Deep Presidency: Toward a Structural Theory of an Unsustainable Office in a Catastrophic World—Obama and Beyond

Abstract

Modern and postmodern theories of the presidency tend to place the American president on a continuum of power, asserting the need for either a more active or less active chief executive. From the seminal work of Richard Neustadt, celebrating the assertive president seeking to maximize power and leadership, through the contrasting view of historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. and others who sought to restrict the reach of the executive, scholars have battled over the appropriate balance of power—particularly the executive-legislative scale. From an alternative critical/structural view of the office, this expansive-restrictive debate, while important, misses the central point that regardless of party, personality, or management style, all presidents seek the same structural goals. If, as Theodore Lowi has argued, the president is the “state personified,” then we need to ask how the capitalist state shapes and constrains the imperatives presidents must pursue, given our political economy and the ideology that sustains it. Two core imperatives emerge for the literature on theories of the state: the pursuit of economic growth and the provision of “national security.” This article explores debates over theories of the presidency in the light of twenty-first-century challenges to conventional definitions of “growth” and “national security.” In the face of global climate change and the decline of US military and geopolitical preeminence, can the presidency break free from its imprisonment in orthodox notions of growth and national security to forge a more sustainable path for the nation and the office? And more broadly, if our way of life in fact undermines our way of life in an unsustainable self-defeating logic, absent a cataclysmic crisis, what, if any, role can the president play in fostering a deep change of direction? By challenging the power structure of the political economy, a critical/structural theory of the presidency is best situated to address such questions.