The Imperial Party Has No Clothes

Joe Biden’s candidacy and presidency was a promise to return to normalcy after one term of Trump’s erratic administration. Far from this return to normalcy, global chaos and war ensued, a dispirited citizenry has been burdened by the economic shocks of the global pandemic of the coronavirus, and the 2024 election is already the wildest since 1968 with the recent assassination attempt on Donald Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania and Joe Biden’s decision to drop out of the race despite preventing Democratic Party voters a fair primary. The chaos of 2024 forces us to look more acutely at the tension within American politics and the real battle between the forces aligned with Trump and the imperial bureaucracy with its overwhelming Democratic Party sympathies.

Two figures are illustrative for our understanding the crisis of American politics: Alexis de Tocqueville and Arthur Schlesinger Jr.

Tocqueville’s Democracy in America is coming up on 200 years old, and while undeniably out of date in the sense that it describes a world and political reality that is very different from our own, it remains an indispensable window into what American democracy used to be instead of what American politics is in the twenty-first century. In this manner, the work helps us understand the tensions currently playing out. Tocqueville’s marveling at nineteenth century American democracy was the rule of the states and localities, townships and municipalities, and not the federal government administration, “the Government of the States is the rule.”

Furthermore, Tocqueville’s praise of the Constitution wasn’t that it was perfect but that it was limited in power and scope. He praised the theory of divided government as ensuring that the rule of the states and municipalities reigned as the more immediate reality of the lives of American citizens who identified with their states and townships more than the distant federal government based in Washington D.C., “The only advantages which result from the present constitution of the United States are the division of legislative power and the consequent check upon political assemblies.” When Tocqueville speaks of democracy, he speaks of participation in civil society, Americans’ restless participation in the organs of their locality: church, local government, town square, and family life. “It is not the administrative but the political effects of the local system I most admire in America,” the great Frenchman wrote.

Yet Tocqueville also saw within the Constitution the danger of an imperial presidency, the executive power’s “royal prerogatives” that could destroy the system of local democratic governance that was the ingenious spirit of the early American republic:

If the existence of the Union were perpetually threatened, and if the chief interests were in daily connection with those of other powerful nations, the executive government would assume an increased importance in proportion to the measures expected of it, and those which it would carry into effect.

Let that statement by Tocqueville sink in. Reread it. Reread it again and again. Tocqueville notes two things that could transform the weak executive branch into a totalizing monster, America’s national leviathan: perpetual threats to the American nation and the national interest’s “daily connection with those of other powerful nations.” Tocqueville, in the 1830s, described the world of the twentieth and twenty-first century; the world in which American national security is always threatened and the globalized world where America’s regular interactions are with those of other powerful countries. Tocqueville foresaw the very imperial presidency that Schlesinger would write of in the 1970s.

Arthur Schlesinger Jr., the court historian and public intellectual of the Kennedy presidency, was about as partisan a liberal intellectual as one could be in the midst of the Cold War. Nevertheless, he was an acute reader and interpreter of American politics. While his famous book The Imperial Presidency largely addresses Nixon, his reflection on how the executive branch became “the most absolute monarch” is worth understanding.

For Schlesinger, the excess of the Nixon presidency was “not an aberration” but the “culmination” of nearly 200 years of the slow transformation of the presidency into an executive juggernaut freed from the criticism and restraint of Congress and even the Supreme Court – and a recent Supreme Court decision on presidential immunity further validates Schlesinger’s worry. In particular, foreign policy (or war) transformed the presidency from a less important branch of America’s political process (Congress was originally conceived as the most important of the three branches of government) into the essential branch of American government. Schlesinger provides a history of how war transformed the presidency, leading to its imperial character and quasi-autocratic purpose. For Schlesinger, the power and importance of the presidency rests on its relationship to international affairs. In short, the supreme power of the presidency is the result of America’s gradual slide into becoming an imperial polity.

We cannot seem to escape the new reality of the imperial presidency, Schlesinger laments, and here we are, in 2024, with the problem of choosing the next president.

The Democratic Party since the election of Donald Trump has decried various nationalisms: white nationalism, Christian nationalism, or just plain nationalism. It has equated these various nationalisms as “threats to democracy” and “threats” to the very fabric and soul of America. Once we move beyond this bloviated rhetoric, we can begin understanding the worry of Democrats and their apparatchiks in the media and NGOs have. What is the threat of nationalism directed toward? American imperialism. To hide the fact that American nationalism is directed against American imperialism, it cloaks imperialism with the word democracy. Mind you, there are Democrats who are nationalistic in their politics too, like Bernie Sanders, who, although he does not use that word, promotes a politics hostile to American imperialism and desires to refocus presidential energy to American (worker) concerns. That is what American nationalism is about.

