The Presidents and the People: Five Leaders Who Threatened Democracy and the Citizens Who Fought to Defend It

Corey Brettschneider

On Monday, October 21, the Harvard Safra Center will host an event on my new book, The Presidents and the People: Five Leaders Who Threatened Democracy and the Citizens Who Fought to Defend It.

In the book, I argue that the presidency has always posed a threat to American democracy, a threat seen in Patrick Henry's warning about how weak the supposed formal checks on the office would be if a president with authoritarian ambitions came to power.

Specifically, I show, in a series of case studies, that we have seen that threat play out multiple times when presidents with authoritarian understandings of the Constitution have come to power. John Adams waged war on the national press of the early republic, overseeing numerous prosecutions of his critics. In the lead-up to the Civil War, James Buchanan colluded with the Supreme Court to deny constitutional personhood to African Americans. A decade later, Andrew Johnson urged violence against his political opponents as he sought to promote a white supremacist republic after the Civil War. In the 1910s, Woodrow Wilson modernized, popularized, and nationalized Jim Crow laws. In the 1970s, Richard Nixon committed criminal acts that flowed from his corrupt ideas about presidential power. The actions and ideas of these leaders illuminated the dangers posed to democracy by the American presidency.

But I also argue these presidents didn’t have the last word; citizen movements brought the United States back from the precipice by appealing to a democratic understanding of the Constitution and pressuring subsequent reform-minded presidents to realize the promise of “We the People.” I profile the citizens―the newspaper editors prosecuted by Adams, Frederick Douglass, Ida B. Wells, Daniel Ellsberg, and more―who fought back against presidential abuses of power. Specifically, I argue that these figures helped lead "democratic constitutional constituencies" that prevailed upon recovery presidents to put back in place the norms and institutions damaged by authoritarian presidents. It is this citizen-led political check, rather than the supposed checks of impeachment and judicial review, that has often led to the recovery of American democracy.

I hope the book will be of interest to a wide group of academics as the book speaks to debates about popular constitutionalism, presidential power, and constitutional theory.