Stephen F. Knott: Demagoguery, Restraint, and the American Presidency Part 2 | BRI Scholar Talks

0:00 [Music] hi this is tony williams senior fellow at the bill of rights institute and i want to welcome you to another episode of scholar talks uh on today’s episode we’re honored to have back uh distinguished scholar stephen knott who is going to discuss his important

0:21 new book which i have right here the lost soul of the american presidency the decline into demagoguery and the prospects for renewal uh this is of course part two of our discussion uh in our two-part series so welcome back steve thank you again for uh your willingness to join us for for two uh parts well thank

0:43 you tony it’s always a pleasure great thank you so much well i’ll introduce you again uh stephen f knot is a professor in the national security affairs department at the naval war college he co-chaired the presidential oral history program at the miller center of public affairs at the university of virginia which has a very useful website on all the

1:04 presidents by the way he has taught teachers for many years at the graduate school program at the ashbrook center of ashland university and he’s written numerous books including as i plugged in our first discussion uh the book we wrote together washington and hamilton the alliance that forged america also a superb book on uh alexander

1:27 hamilton called alexander hamilton and the persistence of meth he’s currently uh hard at work on a book on the presidency of john f kennedy and his website is stephen f not kn ott dot com so uh as part two of our series

1:49 uh can you maybe review uh your ideas from from part one of our discussion contrasting this what you term the constitutional presidency with what you term the populist presidency uh and maybe give us an example too to illustrate each one

2:09 oh sure tony yeah so the the constitutional presidency as envisioned by washington and hamilton uh was was a presidency where the occupant would serve as a unifying head of state a president who understood that a president’s words

2:30 can have considerable impact on the body politic and that it would be best to limit uh one’s words uh the amount of time that one would actually address the american public which by the way was usually just done in writing of course uh but it it emphasizes this head of state role

2:52 uh it rejects the idea most uh equally importantly it rejects the idea that the president should serve as the voice of the people and instead emphasizes the idea that the president has a unique responsibility to take care that the laws be faithfully executed

3:13 and that there may be occasions when a president actually has to in a sense stand up to public opinion uh in in favor of the rule of law so the the constitutional presidency of washington and hamilton i see as a rejection of what will come later first to some extent under thomas

3:34 jefferson and then in a sort of full-blown uh completely fleshed-out aversion under andrew jackson and andrew johnson and i mentioned the importance of language the importance of choosing one’s words carefully you can see i think a real contrast

3:55 between the constitutional presidency as practiced by abraham lincoln and the populist presidency as practiced by his immediate successor andrew johnson and you see this especially in lincoln’s second inaugural address where lincoln

4:15 appeals to his fellow citizens both north and south appeals to their better angels and appeals to a sense of unity and that and can see a kind of restoration of the american republic on the horizon of the american union on the horizon and

4:36 so you see in abraham lincoln a kind of magnanimity of some carefully chosen words you see the exact opposite with his successor andrew johnson and in fact at that very inauguration andrew johnson shows up to be sworn in as vice president of the united states and he’s drunk uh he’s he is

4:58 not in control of his uh faculties and uh gives this kind of slurring uh you know people have trouble understanding what vice president johnson is saying uh he doesn’t recognize some members of lincoln’s cabinet who extend him the courtesy of attending his swearing-in

5:19 it’s quite an undignified performance and i think right there you see a kind of nice capitalization of the differences between the sober presidency of uh washington and hamilton and lincoln and that of the more popular perhaps less sober presidency of an andrew

5:39 johnson well steve uh after reading your your magnificent book uh and and racking my brain right now i i can’t think of a starker example between the president and and his or her successor uh regarding the constitutional and populist presidency so excellent well done so all right uh so

6:00 next question you write in the book that woodrow wilson deserves recognition as the president who launched the activist presidency of the 20th century which persists to this day how does wilson break with the founders

6:20 uh and and how does he create a more visionary more democratic presidency that’s that’s more consistent with with what you label the populist presidency so woodrow wilson of course is our first uh president with a phd he spends much of his adult life in the academic world

6:43 uh and he’s a student of of american government and of american political history he does develop a kind of contempt for the american constitution and for the founder some of the founders who drafted that document i mean on the one hand wilson recognizes that for the world they lived in the founders lived in they

