The Machine Still Clatters

“A vain, immoderate faith in these institutions made it possible to overlook the fact that their vitality was gone. The machine could still be heard clattering along, so no one asked if it was still doing its job.”

— Carl von Clausewitz, on Prussia, 1806

The temptation, when confronted with the current state of American democracy, is to treat what is happening as a sudden rupture — a departure from a functioning system by a singular disruptive figure. This is the wrong frame. What is unfolding in the United States today is not an interruption of the republic’s story. It is the latest chapter in a decay that has been accumulating for decades, accelerated but not created by the present moment. Understanding it requires a longer view, and a more honest accounting of where the rot actually began.

Two historical comparisons have recently circulated in discussions of American democratic decline: Prussia before Jena in 1806, and Wilhelmine Germany under Kaiser Wilhelm II. Both are useful. Both are also incomplete on their own. The more precise diagnosis is that America is experiencing both simultaneously — the institutional hollowing out that preceded Prussia’s catastrophic defeat, combined with the active construction of a personalist political regime that mirrors Wilhelm’s systematic displacement of independent statesmanship with loyalty networks. These are not competing analogies. They are compounding ones. The institutional decay created the conditions in which the personalist project became possible. The personalist project accelerates the decay. Together they constitute something more dangerous than either would be alone. What they cannot explain on their own is the mechanism: why the decay accelerated when and how it did, and what a genuine renewal would actually require. For that, one has to turn to Machiavelli.

I. The Institutional Rot: Prussia Before Jena

Clausewitz’s description of Prussia in 1806 is worth sitting with at length, because it is not a description of a state that had obviously failed. Prussia in 1806 was still widely regarded as a serious military power. Its army still marched in the tradition of Frederick the Great. Its officers still held enormous social prestige. The bureaucracy still functioned. The court still observed its ceremonies. To an outside observer, or to a Prussian nobleman who had stopped asking critical questions, the machine still appeared to be working. What Clausewitz understood, and what the catastrophe at Jena confirmed, was that the vitality had quietly drained out of the institutions long before the crisis arrived to expose them. The army rehearsed war rather than preparing for it. The command structure prioritized ritual over adaptability. The political class had convinced itself that stability was the same thing as strength.

The American parallel is not difficult to find. The signs of institutional decay did not begin with any recent administration. They accumulated over decades, visible to anyone who chose to look: a Congress that steadily abdicated its war powers to the executive, a Supreme Court that issued result-oriented rulings and then announced they set no precedent, a regulatory apparatus progressively captured by the industries it nominally supervised, a campaign finance system that translated economic inequality directly into political inequality, and a foreign policy establishment that launched catastrophic wars without consequence for any of the architects. The machine kept clattering. Nobody asked if it was still doing its job.

What makes the Prussian analogy particularly apt is the quality of the failure. Prussia was not defeated at Jena because its army lacked courage or its state lacked resources. It was defeated because its institutions had calcified — because the forms of military excellence had been preserved while the substance had been allowed to atrophy, because the prestige of the officer corps had been maintained long after the system that prestige was supposed to reflect had stopped producing real competence. The United States has undergone a similar process. The forms of democratic governance — elections, legislatures, courts, a free press — have been largely preserved while the substance they were meant to embody has been progressively drained away. What Clausewitz could not explain from inside the catastrophe is why this happens: why institutional form outlasts institutional substance, and what it takes to reverse the process. That question requires a different theorist. But first, the second analogy must be understood, because the structural decay and the active personalist project are not sequential. They are simultaneous, and their simultaneity is precisely what makes the present moment so dangerous.

II. The Personalist Regime: Wilhelm and His Men

If the 1806 analogy describes the structural condition, the Wilhelm II analogy describes the active political project layered on top of it. What made Wilhelm’s Germany so dangerous was not simply that it had a volatile, impulsive leader — it was that Wilhelm systematically built a political system designed to make independent statesmanship structurally impossible. He used his control over appointments and promotions to ensure that the highest levels of government were filled with men who understood, clearly, that their position depended on his favor. They were not incompetent courtiers, but men who understood perfectly well that their continued position depended on not pressing the wrong points. The result was a state that could not honestly evaluate its own situation.

