The President, Democracy and Permanent War

Our civically trained desire to see the US President as “the most powerful man in the world” has had the effect of allowing individual presidents incrementally, and steadily, to increase the power of that branch, most recently in the aftermath of 9/11, when Congress gave to the Executive their branch’s right to supervise war powers (a Constitutional power which Congress has in fact not exercised since December 8, 1941). Professor Nelson's talk focuses on how post-Reagan US Presidentialism promulgates war as a structure of democratic feeling. She develops her argument by looking at how the United States' military presidency has recreated politics as war and at the traction an extraordinary theory of executive power (the so-called "unitary executive") has been able to gain within our militarized political culture.