7:05 did they did do a good job in terms of securing political rights for the american citizenry but wilson believes in in darwin he believes in evolution he believes in a living constitution as a result and believes that as the 20th century approaches it’s time for the united states to

7:26 rethink its devotion to the constitution and the american public’s admiration for many of the founders who drafted the constitution so the constitution must evolve with the times and the presidency wilson comes to believe over time is uniquely situated to lead this

7:48 transformation to bring the american people into the 20th century to update to modernize the american government that will be the president’s primary responsibility in the 20th century and so when wilson wins the presidential election of 1912 after segueing from an academic

8:10 career into a political one he makes it abundantly clear as he puts it that the president is free to be as big a man as he wants to be there are not going to be the kind of 19th and 18th century restrictions on presidential power in the 20th century if we are going to

8:32 prevail if the american system is going to survive in the 20th century we have to move beyond that antiquated form of thinking and so the changes occur across the board the president emerges as the party leader he emerges to some extent as the de facto speaker of the house

8:52 it’s his responsibility to educate the american public so to speak to bring them up to speed on 20th century realities it’s an across-the-board transformation of the role of the presidency and i would argue in some ways it’s an across-the-board transformation of the uh importance of the constitution in the american mind

9:14 right and you know can you maybe give a few examples of that you know i i’m thinking here you know he presides over a real expansion of the administrative state and the executive agencies and really kind of his visionary rhetoric uh you know with with um you know leaving the united states in the war making the world safe for democracy as

9:37 he terms it and then personally going to versailles right to hammer out the peace agreement and then goes on this sort of whistle stop tour uh to to push it among the american people or sort of over the heads of the senate seem to be some of the more striking examples from yes yeah no good all excellent points tony

9:57 yeah i mean wilson begins to see not the president not only as the voice of the american people but to some extent as the voice of of the peoples around the globe the united states has a unique responsibility to bring the blessings of democracy to the rest of the world and the president is in a unique position

10:18 to lead that crusade so there’s an unbridled um sense of america’s role in the world an unbridled sense of the president’s responsibility to foster that role both on the domestic front and on the foreign policy front and as you as you said tony you see it

10:39 uh in his trip to versailles you see it in his proposal for league of nations at home you also see it you mentioned tony the administrative state wilson again wanting to bring the american people and the american political system into the 20th century believes in this

10:59 notion of uh expertise of uh of uh of a sort of skilled bureaucracy a skilled administrative state being part of that process of modernizing america wilson is all about efficiency and in his view efficiency requires centralization

11:22 and federalism which talks and celebrates decentralization is one of wilson’s enemies in a sense so the more you can centralize power in the united states the more you can create a centralized efficient bureaucracy the better and the better for bringing the united states

11:43 into the 20th century so you know i have issues with much of what wilson stood for but this is a significant president for better or for worse right and and a bit of a darker side too right uh in terms of uh um policies towards african-americans as well as civil

12:04 liberties during world war one excellent points and i’m glad you brought that up and sadly of course one of the concerns that washington and hamilton had with a majoritarian popularized or populist presidency is that minorities would pay the price and by the way you did see that i think

12:25 during the age of jackson uh you did see it too certainly to a great extent uh under under andrew johnson and you see it again here under president wilson where some of the progress and i grant you it wasn’t necessarily significant progress but it was some progress the federal workforce for instance in washington dc

12:46 had been had finally taken steps towards uh integration allowing african americans to to uh secure positions in the federal government wilson reverses all that uh wilson’s administration reverses all that a horrific record on racial matters uh of course he welcomes the director of the birth of a nation to the white house

13:08 to uh to promote this overtly racist film and as you mentioned tony on the civil liberties front certainly during the first world war uh his administration has an atrocious record not just against people who were openly identified as bolsheviks or openly identified as german supporters

13:28 but even people who spoke out against the draft like eugene debs and others they were imprisoned by the federal government for engaging in a form of political speech in opposition to the draft this this this record of wilson’s on civil rights and civil liberties is is very disturbing right all right gotcha all right well

13:51 moving on uh to fdr uh he’s the president who presides over the saving of capitalism during the great depression uh defeating the nazis and imperial japan during world war ii and and yet you point out there are also several more troubling aspects of his presidency contributing to the development of this

14:12 populist presidency yeah so obviously franklin roosevelt takes advantage of some technological developments the advent of radio to further woodrow wilson’s vision uh and i didn’t touch on this should have of a president sort of forming a personal bond

