Federalist 71
Hamilton identified “duration in office” as one of the necessary features of a well-ordered executive branch. Again, there was no compelling template for the creation of the presidency: state governors provided one model while monarchs provided the other. The former tended to have short terms while the latter, well, lifetime ones. Debates about both the length of the terms and also whether they were renewable predominated discussions concerning Article II at the Convention. Settling on four-year terms resulted from compromise and not some preeminent wisdom.
In Federalist 71 Hamilton made it clear what he thought was at stake in giving aspiring presidents longer terms. First of all, brief terms in office would not appeal to the ambitions of those who would find the office attractive. For the Anti-Federalists that alone was enough to recommend short terms, but Hamilton believed that ambition didn’t make someone a bad person; good people had ambition as well. A longer term would “firm” up the will of people interested in the office while it also stabilized “the system of administration” over which that person would preside. A longer term will induce potential candidates “to risk more” to pursue the office.
In the course of his discussion Hamilton compared holding office to owning property. This was a fairly typical position of the day: since holding office was typically a remunerative sinecure, withholding office or removing a person from one was tantamount to a kind of theft. The famous Marbury v. Madison decision turned in no small part on Marbury’s claim that denying him the office was an infringement on his property rights and thus a violation of the fifth amendment.
Hamilton defended the necessity of that kind of ambition because of his suspicions about democracy itself. The “independent executive” combatted the “ill-humours” that could “prevail” either “in a considerable part of the society itself” or in a “predominant faction in the legislative body.” In other words, the presidency was to provide some sort of aristocratic ballast to the ship of state amidst the tempests of democracy, and a properly balanced man would “find himself little interested” in an office of “precarious” tenure. The longer the tenure, the more attractive the office.
Of course, its possible that a sinecure of that sort, combining power and privilege and a generous remuneration, might appeal to less scrupulous sorts, especially those of a more democratic temperament (Hamilton may well have been thinking of Jefferson). Such persons might think of the executive as properly “inclined to the servile pliancy … to a prevailing current” as a mark in its favor. “But such men,” Hamilton argued, “entertain very crude notions, as well of the purposes for which government was instituted,” those purposes redounded to stable and energetic ordering of political life. Obviously the will of the community should be preeminent in any popularly based system of government, but that did not “require an unqualified complaisance to every sudden breeze of passion, or to every transient impulse which the people may receive from the arts of men, who flatter their prejudices to betray their interests.”
How to deal with demagogues was one of the central questions of constitutional deliberation, and part of that analysis involved not only understanding how they operate but where they operate. Hamilton believed that demagoguery proved a special problem in the public at large: that is, demagogues would emerge from the mass of people and, by appealing to their basest passions, move the people to operate against the government. In other words, Hamilton worried about populist demagogues, such as the ones — in his understanding — that inspired Shays’ Rebellion. He also worried about demagogues in the legislature and how such characters, accruing power, would destabilize the government and threaten liberty in the process. I suppose Joe McCarthy would be an example of this. He seemed less concerned, however, about demagogues becoming president, although by the election of 1800 he had gotten some religion on that issue, his obsession with Aaron Burr ultimately costing him his life.
Hamilton did draw attention, however, to a central problem of political life: where is the depository of interest, and how do you identify what people’s true interests are? We know from our own experience that we will often act contrary to our own interests, usually prompted by a sudden impulse of passion, or by bad habit, or by misanalysis of the situation. We can be shortsighted or impulsive. Sometimes we lack sufficient information to make good decisions. Often we have conflicting interests and we realize we have to sacrifice one to achieve the other.
How many people have all the information they need about the other person when they propose marriage? Do they fully understand the sacrifices they make in “forsaking all others”? How many marriages have been undone by one of the partners yielding to a sudden impulse of passion? How many relationships are destroyed by a lack of understanding or by bad communication? Tocqueville observed that in democracies everything is unstable, but the most unstable thing of all is the human heart. How much more unstable still is the reaching of heart to heart?
The institution of marriage is designed in part to stabilize the longings of these unstable hearts. The permanent interests of the partners are articulated in the vows and upheld in the norms of marital life. When both partners freely uphold these norms of mutual respect, solicitude, affection, loyalty, and self-sacrifice the marriage might be regarded as happy. Once the norms are either abandoned or eroded, the marriage deteriorates rapidly. We recognize the power of these norms when we see their abuse, especially if that abuse turns violent.
