I would like to suggest it is no coincidence that public contempt for the political process has grown step for step with the administrative apparatus entrusted to implement ever more of America’s multifarious rules. When a piece of legislation or a set of regulations becomes the repository of an all-or-nothing moral ideal, the niceties of the rule of law become a threatening obstacle in our quest to achieve the totality of progress we have promised ourselves. The byzantine complexity of our administrative apparatus becomes an excuse for doing whatever it takes to arrive at the goal—no longer “full implementation” in a legal sense, but rather in the moral sense of experiencing the ideal as actualized in everyday life.

As our regulatory state has grown to replace our old government of enumerated and separated powers, it has inspired us to resent politics ever more deeply. In an eerie echo of the progressives’ call for an executive who could bring clarity and purpose to the inefficient and unwieldy realm of legislation, Americans begin to long for the kind of constitutional despotism that would allow presidents to implement our legislated dreams of justice to the best of their ability, whatever degree of arbitrary fiat that entails.