumptively) legitimate elections entirely too much power to the given individuals who are elected to the presidency that they can use in basically unaccountable ways. This is clearest, of course, with regard to the military/foreign policy aspects of the presidency, but the veto power, whose importance is greatest with regard to domestic politics, is also part of this analysis. If we're talking of a first-term president, then there is one obvious mechanism of accountability, which is the up-coming election, given the almost certain desire of a first-term president to be re-elected. But one a president is re-elected, that mechanism literally disappears overnight. The one thing we knew about Bill Clinton on January 20, 1997, as was true with George W. Bush on Jan. 20, 2005, is that neither would ever have to face the electorate again. They are free to think of their "legacies" and have every incentive to "act boldly" because they don't face ordinary constraints that first-term presidents feel.
There are other mechanisms of accountability, of course, including vigorous oversight and the (theoretical) possibility of impeachment. But even vigorous oversight may not change a president's determined course, and impeachment, for reasons I've argued elsewhere, is much too clumsy a weapon, especially if one is more concerned, as I am, by disastrous misjudgment and incompetence than by criminality.
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In any event, this is how I use a term like "dictator" to refer to our own president: The ability to make basically unilateral, and potentially sweeping, decisions of literal life and death without having to fear being held accountable for those decisions, where the most important mechanism of accountability is fear of losing one's job.
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