14:33 with individual americans and of course the technology of radio allows fdr to do that so if you go to the fdr library in hyde park new york you’ll find all these letters from people saying i felt you were in my living room with me that’s exactly the kind of bond woodrow wilson envisioned for the 20th century uh presidency

14:55 and of course as you said tony i mean fdr deserves i in my view a lot of credit for assembling a first-rate national security team during the second world war i think he deserves a lot of credit for restoring american optimism during the great depression i might even argue that he helped to save american capitalism the downside was

15:18 that as part of this popular populist presidency fdr had a tendency to portray his opponents in very stark inflammatory uh polemical language including just referring to uh republicans as as in a sense the enemy to the point where in his 1944 state of

15:40 the union message franklin roosevelt actually suggests that if the republicans were to win the presidential and congressional elections that year it would mark the triumph of fascism in the united states and of course this would be at the very moment that fascism in europe and in asia is being defeated

16:02 and yet he raises that specter here he also as we all know engages in what i would consider to be a very polemical assault on the supreme court um and in a sense on the i would argue on the rule of law with his court packing scheme which of

16:23 course goes down to defeat but the kind of language that fdr used to attack the court uh is is fairly rare in in american history uh he refers to these old men as being sort of captives of horse and buggy days that they have not evolved with the rest of america

16:45 in realizing the importance of of technological changes the industrial revolution everything else that requires the constitution and the american system of government to catch up and these people are still living back in 1789. very over the top i would argue damaging rhetoric so while i can see a lot of merit

17:07 with some of fdr’s policies and practices as president there’s also an incredible amount of damaging rhetoric directed at the courts directed at political opponents and to build on your previous question tony fdr’s track record certainly when it comes to civil liberties

17:29 regarding the status of japanese american citizens is hardly one that we can we can celebrate so if you see yourself the president as in a kind of wilsonian i’m as big a man as i want to be then nothing’s going to stand in the way of you imprisoning 120 or so thousand uh

17:51 uh japanese americans uh because who’s going to speak up for them they’re an unpopular minority right and so this is exactly the dangers of this majoritarian populist presidency that if you sort of uh weaken the rule of law and you celebrate

18:13 the president instead as a personality and you give him this unbridled power you end up with abuses of power like we did with the internment of their of these japanese americans thank you and so while many or maybe most 20th century presidents uh exemplify the populist

18:36 presidency you argue that there were some exceptions i’m thinking here william howard taft uh calvin coolidge by and large dwight eisenhower uh and so in what ways do they exercise the kind of restraint of the constitutional presidency

18:56 yeah terrific question tony and i i i’ve often thought that william howard taft is one of our more underestimated presidents and uh i think i even suggest in the book that maybe he should be put up on mount rush war mount rushmore if he if he would fit which is i grant you an open question but

19:16 i’d replace teddy roosevelt might put taft up there in a jiffy and the reason for that is that uh taft actually pursued a fairly progressive agenda as i understand it more anti-trust suits were brought during the taft years than were brought under teddy roosevelt

19:37 more conservation land was set aside under william howard taft that occurred under teddy roosevelt but taft does not engage in the kind of demagoguery that you see from tr especially as time goes on and especially during tr’s bull moose campaign in in 1912 taft does not

20:00 attack the supreme court taft does not does not do anything to sort of weaken the rule of law and taft downplays the personal elements of the presidency he does not attempt to present himself as a kind of warm and fuzzy figure

20:20 as tr did a tr was constantly parading his family out in front of the press that’s that’s a very much a populist modern conception of something a president too should do taft rejects that he’s a throwback to that more restrained constitutional model uh and for that reason and many others i

20:41 i i really respect uh and think taft deserves more attention than he receives you mentioned coolidge i have to confess and this may be one of the weaknesses in the book there’s not a lot of discussion in there about coolidge and perhaps i should have devoted more attention to coolidge however there is a quotation from

21:03 coolidge that is absolutely terrific that i think goes to the heart of my thesis and i’ll loosely paraphrase paraphrase the quotation here but coolidge says something to the effect of it’s very easy for an american president uh to to set the american public a light you know to fire them up

21:23 uh to divide them to pit them against one another to be the captive of jealousies etc and a president should not do that so coolidge had that washingtonian understanding of the important role of the president as a head of state and as a unifier and i wish i had devoted more attention to

