My Take | An imperial republic deserves an imperial president
- By granting nearly total immunity to the president, the US Supreme Court has completed the historical arc of the American empire that has long been above international law
If there is a single moral lesson to be learned from The Annals of Tacitus, the Roman historian, it is that all empires corrupt, and being the world’s greatest empire corrupts absolutely. Republican virtues cannot long survive the brutalities and criminalities of empire.
And so, in its centuries-long journey, a small republic in North America turned into the imperial republic. Then, when it has become the most powerful empire the world has ever seen, though often one that dares not speak its name, it only makes sense that its most powerful office should, in just a matter of time, become the imperial presidency, not only in fact but also in law as well.
Now, that destiny has been fulfilled. That is the meaning of the latest ruling by the supermajority of the six “conservative justices” of the US Supreme Court, according to whom the president’s immunity is almost total.
The fateful decision, which runs contrary to the fundamental principles of the US constitutional framers and the key arguments three of them made in the Federalist Papers, may be taken as the consummation of America’s political development, indeed “the end of the history” for the United States. This doesn’t mean there won’t be more conflicts and wars ahead – indeed, a total imperial presidency most likely guarantees many more of them. But to paraphrase Stanford University political scientist Francis Fukuyama, Americans are reaching the end point or institutional terminus of their political history.
Just as no informed Roman seriously thought the old republic still existed after the rise of Augustus, so in time, historians will come to realise that a US democracy – guided by the rule of law and the principle that no one is above the law – cracked under the weight of empire as the US president is finally recognised as being above the law, against the very Constitution he or she has sworn to protect.
Oh, the paradox! Fukuyama’s one-time hero, the philosopher Hegel, would have loved it, for he calls such inflection points in history the work of “the cunning of reason”, before which men’s wisest plans are laid waste and turned into their opposite.