Bismarck, for all his considerable faults, had understood something that Wilhelm never did: that the statesman’s primary function is to maintain the relationship between military means and political ends, and that this requires the willingness to refuse what the military wants when its requests exceed what politics can sustain. He killed a proposed preventive war against Russia in 1887 essentially on his own authority (as SoD Rock documents in detail), not because he was soft but because he grasped that Germany’s long-term position depended on diplomatic flexibility that a war would foreclose. There is nobody in the current American administration with either the authority or the inclination to perform an equivalent function. The people who might have played that role have been systematically removed or sidelined, and the logic of the personalist system ensures that their replacements understand the lesson.

The figure of Congress in this picture is, if anything, more troubling than the Kaiser himself. Frederick William III — the passive, indecisive king who presided over Prussia’s humiliation — is the more accurate parallel for the legislative branch than any comparison to an active antagonist. Frederick William III was not a villain. He was a man who kept making small accommodations to avoid confrontation, who privately understood that something was wrong but could not bring himself to act on that understanding, who kept hoping the situation would resolve itself without requiring him to take a stand that might cost him something. He was, in the end, irrelevant to the catastrophe. That irrelevance was itself the catastrophe. A legislature that functions primarily as a mirror for its own procedural self-regard, capable of registering alarm but not of translating alarm into action, is performing the same historical role. And in performing it, it is replicating not merely the passivity of Frederick William III, but a much longer pattern — one that Machiavelli identified as the central pathology of republics in decline, and that the history of the American republic since Nixon has illustrated with painful precision.

III. The Long Unraveling: Machiavelli and the Failure of Return

Machiavelli argued, in the Discourses on Livy, that republics require periodic riduzione ai principii — returns to founding principles — because institutions naturally drift toward corruption over time, and without regular shocks that reassert the original norms, the drift becomes irreversible. The shock can be an external catastrophe that forces adaptation, or an internal reckoning produced either by a great man whose personal virtue is sufficient to compel the republic back to itself, or, more reliably, by the institutions enforcing their own founding principles against transgressors regardless of rank or power. Machiavelli preferred the institutional route precisely because it did not depend on the contingency of any single virtuous figure. The key word in either case is visible. The example must be made publicly, demonstrably, with sufficient severity to restore what Machiavelli called terrore — not cruelty for its own sake, but the reinstatement of genuine consequence, the credible threat that power confers no immunity from the law that governs everyone else. This is not revenge. It is maintenance. The republic requires periodic proof that power does not confer immunity, because once that proof stops being given, the belief that the rules apply equally begins to die, and with it the civic foundation on which the republic rests.

The last genuine renewal of the American republic, on this reading, was not a single event but an extended process that ran from the Civil War through the late 1960s. The Civil War established the principle that the Union’s founding ideals were worth fighting for, and that the explicit exception built into the founding compromise — the one that allowed a subclass of human beings to be held as property — was incompatible with those ideals. What followed was a century-long argument about who the republic was actually for: contested at every step, partially reversed after Reconstruction, advanced again through the Progressive Era and the New Deal, and finally given something approaching completion with the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act. The New Deal was not the origin of this process but its economic culmination — the moment when the State demonstrated, within severe limits, that it could act as a steward of collective interests. The civic legitimacy it purchased was real but structurally compromised from the outset: the exclusion of agricultural and domestic workers — disproportionately Black — from Social Security and labour protections was not an oversight but a political price paid for Southern Democratic votes. The legitimacy was therefore partial, purchased at the cost of reinforcing the very exception the Civil War had been fought to abolish. That it was partial does not mean it was trivial — a generation of Americans experienced the State as a competent actor in their material lives, and that experience created a reservoir of civic attachment that subsequent decades would draw down. But the reservoir had a crack in its foundation from the beginning.

That legitimacy was then spent down through a series of deliberate choices not to make the examples that Machiavelli understood were necessary.

