Overview

In the 2024 campaign, the presidency itself is the problem. The modern presidency has become the central fault line of polarization in America because the president, increasingly, has the power to reshape vast swaths of American life. In The Cult of the Presidency, Gene Healy argues that ""We, the People"" are to blame. Americans on each side of the red-blue divide demand a president who can create jobs, teach our children well, tend to the ""national soul""--and vanquish their culture-war enemies. Our political culture has invested the office with preposterously vast responsibilities, and as a result, the officeholder wields powers that no human being ought to have. In a new preface to the 2024 edition, Healy argues that the rise of partisan hatred lends new urgency to the cause of re-limiting executive power. In the years since Cult was first published, politics has gone feral, with polls showing that substantial majorities of Democrats and Republicans view members of the other party as ""a serious threat to the United States and its people."" At the same time, the most powerful office in the world has grown even more so. That's raised the stakes of our political differences dramatically: the issues that divide us most are now increasingly settled by whichever party manages to seize the office. In our partisan myopia, we've laid down the infrastructure for autocratic rule and sectarian warfare, making the presidency powerful enough to tear the country apart. Interweaving historical scholarship, legal analysis, and trenchant cultural commentary, The Cult of the Presidency traces America's decades‐long drift from the Framers' vision for the presidency: a constitutionally constrained chief magistrate charged with faithful execution of the laws. Restoring that vision will require a Congress and a Court willing to check executive power, but Healy emphasizes that there is no simple legislative or judicial fix. Unless Americans change what we ask of the office--no longer demanding what we should not want and cannot have--we'll get what, in a sense, we deserve.

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9781952223945

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Reviews

"""'Cult' is precisely the word, because the president's omnibus job description requires above all that he serve as high priest in America's civil religion. Healy's argument for restoring the presidency to its constitutional limits is as persuasive as his argument for why we, the people, will probably never permit it.""--Walter A. McDougall, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and author of The Tragedy of U.S. Foreign Policy: How American Civil Religion Betrayed the National Interest ""Gene Healy's well-researched, lucidly written historical overview of the American presidency could not be timelier with Americans about to elect a new president. This study provides a reality check for where we should not want future presidents to go.""--John W. Dean, former Nixon White House counsel and author of Blind Ambition: The White House Years ""It's more than just a guide to why you shouldn't expect too much from the executive: It's a history of how we've come to view the president as central to not only our politics but our national conception of self. Its emphasis on the limitations of the president is as relevant to those who seek to make the state work better as to those who seek to imprison it. Moreover, Healy is a graceful, funny, and fluid writer.""--Ezra Klein, New York Times columnist ""Popular perceptions often thoughtlessly equate activist presidents with great ones. Gene Healy makes a compelling case that the opposite proposition lies closer to the truth. In this thorough historical analysis, Healy lays bare the deeper risks of an expansionist view of the presidency.""--Richard A. Epstein, Laurence A. Tisch Professor of Law at New York University School of Law and author of The Classical Liberal Constitution: The Uncertain Quest for Limited Government ""Rhetorical--and related--excesses are inherent in the modern presidency. This is so for reasons brilliantly explored in the year's most pertinent and sobering public affairs book, 'The Cult of the Presidency.'""--George F. Will, Washington Post columnist ""This splendid book provides the best account yet of how the Imperial Presidency, abetted by Democrats and Republicans alike, came to pose a clear and present danger to our republic.""--Andrew J. Bacevich, professor emeritus of international relations and history at Boston University and author of Washington Rules: America's Path to Permanent War"

Author Information

Gene Healy is senior vice president for policy at the Cato Institute. His research focuses on executive power and the role of the presidency, and he is the author of, among other works, Indispensable Remedy: The Broad Scope of the Constitution's Impeachment Power (2018) and False Idol: Barack Obama and the Continuing Cult of the Presidency (2012). Healy holds a BA from Georgetown University and a JD from the University of Chicago Law School.

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