An Enemy and an Emergency

In 1973, the historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. gave us the phrase “the imperial presidency.” He meant it as an alarm. Watergate was unraveling, the Vietnam War had been run for years on executive say-so, and it seemed possible, briefly, that the country would decide a presidency with that much power was a mistake, and correct it.

It did correct it. And then, over the next fifty years, it un-corrected it, step by step, under presidents of both parties, until the office Schlesinger warned about looks modest beside the one we have now.

This is a short history of how that happened. But it’s not mainly a story about ambitious presidents. It’s a story about a mechanism. Power does not concentrate on its own. It concentrates when someone supplies a reason, and the most reliable reason, the one that has worked over and over, is an enemy. Anti-communism, xenophobia, sexism, and racism are not side plots in this history. They are the engine.

Start with a distinction I keep coming back to: power can be “concentrated” or “distributed.” Distributed power is slow, plural, and frustrating, with many hands, many checks, Congress and courts and states and an organized public, all of them able to say no. Concentrated power is fast, unified, and unaccountable, with fewer hands, fewer veto points, and decisions made at the top and explained later, if at all.

Every move from distributed toward concentrated power needs a license. Someone has to make the case that the slow, plural way is too dangerous right now - that the threat is too urgent for the ordinary machinery of consent. That license has a standard form: an enemy and an emergency. Name the enemy, declare the emergency, and the checks begin to look like luxuries.

But notice what that license actually has to do. An enemy and an emergency are only words, just claims, a story about danger. By themselves they move nothing. What converts the story into surrendered power is fear. The enemy is named in order to frighten; the emergency is declared in order to frighten; and it is the fear, not the words, that does the work. This is the part of the mechanism we tend to hurry past, because it is uncomfortable to sit with. Fear is not a side effect of the authoritarian appeal. Fear is the appeal. Fear is the point.

Consider what fear does to a person, and then to a public. Fear narrows. It shortens the horizon until only the immediate threat is in view, and everything else - proportion, precedent, the long-run cost - drops out of the frame. It makes deliberation feel like dithering and patience feel like negligence. A frightened person does not want many hands and a court date; a frightened person wants someone to act, and to act now. So fear does not merely tolerate concentrated power. It generates an appetite for it. It takes the very features that make distributed power valuable - that it is slow, plural, accountable, and hard to move - and quietly relabels them as weakness. Frightened enough, a free people will not have concentrated power forced on them. They will ask for it.

Laid out plainly, then, the mechanism is a sequence. Name an enemy. Let the enemy do its work on the public’s nerves. Let the resulting fear harden into a demand - for safety, for action, for someone in charge. Then supply the concentrated power the frightened public is now asking for, and call it protection. Each step is modest. Each feels, in the moment, like nothing more than common sense. That’s exactly what makes the sequence so durable, and so easy to run again and again.

And this is why the story is not, at bottom, a story about presidents. Authoritarian power is rarely simply seized from above. Far more often it is granted from below; handed upward by a population made frightened enough to want a protector more than it wants its own authority. The frightened public is not a bystander to the mechanism. It’s the mechanism’s trigger. Authoritarianism runs from the bottom up: it needs our fear, and it needs us to act on it. That is the grim part. But it’s also the hopeful part because what depends on being granted can also be withheld. Fear is the fulcrum on which all of this turns, and a small force can move an enormous weight if the fulcrum is set in the right place. But a fulcrum is useless without something to rest on. Refuse the fear, and the lever has nothing.

For one moment, the country tried distributed power on purpose. Congress passed the War Powers Resolution over Nixon’s veto in 1973, trying to claw back the decision to go to war. It created a special court in 1978 to put a judge between the government and its wiretaps. The Church Committee, in 1975 and 1976, dragged the intelligence agencies into daylight and documented what unchecked executive power had already done, including COINTELPRO, the FBI’s campaign to surveil and sabotage the civil rights movement and its leaders.

It was a real reform. It also rested on a fragile assumption: that the fear had passed. It hadn’t. The Cold War was still on, and the architecture of the national security state - the secrecy, the agencies, the doctrine that some decisions are too sensitive for ordinary scrutiny - was left standing. Reform trimmed the branches. The root system was intact.

In the 1980s, executive power got something it had lacked: a theory. Lawyers in the Reagan Justice Department, and in the newly founded Federalist Society, began developing the “unitary executive” — the claim that the Constitution places all executive authority in the president’s hands, and that congressional limits on it are suspect by default. Presidential signing statements, once rare, became a tool for quietly rewriting laws on the way to enforcing them.

