Civics: “They treated alternative opinions as lacking legitimacy and therefore unworthy of notice”
Since De Tocqueville wrote, events have combined to falsify his grounds for optimism. The federal government, and therefore the president who directs it, now has functions encompassing most aspects of public welfare. Its 12,000 civilian employees of 1832 have grown to two million in 2025, in addition to another million employees of the individual states, many of whom are employed in federal programs. In the same period, federal government expenditure has increased from an estimated 0.02% of GDP to 23%, dwarfing the expenditure of the individual states. This is a pattern common to all modern democracies. At the time of the census of 1851, the United Kingdom employed just 1,628 civil servants, as against 560,000 now. At the end of the 19th century, government expenditure in European countries stood at about a tenth of GDP on average, as opposed to just under half today. Even these figures do not capture the whole picture. Until relatively recently, the main limitation on the power of governments was their ignorance. The German sociologist Max Weber defined bureaucracy as “domination through knowledge”. That domination has been greatly increased by modern techniques of information gathering, storage and retrieval.
Article II of the US Constitution concentrates all executive power in the president’s hands. He has an electoral mandate independent of Congress. He hires and fires all federal agents and employees. All of them are answerable to him. He is the commander in chief of the armed forces. He nominates all federal judges, subject to Senate confirmation. He is not answerable to Congress for the way that he uses these powers, except by way of impeachment, and only then for treason, bribery or other high crimes and misdemeanors. Since a decision by the Supreme Court in 2024, the president has also been constitutionally immune from criminal liability for acts done in his public capacity.
These awesome powers are characteristic of presidential systems, and the only other region where presidential democracies have been the norm is Latin America. Every Latin American country has adopted the US constitutional model, with greater or lesser variants. And every one of them has at some points in its history experienced the subversion of its democracy by its president or the usurpation of presidential powers by a military dictator. The only significant European country to have a presidential system comparable to the US is France. The constitution of the Fifth French Republic was created for a relatively benign strongman, General de Gaulle, but the French presidency may well in 2027 fall into the hands of a markedly less benign strongman of the extreme Left or Right.
The great German-American constitutional scholar Karl Loewenstein observed that the success of the American presidential model was due to factors unique to the United States: its historical prosperity, its relative freedom from external threats, its political culture. These things had, as he put it, “converted an intrinsically absurd constitutional mechanism into a cherished national myth”. When transplanted to a less privileged environment, Loewentein pointed out that the American model has almost always failed. His emphasis on the moral and physical environment of democracies was an important insight. After all, the moral and physical environment may change. All democratic constitutions, whether formal and legal like that of the USA, or informal and political like Britain’s, are vulnerable to the collapse of the basic cultural norms on which democracies depend. When this happens, the formal institutional framework usually survives. There are elections, legislatures, courts and so on in Vladimir Putin’s Russia. But the rule of law and substance of democratic accountability have gone, replaced by a brutal autocratic reality.
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Yes, but he is wrong. The US Constitution has patently not been dismantled. As for the excessive use of executive orders, this is a problem that afflicts every Presidency. The allegation of corruption is nothing more than that. We await Lord Sumption’s evidence on this point.
