The Führer Next Time

Upon what meat doth this our Caesar feed

Way back in 1982, Samuel Francis, a former fellow at the Heritage Foundation and legislative assistant to Senator John East of North Carolina, tried to give intellectual shape to a fractious and lumpy New Right coalition that delivered Ronald Reagan to Washington. In an essay called “Message from MARs: The Social Politics of the New Right”—MARs stands for Middle American Radicals, the lower middle class strata that Francis identified as the Republican base—he proposed that the right should abandon its “inertial conservatism,” which centered on “intermediary institutions” like the Congress and the courts . Instead, the New Right should instead pursue what he called “Caesarism” and “favor a populist-based presidency able to cut through the present oligarchical establishment…” of “cosmopolitan” liberalism, using the power of the executive to break the power of the “entrenched elite whose values and interests are hostile to the traditional American ethos and which is a parasitical tumor on the body of Middle America.” Francis was still a little vague on how to do this in concrete terms, but insisted that “only the presidency has the power and resources to begin the process and to mobilize popular support for it.” In any case, the Reagan administration wasn’t really it: the Gipper turned out to be a disappointment for Francis and his fellow hardliners, who’d come to label themselves “paleoconservatives.” Their type of guy wouldn’t come along till much later, long after Francis was dead and buried.

These days, the demand for a “Caesarism” has gone from the cry of a lone voice in the wilderness to having a whole chorus of right-wing supporters. And now we can see very clearly something like what Francis would have wanted in policy terms. Carlos Lozada of The New York Times recently read the Heritage Foundation’s entire 887 page, "Mandate for Leadership,” essentially their plan for a second Trump administration. (Francis, as it so happens, contributed the “Intelligence Community” section for the original Mandate for Leadership.) Here’s what he found:.

…for all the book’s rhetoric about the need to “dismantle the administrative state,” it soon becomes clear that vanquishing the federal bureaucracy is not the document’s animating ambition. There may be plenty worth jettisoning from the executive branch, but “Mandate for Leadership” is about capturing the administrative state, not unmaking it. The main conservative promise here is to wield the state as a tool for concentrating power and entrenching ideology.

….

The book regards pursuit of the president’s agenda — variously described as the president’s “needs,” “goals” or “desires” — as always consistent with the law. “The modern conservative president’s task is to limit, control and direct the executive branch on behalf of the American people,” it states. And the American people’s needs, goals and desires are conflated with those of the leader.

This leader could ride roughshod over the entire Federal government and even the Constitution itself:

Mandate for Leadership” is about not just a president exerting control over the executive branch but also the executive expanding its power over the other branches of government. In the book, the legislature and judiciary suffer from many small cuts and a few big ones.

Congress’s powers of oversight, for instance, would diminish in various ways. Rather than endure the process of congressional confirmation for people taking on key positions in the executive branch, the new administration should just place those officials in acting roles, which would allow them to begin pursuing the president’s agenda “while still honoring the confirmation requirement.” (That is, if bypassing the requirement is a form of honor.) Lawmakers would no longer review U.S. foreign arms sales, the book states, except when “unanimous congressional support is guaranteed,” a requirement that renders those reviews pointless. The Department of Homeland Security should have the power to select and limit its congressional oversight committees. And the White House can tell the State Department when to remain “radio silent” in the face of congressional inquiries.

In a section titled “Affirming the Separation of Powers,” the book contends that the executive branch — that is, the president and his team at the Justice Department — is just as empowered as any other branch of government to “assess constitutionality.” A new conservative administration must “embrace the Constitution and understand the obligation of the executive branch to use its independent resources and authorities to restrain the excesses of both the legislative and judicial branches.” The president must make sure that the leaders of the Justice Department share this view of the separation of powers.

It is the role of the judiciary, not of the president and a pliable attorney general, to decide whether laws and policies are constitutional. Believing otherwise does not “affirm” checks and balances; it undercuts them. “Mandate for Leadership” turns the separation of powers among the three branches into a game of rock, paper, scissors — except rock beats everything. It is consistent, though, with the leadership of a president who likes to talk of the nation’s top jurists as “my judges” and who referred to a former speaker of the House of Representatives as “my Kevin.”

Corey Robin, in one of his many pot shots against what he calls “the fascism thesis,” once insisted that the GOP and Trump’s reliance on the Senate, the courts and the whole “constitutional order” made Trumpism “almost the complete opposite of fascism.” But it’s clear that what the right envisions for Trump is not a bland, counter-majoritarian conservatism, but something a little more muscular. Of course, Trump may not use Heritage’s plan—he generally has limited time for things that don’t issue directly from his person— but as Lozada points out, it is tailored to the temperament of a man who has called for suspending the constitution in the past, has drawn up plans for mass deportation camps, wants to do a purge of the civil service, and whose advisers are plotting to invoke the Insurrection Act in order to use the military against political opposition on day one.

I believe all Trump’s power grabs, like January 6, are likely to fail and be farcical, as is the very notion of Trump playing Caesar. But he very much wants to play that role. And many others would like to play the supporting cast. That much should be clear by now.

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If you want to learn more about Sam Francis, the paleocons, and what they envisioned for America, you might find When The Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s interesting.