21:44 that i do see some elements as you mentioned in dwight eisenhower eisenhower also i think understood the um importance of the president’s role as a head of state he played that uh role to to to the max uh he avoided eisenhower avoided

22:04 the kinds of personal attacks uh that characterized the presidencies of for instance franklin roosevelt and harry truman in fact eisenhower would frequently get upset at staff members or cabinet officers of his who engaged in those kinds of personal attacks he was always keenly aware that one

22:27 should erect a high wall of separation between policy disputes and the personalities involved and so you see eisenhower have a terrific relationship for instance with senate majority leader lyndon johnson of the opposite party which i think did a lot of good for the united states in terms of pushing through the interstate highway

22:49 act a civil rights act of 57 and other initiatives so of of the sort of modern presidencies and i’m probably dating myself here by classifying eisenhower’s modern modern but of the modern group of presidents yeah i think eisenhower comes perhaps the closest uh to emulating the model set by by

23:11 washington and hamilton right and and just as an aside you know ike really did that uh tremendously uh in in world war ii i think you point out um you know holding the alliance together not allowing his his generals to criticize the british uh even when when sometimes they deserved it

23:32 great point tony yeah i mean this this man was a master consensus builder uh in some ways an extraordinary diplomat uh it’s it’s i mean he’s finally received his due it took way too long in those perennial polls of presidential greatness

23:52 uh for eisenhower to receive the the due to receive the rewards he is due i mean he’s now finally almost always ranked in the top ten and i think that’s remarkably well deserved he conducted himself with dignity uh he understood as i said the importance of the president as a unifying figure

24:15 well um you demonstrate uh that technology mass communications rather in the form of newspapers and then radio television of course today we have the internet and social media um they’ve greatly facilitated the growth of this populist conception

24:37 of the presidency uh can you cite a few examples throughout the 20th century sure so while fdr uses radio to strengthen or to embed the kind of wilsonian vision of the presidency having this personal relationship with the public john f kennedy will use television

24:58 uh to remarkably great effect and of course kennedy arguably was made for television uh you know good-looking man relatively young appeared to be healthy although we know now that wasn’t quite true but he certainly came off as vigorous and he knew he understood the power of visual images

25:20 both in terms of his television presentations which he put a remarkable amount of work into including consulting with various figures in hollywood that he knew of but also he put a lot of work into print visual images and having grown up during this era

25:40 i can remember the weekly arrival of life magazine or look magazine as well in our in my parents home and they were usually filled with all sorts of pictures of president kennedy romping with his children at hyannis fort or his beautiful first lady or whatever kennedy understood the importance of visual

26:01 images and um you know for better or for worse it’s quite possible although you’ll get some divisions on this in the scholarly world but it’s quite possible that kennedy’s election was due to the way he looked in those four televised debates with richard nixon people who watched the debates on

26:22 television gave the edge to kennedy people who listened to it on radio and weren’t seeing that visual image of this young good-looking candidate as opposed to the sweaty ghost-like looking richard nixon whose eyes were darting back and forth as if he was in a police lineup um

26:42 those who who didn’t see those images gave the edge to nixon now that may have something to do with a more rural republican audience not quite having television but whatever you get the point uh kennedy rode tv into the white house and sadly by the way i think one of the reasons for his hold

27:03 on the american imagination uh was was his tragic assassination which is the first time uh tel aviv the three major television networks at the time stayed with a news story from from beginning to end they went over i think 72 hours straight on that sad november weekend in 1963

27:25 and all those images of john f kennedy jr saluting his father’s coffin jacqueline kennedy lighting the eternal flame etc were just embedded in generations of of americans right and and now we have uh you know social media and uh you know you know youtube the

27:46 internet blogs uh that’s certainly contributed it seems to the populist view of the presidency uh as well as maybe the poisoning of our national discussion as well yeah i think so tony i mean i i’ve tried not to be too pessimistic in in this book um but i do think uh

28:08 and i obviously i’m not the first to say this and this is not my area of expertise but it does seem as if social media instead of living up to the expectations of its founders of a allowing for a free exchange of ideas instead we’re all seeking you know shelter

28:28 in various forums where we’re just going to hear people who think like we do and any dissenter is going to be you know drummed out fairly quickly uh and that’s just that’s that’s been been bad for for american politics i think the other thing i would add is because we’re we are all so connected