Nixon resigned without criminal prosecution. The system congratulated itself for forcing a resignation while allowing the underlying lesson to be established: if you are powerful enough and the political will to pursue accountability can be redirected toward “national healing,” you escape. This was not a minor procedural leniency. It was a foundational instruction about how power would henceforth operate. The post-Watergate period did produce a genuine attempt at Machiavellian renewal — the Federal Election Campaign Act Amendments of 1974, the Ethics in Government Act of 1978, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the War Powers Resolution, and strengthened Freedom of Information provisions. These were not trivial measures; they addressed the procedural architecture of executive accountability with real seriousness. But they addressed procedures. They did not address impunity. Ford’s pardon had already established the template: the forms of accountability could be elaborated indefinitely, so long as the substance — the visible, consequential punishment of powerful transgressors — was withheld. The subsequent erosion of those reforms, through Citizens United, through the expiration of the independent counsel statute, through the routine circumvention of the War Powers Resolution by every subsequent president, was not incidental. It was the predictable consequence of building accountability structures on a foundation from which the terrore had been removed. The campaign finance system of 2024, after five decades of reform legislation, looked, in the assessment of the Brennan Center for Justice, much as it had before Watergate.

Iran-Contra confirmed the lesson. The architects were pardoned or had their convictions overturned. The Iraq War produced no legal or institutional consequence for anyone responsible for a process in which, by the most credible documentary accounts, the intelligence was shaped to fit a conclusion already reached rather than to test one. Each failure made the next transgression more thinkable. Each normalized a slightly larger departure. The contrast with the savings and loan crisis of the 1980s makes the trajectory concrete: during that episode, special government task forces referred over a thousand cases to prosecutors, resulting in more than eight hundred bank officials going to prison. The 2008 financial crisis was orders of magnitude larger in its economic and social consequences. Its criminal prosecution record was orders of magnitude smaller — a comparison Senator Elizabeth Warren would invoke explicitly in Congressional hearings as evidence of a pattern, not a coincidence.

The 2008 crisis belongs in this sequence and is perhaps the most damaging episode of all, for a reason Machiavelli would have recognized immediately. The failure of previous accountability — Nixon, Iran-Contra, Iraq — could at least be narrated, however unconvincingly, as acts of institutional restraint, as avoiding the destabilization that aggressive prosecution might cause. The 2008 non-reckoning offered no such alibi. People lost their homes while watching the institutions that caused the crash receive public money and pay bonuses with it. The implicit social contract of capitalism — that its rewards are justified by the discipline of its losses — was publicly voided for the people at the top while being ruthlessly enforced on everyone below. This was visible, total, and went entirely unpunished. That combination carries the specific political danger Machiavelli identified as the most corrosive form of institutional failure: not the transgression itself, but the transgression made fully visible to the entire citizenry, with no punishment administered and no narrative available to restore faith in the system’s fairness. When that happens at the scale and visibility of 2008, the damage to institutional legitimacy is not merely reputational. It is structural.

By the time the Supreme Court issued its presidential immunity ruling in 2024 — the formal legal doctrine that ratifies what had previously been merely practical reality — the sequence was complete. What started as norm erosion had become constitutional architecture. The reforms that followed each transgression were real but temporary. Each cycle of reform-then-erosion left the institutional fabric weaker, not because the reforms were misconceived but because they were not accompanied by the visible, consequential enforcement that Machiavelli understood as the only mechanism capable of making the return to principles durable. The system retained some capacity for institutional self-correction in the economic-regulatory domain — Sarbanes-Oxley, enacted after Enron and WorldCom, produced real criminal accountability for corporate fraud — while systematically losing it in the political-constitutional domain. That selective atrophy is, if anything, more alarming than uniform decline, because it suggests the decay is not general but targeted at precisely the nexus where state power meets the question of consequence.

