Let’s Rain on Trump’s Parade

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/01/opinion/trump-military-parade-congress.html

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The inflation of presidential power over the last century would mystify James Madison. He predicted that the people would be more loyal to legislators than to the executive and that Congress would jealously protect its power. Yet Congress has repeatedly ceded its authority in recent decades, and Americans, who have become more intensely partisan, increasingly form political identities based on their loyalty or opposition to the president.

President Trump’s order for an extravagant parade showcasing American strength — which the House recently endorsed in its version of the National Defense Authorization Act but which the Senate Armed Services Committee did not — suggests one explanation for the swollen presidency. Americans and their legislators, being human, are awed by the spectacle of power. That is why those who are suspicious of power should not love this parade, whether or not they like Mr. Trump. The best reason for concern about the parade may be that a president, and not merely this president, proposed it.

There are more pressing issues of military policy, but this one is an important constitutional symbol. There are, of course, occasions for military celebrations. Victory is usually the chief one. But the pageant of arms being prepared at Mr. Trump’s direction has no particular cause. It is a show of might, plain and simple. As such, it cannot help but adulate the person of the president who will command all that he surveys.

After-the-fact justifications for the proposed Veterans Day parade included celebrating the 100th anniversary of the end of World War I and the century of American power that followed. House Republicans resorted to the old fallback that opposing the parade would disrespect the troops, who for too long “have been victims of political discord.” They have? The military is among the most respected institutions in society, will receive more than $700 billion over the next fiscal year and does not need the additional currency that contemporary politics prizes most: victimhood.

The reality is that Mr. Trump got the idea for the parade from Bastille Day festivities he observed in France. But such performances are better suited to the more ornate traditions of Old Europe — where presidents live in self-described palaces rather than the comparatively modest residence once known as “the President’s House” — than to the republican simplicity to which early Americans inclined.

Of course, ample water has flowed under the constitutional bridge since Thomas Jefferson endorsed republican simplicity by arriving for his inauguration on foot in a frock coat. Mr. Trump is hardly the first president to treasure the grandiose. But as a symbol, the military parade he is organizing should be understood less as a celebration of imperial grandeur than as a ploy for expanding presidential power by advertising it.

Despite the widespread assumption among his supporters that Mr. Trump is restoring the Constitution, he, like all his recent predecessors, is in this sense the heir not of Jefferson or Madison but rather of Woodrow Wilson. Wilson argued that the president should occupy the center of the constitutional system and take on “the imagination of the country.”

Wilson’s vision of the presidency has prevailed in no small part because of the fact of global American power, which is necessarily, though not exclusively, concentrated in executive hands.

But this does not explain why such power has not inspired republican jealousy but rather has bred cults of personality around nearly all recent presidents. John Adams, who was the most systematic political theorist among the American founders in addition to serving a term as president, helps solve the mystery.

As the political scientist Luke Mayville has shown, Adams argued that wealth commands influence not by means of corruption but rather by awing those who behold it. Power works similarly. Human beings are fascinated by it, and neither Americans nor their legislators are immune. In Mr. Trump’s case, the seduction of both wealth and power is combined.

It is difficult to explain Congress’s long-term abdication of authority solely in terms of political interest, since legislators are emptying out the power of the offices they seek to retain and use. But politicians are human like the rest of us. They may defer to power because they are enthralled by it. The same is true of journalists and others who fixate on the presidency.

That is why burnishing the aura of power with gratuitous displays like a military parade with no obvious occasion are constitutionally ill advised. Mr. Trump’s conflation of opposition to himself with “treason” suggests his underlying impulse is not republican simplicity, which he never promised, but rather the baroque declaration of Louis XIV: “L’état, c’est moi.” The parade will further fuse the person of the president and the regime. In a republic, such symbols matter as much as formal limitations on power.

There is a solution. Rather than endorsing the parade, Congress can still disenthrall itself from the gravitational seduction of power long enough to prohibit the use of federal funds to stage such a display. That may be an initial step on the road to a restoration of republican government in which, as Madison wrote, the legislature “necessarily predominates.” Diminishing the spectacle of the presidency would be a welcome precursor to reducing its power.