Commenting on a post of mine, co-blogger Scott Sumner offered a striking observation:
“I feel sort of like Rip Van Winkle, like I fell asleep in the USA and woke up to find myself living in a banana republic.”
According to a Wall Street Journal story, some members of Congress are beginning to start waking up to the current president’s power grab (Aaron Zitner, Siobhan Hughes, and Gavin Bade, “Powers of Trump and Congress Collide as Government Shutdown Nears,” March 1, 2025). Budget and tariff policy are two areas where some congressmen suspect that Congress should not have delegated so much power to the president.
It could happen here, “it” being despotism of the harder sort than the Tocquevillian soft sort that we have already gotten used to. Instances of the problem are too numerous to be listed here. My post of yesterday suggests that one man has apparently been granted the power to close America to the rest of the world if he feels like it. Let me mention three other incidents that seem symptomatic of a general rejection of anything that looks like the remnants of classical liberalism.
One relates to the disgraceful humiliation of the Ukrainian president by President Donald Trump and his vice-president in the White House on February 28 (see “Trump-Zelensky Meeting Implodes, Threatening Hopes for Peace,” Wall Street Journal, February 28, 2025; and “Trump, Vance and Zelenskyy Spar over Russian War in Tense Exchange: ‘Very disrespectful,’” Fox News, February 28, 2025). Soon after the meeting, Trump repeated on his social media something he had said about Zelensky:
He disrespected the United States of America in its cherished Oval Office.
If he heard this naïve glorification of the state, H.L. Mencken must be turning and laughing out loud in his grave. The king of Spain “tramples or tries to trample the dignity of a people,” the late dictator Hugo Chavez said referring to the Venezuelan people, his people, that is, himself, after the king had told him to shut up in a meeting.
As a second example, some officials in the president’s entourage have declared that the president’s decisions should not be subject to judicial control. The WSJ reports:
Dan Bongino, Trump’s choice to be deputy director of the FBI, has said the president “should ignore” a court decision with which he disagrees, and Vice President JD Vance wrote recently that “judges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power.” …
“There is no hard-and-fast rule about whether, in every instance, a public official is bound by a court decision,” said Aaron Reitz, Trump’s nominee to head the Office of Legal Policy, which advises the attorney general on policy and helps select federal judicial nominees.
In his 1945 book On Power, political theorist Bertrand de Jouvenel explained how English and American liberties had long been protected by the common law or the Constitution through the courts, where judges were powerful enough to check the government and its agents. After the independence of judges was abolished, the French Revolution rapidly turned into the worst tyranny the country had known.
The third instance I will mention also relates to the heightened threat to the rule of law. It was an incident during the attempts to deport illegal immigrants. Although it may look innocuous and merely indicative of the poor legal and historical education, or the weak spine, of many low-level praetorians, I think it is significant. According to a Reason Magazine report, an Afghan government employee who had helped the occupying American army finally succeeded in coming to America as a refugee. But in February, when he went to a long-scheduled appointment with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, he was arrested and jailed, presumably to be deported. His lawyer says she asked an ICE agent why her client had been arrested and was answered (twice), “New administration”—as if a change of personnel at the top of the state changed the rule of law at the governors’ pleasure. Is it a government of laws or a government of men? Let’s hope that the lawyer did not remember the answers accurately, but they are in line with the trends we have seen recently.
On Monday, the American Bar Association issued a strongly worded statement that supports the concerns expressed in my second and third examples.
The problem is a general one: Should a state that wants to do good—or claims such intention, or lies in saying so—be constrained? Well-meaning and well-informed opponents of tyranny admit that the answer is Yes, including on the “caviar left” (la gauche caviar, as we say in French). Take Daron Acemoglu et al. who, in The Narrow Corridor, argue that Leviathan grows non-stop but is happily shackled by the concurrent growth of “civil society.” It is the “shackled Leviathan” in the authors’ jargon or, alternatively, the “state capacity” doctrine. Illimited democracy can do no wrong. But shackles that don’t shackle are no shackles. Not far down this slope, state capacity, that is, state power, becomes the real object of love as we see in Acemoglu latest and rather horrible book, Power and Progress.
That’s where we are: enjoying a Leviathan who was strong enough to partly unshackle himself. It looks as if those who wanted a powerful Leviathan are getting their wish. Do they now realize that it will not bring social nirvana? Will the last shackles hold?
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The loving and beloved king with his scepter, by DALL-E as influenced by your humble blogger and perhaps by H.L. Mencken