The theory had a Cold War sponsor. Iran-Contra - a secret, executive-run war financed by secret arms sales, in open defiance of Congress - was justified, by those who ran it, as something anti-communism required. The enemy licensed the secrecy; the secrecy concealed the lawbreaking. When the Cold War ended, the enemy vanished but the machinery did not. The 1990s normalized presidential war without a declaration. The expansion no longer needed communism. It had momentum.

September 11, 2001 supplied the most powerful license in modern American history. Within a week, Congress passed the Authorization for Use of Military Force - sixty words, no expiration, no named country - and presidents have stretched those sixty words across two decades and many countries since.

What followed was a near-total executive program built on the enemy-and-emergency form: warrantless mass surveillance of Americans, run for years outside the law that was written to govern it; indefinite detention without trial at Guantánamo; and secret Justice Department memos redefining torture so it could be authorized from the top. Each was defended as something the emergency demanded and the commander-in-chief was uniquely empowered to decide. The terrorist enemy did the work the communist enemy had done before - and because that enemy was coded as foreign, Muslim, and brown, the public was primed to grant the exception.

The next president had run partly against that program and then kept much of it. This is the most important and least dramatic part of the story. Surveillance authorities were renewed. The drone campaign expanded, and in 2011 it killed an American citizen without trial. Prosecutions of leakers under the Espionage Act outpaced every previous administration combined. When Congress deadlocked, the White House governed by executive action, by “a pen and a phone.”

None of this required a villain. It required only that each president treat the powers he inherited as normal, and hand them on. Concentrated power had become bipartisan infrastructure. That is how a distributed power system actually dies, not in one dramatic seizure, but in a long, quiet agreement across parties that the machinery that fear justified is simply how things are done now.

What happens when someone inherits all of that and feels no obligation to be embarrassed by it? We’re finding out. A national emergency declared to move money Congress had explicitly refused to appropriate. Open assertions that the president’s authority over the executive branch is essentially total. In 2024, in “Trump v. United States,” the Supreme Court granted presidents broad immunity from prosecution for “official acts,” converting a mere norm against presidential lawbreaking into a constitutional shield. Moves to reclassify large parts of the civil service, stripping job protections so that career expertise can be swapped out for loyalty.

These are not deviations from the path. They are the path - the unitary-executive theory, the emergency precedent, and the national-security secrecy doctrine, all arriving at once in the hands of people willing to use them without apology.

Notice what licensed each stage. Anti-communism built the permanent secrecy state - the agencies, the classifications, the doctrine that some power must sit beyond scrutiny. Xenophobia gave the executive its most lawless zone: immigration. Since the Chinese Exclusion Case of 1889, courts have held that the political branches wield near-absolute “plenary power” over who may enter and remain, an entire field where the ordinary rules of review barely reach, available for use whenever a frightening outsider can be named. And racism supplied the template for turning citizens into suspects: COINTELPRO against Black organizers, the carceral build-out, the surveillance of dissent, all rehearsed first on people the majority had been taught not to count as fully part of “us.”

Beneath all of it lies the oldest of the four - sexism’s contribution. Long before the unitary executive there was the unitary household: the doctrine of coverture, under which a married woman’s legal self was absorbed into her husband’s, two persons collapsed into one, and that one the man. The idea that legitimate authority means the many folded into a single, answerable head did not begin in the Justice Department. It began at home.

The common thread is not four separate prejudices. It is a single technique. Concentrated power needs an enemy who feels internal enough to be everywhere and alien enough to be denied the protections owed to “real” Americans. Communist, immigrant, Black radical, terrorist - the names rotate; the function is constant. Fear, again, is the fulcrum, and these threads are how the lever gets placed.

If power concentrates through manufactured fear, then it is held - and reversed - by people who refuse the manufacture of fear. That’s the hopeful part, and it is not sentimental. The reform of the 1970s was real; it failed only because it trimmed the branches and spared the root.

The distributed answer is not a better president. It is a Congress willing to reclaim the powers it gave away, courts willing to enforce limits on the office that appointed them, states and localities acting as genuine checks rather than spectators, and a public that recognizes the enemy-and-emergency script the moment it starts, and declines to play their part.

The presidency grew because, again and again, we were persuaded that someone else was the danger. The work now is to stop being persuaded - and to find each other before the next emergency is announced.