On President’s Day, with the post office and the library closed, we have extra time to reflect on who our presidents have been and are, and what exactly it is that they do.
The role of modern presidents is not unlike that of the gods of ancient Greece and Rome. The gods had the power to set events in motion but not to control them. They were insulated from the ordinary population by layers of lesser gods. At its most imperial, the role of our president corresponds to that of Jupiter or Zeus, the chief god of the ancient world, whose symbol was the eagle and who was very fond of casting thunderbolts and otherwise throwing his weight around.
The men who framed the Constitution were educated in the Roman classics, which explains why Washington D.C. today looks and functions so eerily like ancient Rome in 31 BC. If you have a history book handy you can quickly check what happened in 31 BC. The culture of ancient Rome has had a long, long echo in our own time. An executive order of 2020 required that future federal buildings should be built to resemble Roman temples and palaces as far as possible — the so-called classical style. It’s obvious that that period of history is appealing to some leaders in Washington.
The Imperial Roman government consisted of an all-powerful emperor, a wealthy aristocratic Senate completely subordinate to him, and elected popular assemblies rather like the House of Representatives that could be and were ignored until they eventually disappeared. This political model was a mirror image of the Roman religion, with the emperor representing Jupiter and dominating the lesser gods, who, in turn, controlled the lives of ordinary mortals. Some of the later emperors claimed to be gods themselves and found citizens foolish enough to believe in them.
America’s founders knew all about the Olympians, and they never forgot the dangerous attraction of the imperial idea even as they struggled to create a democratic constitution. Every newly elected president inherits the uneasy compromise of 1787. They are expected to be amiable and Olympian, democratic and commanding, all at the same time. It’s impossible. Real-life presidents have tended to wobble from one extreme to the other.
Alexis de Tocqueville, the French aristocrat who came to America in 1835, was one of the first to write about this uneasy balancing act. He was sure, from his experience with the tyrant Napoleon, that democracy was better than any alternative, but worried that democracy would produce nothing but mediocre and capricious leaders and would eventually succumb to the appeal of a new dictator.
That’s the democratic dilemma in a nutshell. How powerful should our leaders be? They can lead us in any direction — to the top of the mountain or over the cliff. But only if we let them do it. Presidents are not gods, no matter how much they aim for the impression of immortality.
Perhaps there is no such thing as an ideal candidate, in this world, or the last, or the next. Even the gods are not perfect.