28:49 it makes deliberation in washington dc whether it’s at the presidential level or at the congressional level it makes it almost impossible because the minute there’s any suggestion of a possible compromise interest groups on all side of the equation are going to use this great technology we have to try to

29:09 go after their representatives or again even the president on occasion to try to get them to shift their positions to say stay true to the party platform or whatever it’s just made compromise consensus deliberation it seems to be nearly impossible so um you know i’m hopeful for the future i

29:31 hope we can restore some elements of this earlier conception of the presidency and of the constitution itself that’s right why one of the reasons the main reason why i wrote this book right and and i think it’ll go a long way towards uh helping to to restore um this conversation so and uh you know we do have an

29:52 inauguration upon us and and you mentioned in the book that the the modern populist presidents have used the occasion of the inauguration for a very strong visionary idealism kind of like wilsonianism and and laying out this sort of expansive vision

30:12 of what the federal government can do at home and abroad it’s usually promised in the first 100 days of the new administration so how can a new president use the inauguration instead to convey a the founders

30:32 presidency as determined yeah it’s a terrific question tony i i do think one one of the themes of the book is this sort of inflated rhetoric inflated expectations that you see in inaugural addresses and then other presidential statements that just never

30:52 seems to to end both parties sort of bidding to outdo one another in terms of what they can promise right uh to their to their base and um you know it’s going to require to get back to that healthier conception that you alluded to it is going to require

31:13 presidential candidates i think to to stop over promising to stop uh fueling these expectations but you know what that’s ultimately on all of us it’s ultimately on the american people to resist the siren call of uh of heightened expectations or to resist the siren call

31:34 of demagogues who try to pit uh americans against their their fellow citizens who disagree with them uh you know it’s easy to blame the politicians it’s easy to blame some you know presidents as i to some extent have done in this book but i i do conclude the book by noting

31:54 again this is on us as as american citizens we have to also embrace a more sober understanding of the role of government a more sober understanding of what the presidency can deliver if if we do that then i think we have a really good chance of

32:14 returning to a healthier uh political order because it does seem to me that things at the moment are are out of sorts right so so you’re saying we really look to the president to solve all of our problems and and they either cause them or or they solve them right everything that goes right they take credit for everything that’s

32:34 when they’re they’re blamed for right maybe we should look more to civil society and to other institutions and maybe the three branches of government and different levels of government rather than the president well put and you know that wasn’t the gist of my book but i do mention in passing towards the end that if we do restore this more sober

32:55 restrained constitutional presidency it should have the effect i would think of restoring congress to its to its proper role uh and if that were to happen that would be just one of many i think good things to to stem from this restoration well and and that’s the the point of my final

33:18 question and and i think ending on a hopeful note as you do in in the book you quote james madison in the conclusion i think kind of as you started in in in part one the first question uh that that madison wanted representative government to refine and enlarge the public views so how can the lost soul of the

33:41 american presidency be restored to return to that healthy energetic and restrained presidency and in social civic order yeah another terrific question and and it’s a real challenge um for us as americans uh one proposal

34:03 i make in in the book and i realized having spoken to a few groups about this this this one doesn’t go over especially well but i i do think we need a presidential selection process that has some screening or filtration to it um in other words

34:24 uh and in my view that’s probably only possible with a restoration of some type of party leadership role in the actual selection of presidential nominees we’ve democratized the process so much but i think we do have a tendency to reward those candidates in both parties who over promise or perhaps engage in

34:46 an excessive amount of demagoguery uh and if the party leaders were allowed to uh uh to select nominees yes you might end up with a kind of smoke-filled room mediocrity like a benjamin harrison let’s say but on the other hand you know benjamin

35:06 harrison did not do a lot of damage the system remained intact the expectations of what the federal government and the presidency would deliver were kept at a minimum um these people for the most part did no harm and that’s not a bad thing i think we underestimate the importance

35:27 of stability um we’re all in some ways captivated by change and we expect presidents to be change agents that’s a mistake and so again one perhaps practical step that i would advocate is the restoration of the role of political parties and their leadership

35:48 in terms of the actual selecting of presidential nominees very good well stephen knott the book is the lost soul of the american presidency the decline into demagoguery and the prospects for for renewal steve knott i want to thank you again for joining us

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