The Unitary Executive vs. The Deep State

A shaggy dog story

Seventy-five years ago, the great historian Fernand Braudel popularized among his readers the phrase longue durée. He meant long-term changes in the organization of things, as opposed to the history of events that are the province of journalists and other narrators. The change that happens in the longue durée is evolutionary, a change that becomes embedded in the record.

In 1993, American presidential historian Stephen Skowronek introduced the similar concept of political time, which unfolds much more slowly than do the presidential terms by which we ordinarily experience and chronicle American political history.

Administrations change in calendar time. The periods we call “eras” develop in Skowronek’s political time. Eras end in abrupt break-ups that follow gradual decline in the efficacy of the coalitions that had supported them. A strong president follows, who founds new era.

Eras, Skowronek wrote, are characterized in terms of what they did, their ideological commitments, and their supportive coalitions. In Presidential Leadership in Political Time, Skowronek identified seven. Even the third edition (2020) appeared too soon to have identified, presumably, an eighth.

Thus Thomas Jefferson to John Quincy Adams (1801-1828); Andrew Jackson to James Polk (1829-1860); Abraham Lincoln to Grover Cleveland (1861-1896); William McKinley to Herbert Hoover (1897-1932); Franklin Roosevelt to Lyndon Johnson (1933-1968); Richard Nixon to George H. W. Bush (1969-1992); Bill Clinton to Joe Biden (1993-2024); and, presumably, Donald Trump (2025-2028) – until who knows who, what, or when?

Presidential Leadership in Political Time: Reprise and Reappraisal (2020) is a complicated book, its arguments subtle, its command of historical detail intimidating, yet quite readable if you have interest and time. In 2009, Skowronek published The Conservative Insurgency and Presidential Power, a 35-page essay in the Harvard Law Review that caught EP’s eye.

The news, at least to Economic Principals, was a second book had appeared, much closer to the present day. Phantoms of a Beleaguered Republic: The Deep State and the Unitary Presidency (Oxford, 2021). Skowronek, and two co-authors, John A. Dearborn and Desmond King, dissect a enduring argument about American governance that has recently come to a boil.