IV. The Transfer of Legitimacy

The decay of civic attachment to public institutions did not happen in a vacuum. It was actively cultivated, over decades, by a systematic transfer of public functions to private actors — a transfer that was not merely economic but deeply political in its effects. The systematic privatization of public goods from the postwar period onward did not merely transfer economic activity. It transferred legitimacy. When NASA’s role in human spaceflight diminishes and private contractors fill the gap, when public transit decays and ride-share platforms fill the gap, when public healthcare is gutted and insurance companies fill the gap, the implicit message to citizens — repeated across decades and across every domain of public life — is that the State is not a competent steward of collective interests. That message, absorbed over a generation, produces a population that has no particular reason to defend institutions they have been taught are either incompetent or corrupt. The Machiavellian failure of return and this legitimacy transfer operated in tandem. Each accountability failure taught citizens that the state was not an honest broker; each round of privatization taught them that it was not a competent one. The combination produced exactly the cynicism Trump weaponized — and it was not manufactured by his campaign. It was the accumulated residue of forty years of lived experience.

This is also why the comparison to Rome’s late Republic is, in the end, more instructive than the Weimar comparison for understanding the time dimension of this decay. Weimar’s collapse was rapid, conditioned by specific postwar circumstances — hyperinflation, reparations, a constitutional order built on a society whose real power networks had not actually been dissolved. American decay is slow, and has been slow for a long time. The Roman Republic took roughly a century to unravel from the Gracchi to Augustus. Each step normalized the next. When Sulla marched on Rome — twice — and then retired, the Senate could pretend the crisis was over. They had their Jena moment and chose not to learn from it. The precedent was set, absorbed, and the republic continued in its forms while its substance quietly hollowed out. The optimates kept winning the institutional battles and kept being baffled that popular attachment to Republican ideals kept declining. They could not understand that defending the institutions while using them to protect elite impunity was itself destroying the foundation those institutions rested on.

There is a further parallel that the Roman comparison makes visible: the reformers who attempted genuine renewal — the Gracchi most prominently — were destroyed not by their enemies’ strength but by the institutional system’s unwillingness to defend them. The Senate understood that genuine enforcement of the principles it nominally upheld would threaten the arrangements from which its members benefited. So the forms were preserved and the substance was surrendered, cycle after cycle, until the forms themselves became the instrument of whoever was willing to use them without constraint. The American pattern is not identical, but the logic is the same: the rules were maintained as long as maintaining them cost nothing, and abandoned the moment they threatened to apply to the people responsible for maintaining them.

V. The Network That Outlasts the Man

There is one further dimension of the Wilhelm comparison that deserves more attention than it typically receives: the personalist networks he built did not dissolve when he abdicated. They were absorbed into Weimar, where the old elites — the Hindenburgs, the Papens, the military aristocracy — retained enormous informal power while democracy provided the institutional form. When Hitler arrived, the calculation of these surviving elites was not irrational given their assumptions: a useful, energetic, controllable populist through whom the old networks could reassert themselves. Papen believed they had hired him. The personalist system had outlasted its original architect and was now looking for a new one who could complete what Wilhelm had, in his erratic way, only begun.

The American parallel is not comforting. The infrastructure Trump has built — the ideological ecosystem, the transformed Republican Party, the captured judiciary, the donor networks, the reorientation of federal agencies toward personal loyalty — does not disappear if Trump leaves office or becomes incapacitated. If anything, the lesson a more capable successor might draw from the Trump period is that the project was correct but the execution was undisciplined — that personal grievance made Trump an unreliable vehicle, that chaotic governance dissipated energy that could have been directed more precisely. A more focused figure who inherited Trump’s structural gains while correcting his operational failures could, in ten or twenty or thirty years, achieve what Trump only partially managed. This is not speculation about a distant hypothetical. It is the normal historical pattern of how personalist networks survive and evolve.

