Apr 21, 2017
Moving toward an American caesar
By Gerhard Casper, ninth president of Stanford, senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute and professor emeritus of law
Today’s political situation would not come as a surprise to those who came before us.
A hundred years ago, in his 1917 magnum opus Economy and Society, sociologist Max Weber was the first to attach the term “caesarism” to the United States. “Every kind of direct popular election of the supreme ruler… that rests on the confidence of the masses and not of parliament … lies on the road to these ‘pure’ forms of caesarist acclamation,” he wrote. “In particular, this is true of the position of the President of the United States, whose superiority over parliament derives from his (formally) democratic nomination and election.”
Weber learned U.S. politics firsthand during the unusual presidential election of 1904, which Theodore Roosevelt won by a sweep of all northern states. Weber wrote of Roosevelt as a “charismatic hero” and began to develop a theory of governance in mass democracies that should look familiar to us a century later.
Every mass democracy, he wrote, will over time move towards caesarism, starting with the plebiscite (direct vote of the citizenry). The caesar’s power derives from his charisma. He responds to his electorate’s psychic, physical, economic, ethical, religious, or political needs; he knows no supervisory or appeals body, no technical jurisdiction.
Was Weber right about us? At one level — even before present-day modes of campaigning, fundraising, advertising, and communicating — he obviously captured an American tendency. While vague policy goals play a role in U.S. politics, modern elections predominantly are about choosing leaders, not about mostly futile attempts to aggregate voter preferences.
American presidential politics as Weber described them arguably began with Andrew Jackson (although leaders like Benjamin Franklin predicted a tendency toward caesarism at the outset — or, as they called it, monarchy). Robert Dahl, in How Democratic is the American Constitution?, writes that Jackson was the first president to challenge the prevailing view that Congress was the only legitimate representative of the popular will:
[J]ackson insisted that he alone could claim to represent all the people. Thus Jackson began what I have called the myth of the presidential mandate: that by winning a majority of popular (and presumably electoral) votes, the president has gained a “mandate” to carry out whatever he had proposed during the campaign. Although he was bitterly attacked for his audacious assertion, which not all later presidents supported, it gained credibility from its reassertion by Lincoln, Cleveland, Theodore Roosevelt and Wilson and was finally nailed firmly in place by Franklin Roosevelt.
To protect against the excesses of caesarism, Weber argued that legislatures were essential. However, the modern U.S. Congress — with its uninterrupted electioneering and the resulting dominance of opinion surveys, with its disregard for the rights of legislative minorities, with its politicized ways of oversight, with its rush to judgment on matters small and large (including war), with its disregard for “germaneness” in legislating, with its dependence on money-raising machines, lobbyists, and earmarks — can hardly be viewed with much confidence or optimism. “The level of parliament depends on whether it does not merely discuss great issues, but decisively influences them,” wrote Weber. “In other words, its quality depends on whether what happens there matters.”
Weber’s 100-year-old prescriptions for democracy help us analyze our tendencies toward evermore accretion of executive power and the personalization of politics. Because of mass democracy’s tendency towards choosing leaders rather than policies, this choice deserves even more attention than it presently receives. Candidates’ passions, their judgment, their sense of responsibility, their respect for the rule of law have to be probed with an eye toward how they might deal not only with the ordinary but also with the unexpected. Of exceptional importance is a leader’s ability to do what, according to Weber, the German leaders of his era were incapable of doing: attract independent political minds.
Weber finished that seminal essay by referring to the “proud traditions” of peoples who are politically mature and keep their nerves and a cool head. As the U.S. continues down the political path he predicted, keeping our nerves and a cool head will be essential to preserving our mass democracy.