The same is true of political life. The permanent interests of the political community are embedded in the institutions of governance, upheld by norms of conduct. Any temporary violation of those norms does not discredit those norms themselves. We often observe them only in the breach.
Human beings have a remarkable gift for rationalization. The cheating partner will often figure out ways to pin the blame on the person being cheated on and to invoke some sort of sham virtue to justify his actions. “She doesn’t understand or appreciate me, and I have a right to be happy, don’t I? And you make me happy.” How often does that work out?
Likewise, any political actor will present his actions as cloaked in legitimacy. Dictators rarely cackle gleefully at the evil they do; rather, they call it good. It’s a sad lesson of experience that we are often mistaken in what we think is good, or best for ourselves, or best for others. The difficulty of democratic life consists in reconciling competing versions of what is good. Even if we do reason correctly about what is good we might still disagree about the best means of achieving it. All might agree that people are better off if they enjoy material success, but is that best achieved by government benefits or by the actions of markets?
As we get older we should acquire some humility, realizing how often we have been mistaken both in what we thought really mattered and in how we went about achieving it. That wisdom, however, can often by mitigated by the efforts of those who try to convince us otherwise. We might come to realize after awhile that money doesn’t buy happiness and that acquiring things inflames rather than satisfies acquisitive desire, but our economy is largely organized around denial of such knowledge. Madison Avenue is dedicated to perpetrating the lie. At some level we know we can’t get something for nothing, or that you can’t spend in perpetuity without there being a reckoning, but our politicians keep acting as if neither thing is true. And we keep voting for them.
Hamilton realized all this. People “know, from experience, that they sometimes err; and the wonder is, that they so seldom err as they do.” It’s especially surprising because the people are constantly “beset … by the wiles of parasites and sycophants; by the snares of the ambitious, the avaricious, the desperate; by the artifices of men who possess their confidence more than they deserve it.” It’s bad enough that we too often abandon our own best interests, but the world is filled with bad people who encourage us to do so. Their reasons are never noble: greed, lust, ambition, envy, anger all factor in.
What is needed, then, is an agent that embodies the enduring interests of the institutions and upholds the moral norms that govern the institutions. When partners in a marriage find the relationship dissolving because one or both of them violate the norms, an independent party steps in to remind the partners of their true interests in order to maintain the marriage. The purpose of a marriage counselor, after all, is to preserve the institutions of marriage.
I think this is how Hamilton sees the presidency. Its fundamental purpose is to preserve the institutions of governance by protecting them against the whims and “temporary delusion[s]” of the public and of bad actors. A good leader will save “the people from very fatal consequences of their own mistakes.” The executive might have to comply to some degree with popular passions, but should never have to comply with the whims of the legislature. Legislatures tend to be imperious, absorbing all power into themselves, and typically act imprudently. Making the executive completely independent of the legislature and giving the executive sufficient time in office alone stabilizes the system of governance. The executive operates as an independent power who best understands and embodies not the temporary whims of the public but their permanent interests. So long as the president gives proof “of his wisdom and integrity,” thus acquiring “the respect and attachment of his fellow citizens,” he should remain in office in perpetuity.
Hamilton, as I’ll demonstrate, would have preferred life-time terms for presidents, but that was never on the table. The Anti-Federalists did not share Hamilton’s confidence that only the best and brightest would ascend to that office. They worried that the concentration of power in the hands of one person would threaten the liberties for which they had fought.
Involved in that notion of liberty is the idea that each person should be considered the best judge of his or her interests. Of course we might be wrong, but so long as we don’t politicize life then the consequences of such error are limited in scope. I will bear the price of my mistakes. When we start concentrating power, however, we also expand the range of consequences. Now one man’s error becomes everyone’s problem. As Madison himself observed: enlightened statesmen will not always be at the helm, so why give them the wheel of so big and powerful a ship? A platoon of a thousand boats, each man with a hand on his own till, is preferable to an aircraft carrier with an admiral in charge.
Director of the Ford Leadership Forum, Gerald R. Ford Presidential Foundation
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