It is not, however, a universal pattern, and intellectual honesty requires acknowledging the cases where it failed. Peronism in Argentina fragmented almost immediately after Perón’s death in 1974 — its ideological incoherence, held together by charisma alone, dissolving into factional violence and military intervention within two years. Berlusconi, who dominated Italian politics for two decades in ways that anticipated features of the current American situation, never anointed a successor; the networks he built reconstituted around different political configurations rather than producing a more disciplined heir. These cases matter precisely because they sharpen the diagnosis. The American case more closely resembles the Wilhelmine-to-Weimar trajectory — where the institutional infrastructure, the donor networks, the ideological ecosystem, and the transformed party apparatus constitute a structural inheritance far more durable than any single leader’s personal following — than it does the Peronist model, where the movement’s coherence depended on one man’s charisma alone. The distinction is not reassuring. It is the structural character of the current project, not the personal qualities of any individual, that makes the successor question so serious.

Recent scholarship has identified a mechanism that closes a loop this analysis might otherwise leave open. A 2025 study in Political Behavior demonstrates that incumbent actions degrading democracy worsen polarization in a self-reinforcing cycle, an effect amplified when party elites endorse rather than condemn the leader’s behavior. The central finding — that polarization is endogenous to democratic backsliding — means the personalist project does not merely exploit existing social division but generates the division that enables its own continuation. Even if Trump falters, the polarization his project has produced does not disappear with him. It remains as structural raw material for whoever inherits the infrastructure, making each subsequent attempt at personalist rule marginally easier and each subsequent defense of democratic norms marginally harder.

The comparative evidence on democratic recovery does not resolve the question in either direction. The Carnegie Endowment’s most comprehensive empirical study of post-backsliding cases found that recovery correlates most strongly with two variables: how deeply institutionalized the backsliding has become, and the degree to which successor governments actually prioritize re-democratization rather than merely returning to prior arrangements. A companion analysis applying this framework directly to the United States concluded that American backsliding is not yet deeply rooted or severe enough to foreclose recovery — a finding whose qualifying “not yet” deserves to be read with the emphasis the authors plainly intended. The GIGA Hamburg Institute’s 2025 global study found that nearly a third of countries experiencing significant democratic decline have subsequently re-democratized, and — crucially — that the duration of the decline matters more for the difficulty of recovery than its depth. If that finding holds, then the long time-horizon of American decay, a half-century of compounding failures rather than a sudden rupture, is itself a risk factor that shorter comparative cases may understate.

The question is not whether a more capable successor will eventually emerge. The structural incentives for one are plainly present, and the infrastructure is already built. The question is whether what remains of the institutional and social resistance proves durable enough to matter when that moment arrives — and whether the people who inherit the wreckage understand, clearly, what they are actually being asked to do.

What the preceding argument suggests is that they are not being asked to restore. Restoration assumes the prior system was adequate and merely needs to be returned to its prior state. But it was the prior system’s accumulated failures — the impunity structurally protected from Watergate onward, the accountability that existed in procedure but not in consequence, the civic legitimacy drained away by forty years of being shown that the state served private interests rather than collective ones — that produced this situation. Going back to the norms of 2014 or 2001 or even 1980 is not a solution. It is a slower version of the same problem.

What Machiavelli’s framework actually demands is harder and rarer: a genuine riduzione ai principii — not an invocation of founding myths but a reconstruction of the mechanisms by which power is made genuinely answerable. That means visible, consequential accountability for political transgression, not as a form of revenge but as the re-establishment of the credible threat whose absence is the rot’s primary cause. It means rebuilding the State’s demonstrable competence in serving collective interests, so that citizens have experiential reasons to attach to it rather than merely inherited ones. And it means confronting the structural vulnerabilities the current crisis has exposed — in campaign finance, in war powers, in the mechanisms that allowed the post-Watergate reforms to be systematically dismantled — with the seriousness that earlier attempts lacked, precisely because earlier attempts stopped at procedure and left impunity intact.

Whether that remains possible is the most important question in American politics. The comparative evidence suggests it is not foreclosed. But the evidence also suggests that the distance between the effort required and the effort being made is the variable that matters most. What is certain is that the consoling fiction — that what is happening is an interruption of a healthy system rather than the latest acceleration of a decay that has been a long time coming — is not just wrong. It is the specific form of self-deception that, in Clausewitz’s account of Prussia, made the catastrophe possible. The machine kept clattering. Nobody asked if it was still doing its job. The asking, at least, has begun.