Since the end of World War II, and especially since the end of the Cold War, America became, and is, the world’s imperial power. It took over this role from Britain. And in the showdown with the Soviet Union, emerged victorious in the battle against global, international, communism ensuring its singular imperial dominance over the world (that’s really what the “unipolar moment” meant or means). America has subsequently entrenched its power as imperial hegemon, embarking on a disastrous foreign policy of forever wars and democracy-building since the tragic and shocking terror attacks of September 11.

The imperial ideology of the United States is, therefore, something a historical accident. It is the result of the struggles of the twentieth century, struggles that transformed the United States from a polity with a regional focus (North America and to a lesser extent the western hemisphere) which permitted the continuation of a politics of insular localism which was once called self-governance, to a global and imperial power with newfound duties and responsibilities in the world born from the ashes of World War II haunted by the specter of global revolutionary communism. The imperial ideology of the United States can be understood as this: American preeminence over a globalized world. This imperial ideology minimally seeks to maintain American dominance over the globalized world, or it seeks to expand American dominance over the globalized world. The purpose of the presidency is to act as the political vehicle for American global dominance at the expense of national, domestic, political concerns. It is the ideology that says the most important political reality of the United States is not domestic politics but international politics, the politics of foreign policy and international diplomacy.

The Democratic Party is the party of American imperialism; it is the party which seeks to maintain the position and place of America as the imperial hegemon while forcibly spreading the new global and imperial ideology of radical chic progressivism over the world through the international institutions the United States principally founded in the aftermath of World War II. In order to achieve this maintenance of imperial power over the world, it needs an imperial president concerned with aforesaid imperial politics and power.

The nationalisms of the American right stand in contrast to the imperialism that has consumed the governing ideology of the Democratic Party. This shouldn’t be surprising, though, since the spirit of the Republican Party has long been “nationalistic,” from Lincoln to Coolidge and, more recently, to Reagan. The moderation of the more violent tempers of this nationalism occurred because of the unique and perilous problem of international communism during the Cold War—but many nationalistic populists (derided as “isolationists” by critics) and libertarians (anti-New Deal and anti-Great Society types or “small government conservatives” by self-confession) were willing to accept the Republican Party’s emerging militancy in defending against global communism with the hope that once the Soviet Union was defeated, America would scale back from the world stage (the want of national populists) and begin dismantling the social welfare state erected by FDR and LBJ (the want of libertarians and small government conservatives). These are the spirits that still run with elevated passions within the Republican Party, centering around Donald Trump, because the desire to return to “America First”—which really means greater presidential focus on Americans instead of overseas, foreign, affairs—and the deconstruction of the administrative state (the “deep state” in contemporary parlance) ironically also require an “imperial” president to radically orient the executive’s gaze away from global, imperial, responsibilities to domestic ones. The “nationalisms” of the current Republican Party is about the politics of domestic prioritization and not foreign policy universalism that seeks to uphold and expand the imperial polity of the United States. This, of course, is worrisome to various countries that have benefited from the American imperial project who would be forced into a political reorientation of their own with the end of the very imperial politics they deride yet are the primary beneficiaries of.

The forcing out of Joe Biden (alongside the prevention of Bernie Sanders’ nomination in 2016 and 2020) has revealed the Democratic Party’s governing class as the governing elite of American imperialism and cemented the party’s de facto status as the party of American imperialism. This was something I foresaw after 2016 and 2020, when, still a Democrat, I had voted for Bernie Sanders during the Democratic primaries. Yet there remains an important and insightful criticism of the nationalisms vying for control of the GOP: the world in which those ideologies had formed does not, in any meaningful sense, exist today. Opposition to American imperial leadership and the New Deal were forged prior to World War II and the end of the British Empire as the world’s leading imperial polity. The United States exists as the imperial polity of the world, and we cannot ignore this fact. And yet, despite one term of a Trump presidency, the first Trump administration really didn’t alter the reality of America’s imperial hegemony while it did expand the political dialogue to include more consideration of American prioritization within the global, imperial, world that the United States still shepherds. The imperial party has revealed itself for all to see in attempting to crush that dialogue and maintain the only legitimate political consideration is the maintenance and expansion of American imperialism. We can, and must, do better. If the imperial presidency is unavoidable, we should not wish to have the “uniparty” of American imperialism.

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