Beyond Flawed Elections: Toward a Privatized Presidency

Beyond the issue of our flawed electoral system, today we confront a much deeper flaw in the liberal state. There is no doubt that flawed elections add to the growing democratic deficit in the liberal state. Yet as significant is the growing concentration of power and secrecy in the Executive. These are compounding the democratic deficit. In a sense, focusing on the former serves to camouflage the latter.

Secondly, blaming the excesses of the Bush Administration for this deeper flaw in the liberal state is far too easy. Those excesses are real and we are paying a high price for them. But these trends are older and deeper: to some extent they are systemic in that they are not the product simply of a political party’s policies. In fact, the Executive’s gain and Congress’ loss of power each begin in the 1980s, and have continued regardless of what political party was in control of the Executive. There has been much writing about the decline in state power due to globalization. Yet insufficient attention has gone to the power shifts inside the state towards growing concentration in the Executive.

This is the thesis I examine briefly here and at length in my new book Territory, Authority, and Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages.¹ One implication of this argument is then that the further degradation of our electoral process evident in the most recent presidential elections is one acute and highly visible manifestation of a deep structural shift. Whatever the shortcomings of the liberal state, the US state is increasingly not liberal. Checks and balances inside the state to keep any of the branches from accumulating excessive powers, and, secondly, the division between a private and a public realm geared partly towards ensuring citizens’ privacy rights and ensuring the public accountability of the Executive, are all under attack from our Executive. At its strongest my thesis is that we are seeing an ironic inversion whereby the public domain as represented by the Executive branch of government becomes de facto partly privatized and the private domain loses privacy.

The decreased power of Congress and the growth in the power of the Executive over the state apparatus is a change that cannot simply be generalized as a loss of power by “the” state, the common interpretation in the globalization literature. We see here in the making a foundational change inside the liberal state. While it never functioned according to the theory, what we see today is a set of processes and realignments that mark a foundational difference. Elsewhere I have developed the argument that we can see in this transformation a constitutive element of the tipping point that ushered the new global age (see n.1). This realignment also implies a transformation in the operation and formalization of the division between a private and a public domain, another critical building block besides the separation of powers inside the liberal state.

Shifts of Power Inside the State

The competition for influence among the three branches of government in the US is an old one. At different times “one or another has come to the fore and asserted at least a comparative primacy in setting the direction and influencing the outcome of administrative process…in this time, that institution is the Presidency” (Kagan 2001: 2246ff). It is, of course, not the first time, the New Deal being the emblematic case. But there is a difference in the character of the accumulation of powers in the federal government that took place through the New Deal compared with the current period. In both periods, the accumulation of power is enormous and at least partly discontinuous with the preceding eras. The difference is that the transformations of the New Deal involved Congress as a key player after initial “obstructions” by the Supreme Court, where today’s shifts of power inside the state mostly do not.

Whether Congress is involved or not actually makes a significant difference. Legislatures slow down the political process: they are the site for public deliberation, often moving into public brawls, allowing the average citizen to catch up. In principle, when the government...