The author wishes to acknowledge a significant debt to the work of Secretary of Defense Rock (History Does You, Substack, https://secretaryrofdefenserock.substack.com/), whose analyses of Wilhelmine civil-military relations, the limits of airpower, and the persistence of institutional decay in American strategic culture informed much of the historical framework developed here. The first two sections of this essay draw directly on frameworks Rock developed in his pieces on Prussia in 1806 and Wilhelmine Germany; the synthesis with Machiavelli, the Roman Republic, and the accountability sequence is the author’s own extension of that work.

Bibliography

Sources are organized thematically around the essay’s principal arguments. The thematic sections do not map one-to-one onto the essay’s numbered sections; several arguments draw on multiple source clusters. Primary sources are listed first within each thematic group. Chicago style throughout.

I. Prussia Before Jena (1806) and the Clausewitz Epigraph

Primary Sources

Carl von Clausewitz, Historical and Political Writings. Edited and translated by Peter Paret and Daniel Moran. Princeton University Press, 1992, 32.

Clausewitz, Carl von. On War. Edited and translated by Michael Howard and Peter Paret. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976.

Secondary Sources

Howard, Michael. War in European History. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976.

Paret, Peter. Clausewitz and the State: The Man, His Theories, and His Times. Orig. pub. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976. Repr. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985.

Rock, Secretary of Defense [pseud.]. “America as Prussia in 1806.” History Does You, Substack. https://secretaryrofdefenserock.substack.com/.

The direct inspiration for the Prussia analogy as applied to contemporary American institutional decay.

II. Bismarck, Wilhelm II, and the Personalist State

Primary Sources

Bismarck, Otto von. Bismarck the man and the Statesman: being the reflections and reminiscences of Otto Prince Von Bismarck. Translated by A.J. Butler. 2 vols. London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1898.

Wilhelm II. My Memoirs: 1878–1918. London, New York [etc.] Cassell and company, ltd, 1922.

Secondary Sources

Clark, Christopher. Kaiser Wilhelm II: A Life in Power. London: Longman, 2000.

Pflanze, Otto. Bismarck and the Development of Germany. 3 vols. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990.

Röhl, John C.G. The Kaiser and His Court: Wilhelm II and the Government of Germany. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.

Rock, Secretary of Defense [pseud.]. “The Limits of the Military Profession.” History Does You, Substack. https://secretaryrofdefenserock.substack.com/.

Rock’s two-part series on Wilhelmine civil-military relations informed the essay’s analysis of the personalist regime and the displacement of independent statesmanship.

Steinberg, Jonathan. Bismarck: A Life. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011.

Taylor, A.J.P. Bismarck: The Man and the Statesman. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1955.

III. The Roman Republic: Gracchi, Sulla, and Institutional Decay

Primary Sources

Appian. The Civil Wars. Translated by John Carter. London: Penguin Classics, 1996.

Cicero, Marcus Tullius. Selected letters of Cicero: with notes for the use of schools. Oxford : Clarendon Press, 1879.

Plutarch. Lives, Volume X: Agis and Cleomenes. Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus. Philopoemen and Flamininus. Translated by Bernadotte Perrin. Loeb Classical Library 102. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1921.

Plutarch. Lives, Volume IV: Alcibiades and Coriolanus. Lysander and Sulla. Translated by Bernadotte Perrin. Loeb Classical Library 80. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1916.

Velleius Paterculus. Compendium of Roman History. Res Gestae Divi Augusti. Translated by Frederick W. Shipley. Loeb Classical Library 152. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1924.

Secondary Sources

Beard, Mary. SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome. New York: Liveright, 2015.

Duncan, Mike. The Storm Before the Storm: The Beginning of the End of the Roman Republic. New York: PublicAffairs, 2017.

Flower, Harriet I. Roman Republics. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011.

Holland, Tom. Rubicon: The Last Years of the Roman Republic. New York: Doubleday, 2003.

