Constitutional Dictatorship: Its Dangers and Its Design
Constitutional dictatorship, far from being a contradiction in terms, has been an important feature of republican governments since Roman times. This essay describes the basic idea of a constitutional dictatorship, and discusses those elements of constitutional dictatorship that already exist in the American constitutional system, particularly in the modern presidency. A constitutional dictatorship is a system (or subsystem) of constitutional government that bestows on a certain individual or institution the right to make binding rules, directives, and decisions and apply them to concrete circumstances unhindered by timely legal checks to their authority. The Roman dictatorship limited the time of the dictatorship and separated the institution that declared the emergency from the person who exercised power. The American pattern has been quite different. Generally speaking, the President announces the existence of a crisis or emergency, and, at the President's request, the Congress generally bestows new statutory grants of power. These new powers are usually never repealed and are banked away for future use, sometimes in very different contexts. The American pattern of constitutional dictatorship does not involve the executive claiming the right to transcend the law; instead Congress grants ever more practically unreviewable discretion to the executive. In addition, a significant feature of American constitutionalism is the rise of "distributed dictatorships," in which executive power is spread among a number of de facto dictators, each with its own special expertise. The modern administrative state increasingly spreads unreviewable power among a variety of different agencies, czars, and bureaucrats. The Federal Reserve's response to the recent economic crisis and the Centers for Disease Control's powers to impose quarantines are examples. The essay concludes with some suggestions for counteracting the more dangerous tendencies in the American pattern of constitutional dictatorship. Although emergencies often cannot be foreseen in advance, the structural features of emergency power must be designed in advance to preserve republican government.
Machiavelli and the Problem of Dictatorship
Machiavelli is the first modern political thinker who pays great attention to the magistracy of dictatorship. “Dictatorial authority,” as he puts it, is fundamental to the survival and prosperity of republics: It is the magistracy, the “ordinary mode,” to which they turn to deal with “extraordinary accidents,” political and military emergencies. Machiavelli's gaze is cast both on the Ancient and the Modern world: Although he concentrates on the Roman magistracy, he also pays attention to magistracies of the modern world that were in some way similar, such as the Council of the Ten in the Republic of Venice. In my paper, I will attempt to reconstruct the essential points of Machiavelli's discussion on dictatorship; in the concluding remarks, I will briefly tackle the more general question of the relationship between politics and law in his work as a whole.
Broadcasting Freedom: Radio, War, and the Politics of Race, 1938-1948
The World War II era represented the golden age of radio as a broadcast medium in the United States; it also witnessed a rise in African-American activism against racial segregation and discrimination, especially as they were practised by the federal government itself. In this study, the author links these cultural and political forces by showing how African-American activists, public officials, intellectuals, and artists sought to access and use radio to influence a national debate about racial inequality. Drawing on a body of national public affairs programming about African-Americans and race relations, the author uses these radio shows to demonstrate the emergence of a new national discourse about race and ethnicity, racial hatred and injustice, and the contribution of racial and immigrant populations to the development of the United States. These programmes, Savage contends, challenged the nation to reconcile its professed egalitarian ideals with its unjust treatment of black Americans and other minorities. This examination of radio's treatment of race as a national political issue also provides important evidence that the campaigns for racial justice in the 1940s served as an essential, and still overlooked, precursor to the civil rights campaigns of the 1950s and 1960s, Savage argues. The next battleground would be in the South, and on television.