If you read the op-ed page or the comics, you know Vice-President Cheney thinks the Executive Branch is above the law. Or, perhaps better, is a law unto itself. Sheila Kennedy has been hammering this point for years. Doonesbury and Candorville have been ripping it recently on the comics page. And an excellent New York Times editorial by Princeton’s Sean Wilentz drives the point home.

Set aside, if you will, your concern that VP Cheney and President Bush are bad guys. Forget the content and just focus on the form. We have created an Executive Branch with an incredible amount of power. In essence, the Executive Branch runs foreign policy almost by itself. We’re finding out right now where the limits, if any, might be.

Unfortunately, Americans like the idea. It as if the President “is” the government and Congress exists to advise and consent. This is undoubtedly true in foreign policy, but is somewhat true in domestic policy as well. Take fiscal discipline. Many would give the Executive Branch even MORE power by providing for a line-item veto. As much as I like the idea of fiscal restraint, I do not favor a more powerful Presidency.

The scope of executive power is incredible and it’s everywhere. The majority who sent a Democratic legislature to Washington ask, “why aren’t they turning the Iraq situation around?” But it is amazingly difficult to do. Be honest: Representative Pelosi and Senator Reid look very small and ineffective next to the President. When Speaker Pelosi went to the Middle East, she was ridiculed for overstepping her authority. Next to the President, the Speaker of the House is an inconsequential figure.

This is not a new trend. Schlesinger wrote The Imperial Presidency in 1973, so this has been a long time brewing. But I’ve got an idea—nothing more than an intuition at this point—that concentration of power in a single person, a chief executive, is bleeding over into the rest of society.

It might explain, for instance, why we elect governors rather than US Senators as President. We don’t choose leaders who compromise, make deals, and seek common ground, as Senators must. We want solitary executives who are “deciders.” And what can Congress do to fight back? It can rarely win a fair face-off, so instead it adopts the strategy of hectoring, hassling and badgering until the President is run to ground. A Democratic Congress did this with Nixon; a Republican one did it with Clinton. That’s not a comparison—leave aside for now how much you think either did or did not deserve the treatment—but a description of what Congress must do to cut the President down to size.

The trend may also explain power-concentration outside of politics. It might explain, for instance, why CEO salaries have soared proportionately far, far beyond other salaries.

It gets scarier. What if it’s part of an even larger trend in which people need to personify ideas and movements. For instance, it is commonplace for Americans to blame Hitler for World War II, even though I’m pretty sure he had help. But we want it to be about Hitler, not about the complicity of millions of Germans and Italians, and surely not about any culpability we might bear. Just so, perhaps we want Presidents and CEO’s to be the living, breathing symbols to whom we can assign credit and blame.

Since I’m out on this limb, the same trend might even help explain the public fascination with so-called celebrities like Paris Hilton. We want social goals and public problems to be defined by individuals so we can personify right and wrong. Philosophy is hard; finger-pointing is easy.

The desire to elevate our leaders to philosopher-kings may be ingrained in us as humans—heck it might even be a genetic throwback to the alpha-male—but I suspect mass media, paced by television, fans the flames. The rise of the Imperial Presidency has been right in line with the rise of televised mass media.

I’m not saying the world’s problems have been boiled down to a few individuals, just that we prefer to think and act as though they have been. The complex social systems still exist, but pushing power, privilege, and responsibility to the top means we no longer have to deal with them. We don’t have to solve the problems, we just have to find the person on whose shoulders we can place them.

Believe me, I’m not trying to redirect blame away from Cheney, Bush, Clinton, Nixon, the nation’s CEOs, or anyone else. But I am saying we’ve created a structure in which much too much is riding on the “goodness” or “ badness” of a few individuals who make it to the top. We don’t just need better people in those jobs, we need those jobs to be much more broadly accountable—to the legislative and judicial branches, to boards of directors, to stakeholders, to voters—no matter who holds them.

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