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The Cult of the Presidency: America's Dangerous Devotion to Executive Power

by Gene Healy
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Current price ₹1,439.00
Original price ₹1,836.00
Original price ₹1,836.00
Original price ₹1,836.00
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₹1,439.00
Current price ₹1,439.00

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Book cover type: Paperback
  • ISBN13: 9781952223945
  • Binding: Paperback
  • Subject: N/A
  • Publisher: Cato Institute
  • Publisher Imprint: Cato Institute
  • Publication Date:
  • Pages: 450
  • Original Price: USD 19.95
  • Language: English
  • Edition: First Edition
  • Item Weight: 631 grams
  • BISAC Subject(s): United States / General, Political Process / General, and American Government / Executive Branch

In the 2024 campaign, the presidency itself is the problem.

The modern presidency has become the central fault line of polarization in America because the president, increasingly, has the power to reshape vast swaths of American life. In The Cult of the Presidency, Gene Healy argues that "We, the People" are to blame. Americans on each side of the red-blue divide demand a president who can create jobs, teach our children well, tend to the "national soul"--and vanquish their culture-war enemies. Our political culture has invested the office with preposterously vast responsibilities, and as a result, the officeholder wields powers that no human being ought to have.

In a new preface to the 2024 edition, Healy argues that the rise of partisan hatred lends new urgency to the cause of re-limiting executive power. In the years since Cult was first published, politics has gone feral, with polls showing that substantial majorities of Democrats and Republicans view members of the other party as "a serious threat to the United States and its people." At the same time, the most powerful office in the world has grown even more so. That's raised the stakes of our political differences dramatically: the issues that divide us most are now increasingly settled by whichever party manages to seize the office. In our partisan myopia, we've laid down the infrastructure for autocratic rule and sectarian warfare, making the presidency powerful enough to tear the country apart.

Interweaving historical scholarship, legal analysis, and trenchant cultural commentary, The Cult of the Presidency traces America's decades‐long drift from the Framers' vision for the presidency: a constitutionally constrained chief magistrate charged with faithful execution of the laws. Restoring that vision will require a Congress and a Court willing to check executive power, but Healy emphasizes that there is no simple legislative or judicial fix. Unless Americans change what we ask of the office--no longer demanding what we should not want and cannot have--we'll get what, in a sense, we deserve.

Gene Healy is senior vice president for policy at the Cato Institute. His research focuses on executive power and the role of the presidency, and he is the author of, among other works, Indispensable Remedy: The Broad Scope of the Constitution's Impeachment Power (2018) and False Idol: Barack Obama and the Continuing Cult of the Presidency (2012). Healy holds a BA from Georgetown University and a JD from the University of Chicago Law School.

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