Bagehot on the American Presidential system

On the day after Barack Obama’s election, I thought you might be interested in what Walter Bagehot said about the presidential form of government, in his famous 19th century work, The English Constitution:

the first election of Mr. Lincoln… was a characteristic instance of the natural working of such a government upon a great occasion. And what was that working? It may be summed up–it was government by an UNKNOWN QUANTITY. Hardly any one in America had any living idea what Mr. Lincoln was like, or any definite notion what he would do. The leading statesmen under the system of Cabinet government are not only household words, but household IDEAS. A conception, not, perhaps, in all respects a true but a most vivid conception of what Mr. Gladstone is like, or what Lord Palmerston is like, runs through society. We have simply no notion what it would be to be left with the visible sovereignty in the hands of an unknown man. The notion of employing a man of unknown smallness at a crisis of unknown greatness is to our minds simply ludicrous. Mr. Lincoln, it is true, happened to be a man, if not of eminent ability, yet of eminent justness. There was an inner depth of Puritan nature which came out under suffering, and was very attractive. But success in a lottery is no argument for lotteries. What were the chances against a person of Lincoln’s antecedents, elected as he was, proving to be what he was? Such an incident is, however, natural to a Presidential government. The President is elected by processes which forbid the election of known men, except at peculiar conjunctures, and in moments when public opinion is excited and despotic; and consequently if a crisis comes upon us soon after he is elected, inevitably we have government by an unknown quantity–the superintendence of that crisis by what our great satirist would have called “Statesman X”. Even in quiet times, government by a President, is, for the several various reasons which have been stated, inferior to government by a Cabinet; but the difficulty of quiet times is nothing as compared with the difficulty of unquiet times. The comparative deficiencies of the regular, common operation of a Presidential government are far less than the comparative deficiencies in time of sudden trouble–the want of elasticity, the impossibility of a dictatorship, the total absence of a REVOLUTIONARY RESERVE. This contrast explains why the characteristic quality of Cabinet Governments–the fusion of the executive power with the legislative power–is of such cardinal importance.

I’m not sure “dictatorship” is a word we’d use today as part of this argument, but this remains a strong case for the British parliamentary style of government over the American system – which, to British eyes, looks like a version of our own constitution but frozen in the 18th century, with an elected rather than a hereditary King. Reading Bagehot now, what’s interesting is how right he was proved about the British system by the war and the emergence of Churchill as Prime Minister; and how true it still remains that a new President elected in a time of hope, like Obama, is an unknown quantity.

Against Bagehot, though, you could argue that the American system has proved itself capable of removing a bad President, at least, in Nixon’s case; and that we British hardly felt we knew Gordon Brown when he became PM, even after ten years of him in government. Margaret Thatcher was also a largely unknown quantity when she reached No. 10, and how she would react to the Falklands invasion was just as unknown as how President Bush was going to react to 9/11.

You’re welcome to e-mail in essays discussing all this, but I don’t promise to mark them. If you’re interested in Bagehot’s work, you can read The English Constitution for free, here, here or here.