Keaveney, Arthur. Sulla: The Last Republican. 2nd ed. London: Routledge, 2005.

IV. Machiavelli’s Riduzione ai Principii

Primary Source

Machiavelli, Niccolò. Discourses on Livy. Translated by Harvey C. Mansfield and Nathan Tarcov. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996. Book III, Chapter 1.

The direct textual basis for the essay’s use of riduzione ai principii. Discourses III.1 is Machiavelli’s most concentrated statement on republican maintenance and the necessity of visible enforcement — the source of both the terrore argument and the distinction between institutional and great-man routes to renewal that structures Section III of the essay.

Secondary Sources

Mansfield, Harvey C. Machiavelli’s New Modes and Orders: A Study of the Discourses on Livy. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1979.

McCormick, John P. Machiavellian Democracy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011.

Skinner, Quentin. Machiavelli. New York : Hill and Wang, 1981.

V. The Accountability Failures: Nixon, Iran-Contra, Iraq, 2008

Nixon Pardon (1974)

Ford, Gerald R. Proclamation 4311: “Granting Pardon to Richard Nixon.” September 8, 1974. Federal Register 39, no. 176 (September 10, 1974): 32601.

Werth, Barry. 31 Days: Gerald Ford, the Nixon Pardon, and a Government in Crisis. New York: Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, 2006.

Woodward, Bob, and Carl Bernstein. The Final Days. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1976.

Post-Watergate Reforms

Brennan Center for Justice. “50 Years After Watergate, Unregulated Money Continues to Corrode Our Politics.” August 2024. https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/50-years-after-watergate-unregulated-money-continues-corrode-our-politics.

Goldsmith, Jack. “Watergate-era reforms 50 years later.” Harvard Law Today, June 8, 2022. https://hls.harvard.edu/today/watergate-era-reforms-50-years-later/.

“The Failure of the Watergate Reforms.” Time, August 8, 2024. https://time.com/7008604/watergate-reforms-backfire/.

Iran-Contra (1992)

Bush, George H.W. “Proclamation 6518—Grant of Executive Clemency.” December 24, 1992. The American Presidency Project. https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/.

Walsh, Lawrence E. Firewall: The Iran-Contra Conspiracy and Cover-Up. New York: W.W. Norton, 1997.

Iraq War Intelligence

“The Downing Street Memo” (Minutes of a meeting chaired by Prime Minister Tony Blair, July 23, 2002). First published in The Sunday Times (London), May 1, 2005.

The essay’s characterization of the Iraq intelligence picture — that intelligence was shaped to fit a conclusion already reached — rests primarily on this document, in which the head of MI6 reported to Blair that “the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.” This interpretation remains contested; the Senate SSCI reports document systematic failure without resolving the question of intentionality versus analytical error. The essay flags this explicitly in the body and the bibliography should be read accordingly.

Ricks, Thomas E. Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq. New York: Penguin Press, 2006.

U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. Report on the U.S. Intelligence Community’s Prewar Intelligence Assessments on Iraq. Washington: Government Printing Office, July 2004.

To be read alongside the Phase II report (2008), which examined how intelligence was used by policymakers. Together the two reports document the failures comprehensively while reflecting genuine disagreement on intentionality versus analytical error.

S&L Crisis vs. 2008: The Accountability Contrast

“In Financial Crisis, No Prosecutions of Top Figures.” New York Times, April 14, 2011. https://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/14/business/14prosecute.html.

“Were Bankers Jailed In Past Financial Crises?” PBS Frontline. https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/were-bankers-jailed-in-past-financial-crises/.

Together, these document the prosecution record of the S&L crisis and the contrast with 2008 that Senator Warren cited in Congressional testimony.

Barofsky, Neil. Bailout: An Inside Account of How Washington Abandoned Main Street While Rescuing Wall Street. New York: Free Press, 2012.

Tooze, Adam. Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World. New York: Viking, 2018.

Sarbanes-Oxley and Corporate Accountability

“Twenty Years Later: The Lasting Lessons of Enron.” Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance, April 5, 2021. https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2021/04/05/twenty-years-later-the-lasting-lessons-of-enron/.

