THE FOUNDERS DID NOT envision a presidential cult of personality, but an unhappy paradox of American democracy is the sovereignty that politicians hold over the public that elects them. This sway has never been more evident than now, when tens of millions of us begin each day by reaching for our phone, skimming through our news feeds, or otherwise plugging into a communal presidential drama—pulled into the vortex, whether we like it or not. This isn’t Donald Trump’s fault. He may be finding new avenues of access, but he didn’t invent the strange intimacy of leader and led that has become a feature, not a bug, of the American system. “Presidential primacy, so indispensable to the political order, has turned into presidential supremacy,” the historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. wrote 44 years ago in The Imperial Presidency, coining the term we all still use.
Schlesinger has a lot to teach us and deserves fresh attention today. No other writer did so much to shape our idea of the presidency—as an office, as an institution, as an incarnation of popular consciousness. His many books may be out of fashion, but the terms he popularized remain part of our common vocabulary. Among them were also judicial activism, unilateralism, and the politics of hope. This last is usually identified with Barack Obama, but it was the title of Schlesinger’s first essay collection, published in 1963, when Schlesinger the Harvard professor had become the in-house chronicler of John F. Kennedy’s administration.
هذه القصة مأخوذة من طبعة November 2017 من The Atlantic.
ابدأ النسخة التجريبية المجانية من Magzter GOLD لمدة 7 أيام للوصول إلى آلاف القصص المتميزة المنسقة وأكثر من 8500 مجلة وصحيفة.
بالفعل مشترك ? تسجيل الدخول
هذه القصة مأخوذة من طبعة November 2017 من The Atlantic.
ابدأ النسخة التجريبية المجانية من Magzter GOLD لمدة 7 أيام للوصول إلى آلاف القصص المتميزة المنسقة وأكثر من 8500 مجلة وصحيفة.
بالفعل مشترك? تسجيل الدخول
After the Miracle
Cystic fibrosis once guaranteed an early deathbut a medical breakthrough has given many patients a chance to live decades longer than expected. What do they do now?
WILLIAM WHITWORTH 1937-2024
WILLIAM WHITWORTH, the editor of The Atlantic from 1980 to 1999, had a soft voice and an Arkansas accent that decades of living in New York and New England never much eroded.
Christine Blasey Ford Testifies Again
Her new memoir doubles as a modern-day horror story.
Is Theo Von the Next Joe Rogan?
Or is he something else entirely?
Orwell's Escape
Why the author repaired to the remote Isle of Jura to write his masterpiece, 1984
What's So Bad About Asking Where Humans Came From?
Human origin stories have often been used for nefarious purposes. That doesn't mean they are worthless.
Miranda's Last Gift
When our daughter died suddenly, she left us with grief, memories and Ringo.
BEFORE FACEBOOK, THERE WAS Black Planet
An alternative history of the social web
CLASH OF THE PATRIARCHS
A hard-line Russian bishop backed by the political might of the Kremlin could split the Orthodox Church in two.
THE MAN WHO DIED FOR THE LIBERAL ARTS
Chugging through Pacific waters in February 1942, the USS Crescent City was ferrying construction equipment and Navy personnel to Pearl Harbor, dispatched there to assist in repairing the severely damaged naval base after the Japanese attack.
