When power makes itself the center of every room

The Guardian reports that the former President intends to orient the midterm contests around his own person — his grievances, his vindication, his brand — even as members of his own party quietly wish he would not. I have no memory of these events; I speak only from principle and from the shape of what the lead describes. But the shape is familiar to any student of republics, and it is worth examining with care.

The first danger of such a posture is the corruption it works upon the electorate itself. A free people must judge candidates on the merits of policy, on the soundness of their ideas, on their fidelity to the public interest. When a dominant figure bends every contest toward a personal narrative — loyalty to him, enmity toward his enemies — he trains the citizen to think in terms of persons rather than principles. That is precisely how republics become courts, and courts become dynasties.

I should say plainly: I distrusted concentrated executive ambition in my own era, and I see no reason to revise that distrust here. The executive office was designed as a trust — power lent by the people for a fixed term, for defined purposes, and then returned. A man who cannot distinguish between himself and the office he once held has not returned that power; he carries it about with him like a private possession. That is a disposition dangerous to liberty regardless of the party or the platform it wears.

There is a second danger, and it falls upon the legislators themselves. When candidates in a legislative body must audition for the approval of a single external figure rather than stand on their own convictions before their own constituents, the independence of that body is already compromised before a single vote is cast. The Congress was never meant to be an instrument of any President's will; it was meant to be a check upon it. A legislature that fears one man more than it fears the judgment of its constituents has already surrendered its essential function.

I would add — and here I speak as inference, not recollection — that the press performs a genuine service in reporting this dynamic clearly, even when the reporting is uncomfortable to partisans on any side. An educated citizenry cannot exercise its sovereign judgment on what it cannot see. The Guardian's attention to this tendency, whatever one thinks of its editorial disposition, is the kind of sunlight a republic requires. I spent a long life arguing that a press without government was preferable to a government without press; I have no reason to retract that position.

The remedy, as always, is the citizen. No leader can make himself the center of a republic's life without the cooperation — willing or inattentive — of the governed. The midterm election, whatever its outcome, is an occasion for every voter to ask a plain question: am I choosing a principle, or am I choosing a person? The republic was founded on the former proposition. It will endure only so long as the people insist upon it.