Decline and Fall of the American Republic

The nature of the power embodied in the U.S. presidency has evolved over the years, and if Bruce Ackerman's "The Decline and Fall of the American Republic" is right, the results of that evolution are unfortunate. The contemporary view that tends to see the president as the center of our country's government and the locus of its political power is something new and quite different from what was intended by the founders. Ackerman, a professor of law and political science at Yale who has written more than a dozen books on American politics, makes clear that his fear is not that the nation is in imminent danger of ceasing to exist as a country. What seems more likely is that its distinctively republican form of government could be lost, crushed under the weight of an unbalanced political structure. In particular, Ackerman worries that the office of the presidency will continue to grow in political influence in the coming years, opening possibilities for abuse of power if not outright despotism.--Troy Jollimore"Boston Globe" (11/14/2010)