VI. The Supreme Court and Executive Immunity

Buckley v. Valeo, 424 U.S. 1 (1976).

Bush v. Gore, 531 U.S. 98 (2000).

Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, 558 U.S. 310 (2010).

Trump v. United States, 603 U.S. ___ (2024). Decided July 1, 2024.

VII. Privatization, Civic Legitimacy, and the New Deal

Fukuyama, Francis. The Origins of Political Order and Political Order and Political Decay. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011 and 2014.

Hacker, Jacob S., and Paul Pierson. Winner-Take-All Politics. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2010.

Harvey, David. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.

Katznelson, Ira. Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time. New York: Liveright, 2013.

Essential for the essay’s argument about the New Deal’s partial civic legitimacy and its structural compromise from the outset.

Mazzucato, Mariana. The Entrepreneurial State: Debunking Public vs. Private Sector Myths. London: Anthem Press, 2013.

VIII. Congress and War Powers Abdication

Authorization for Use of Military Force. Pub. L. No. 107-40, 115 Stat. 224 (September 18, 2001).

War Powers Resolution. Pub. L. No. 93-148, 87 Stat. 555 (November 7, 1973).

Fisher, Louis. Presidential War Power. 3rd ed. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2013.

Mann, Thomas E., and Norman J. Ornstein. It’s Even Worse Than It Looks. New York: Basic Books, 2012.

IX. Weimar Germany and the Survival of Personalist Networks

Primary Sources

Hindenburg, Paul von. Out of My Life. Translated by F.A. Holt. London: Cassell, 1920.

Covers WWI experiences only; provides character background but cannot serve as a primary source for the 1932–33 negotiations. For those, see Turner and Kershaw below.

Papen, Franz von. Memoirs. Translated by Brian Connell. London: André Deutsch, 1952.

Secondary Sources

Evans, Richard J. The Coming of the Third Reich. New York: Penguin Press, 2004.

Kershaw, Ian. Hitler: 1889–1936 Hubris. New York: W.W. Norton, 199.

Mommsen, Hans. The Rise and Fall of Weimar Democracy. Translated by Elborg Forster and Larry Eugene Jones. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996.

Turner, Henry Ashby. Hitler’s Thirty Days to Power: January 1933. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1996.

Peronism and the Limits of the Pattern

The Peronist and Berlusconi counter-cases are drawn from general comparative political science literature on personalist regimes. For the Peronist case specifically, see the Wilson Center’s Latin American Program research on post-Perón fragmentation; for Berlusconi, see Paul Ginsborg, Silvio Berlusconi: Television, Power and Patrimony (London: Verso, 2004).

X. Democratic Decline, Backsliding, and Recovery

Acemoglu, Daron, and James A. Robinson. Why Nations Fail. New York: Crown, 2012.

Carothers, Thomas, and McKenzie Carrier. “Democratic Recovery After Significant Backsliding: Emergent Lessons.” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, April 2025. https://carnegieendowment.org/russia-eurasia/research/2025/04/democratic-recovery-after-significant-backsliding-emergent-lessons.

Carrier, McKenzie, and Thomas Carothers. “U.S. Democratic Backsliding in Comparative Perspective.” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, August 2025. https://carnegieendowment.org/russia-eurasia/research/2025/08/us-democratic-backsliding-in-comparative-perspective.

“Democratic Backsliding and Endogenous Polarization.” Political Behavior, November 2025. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11109-025-10094-8.

Demonstrates that polarization is endogenous to democratic backsliding — incumbent actions degrading democracy worsen polarization, amplified when party elites endorse the behavior. Central to the essay’s argument that polarization will outlast any individual figure.

GIGA Hamburg Institute. “From Crisis to Comeback: The Global Story of Re-Democratisation.” GIGA Focus Global, No. 4/2025. https://www.giga-hamburg.de/en/publications/giga-focus/from-crisis-to-comeback-the-global-story-of-re-democratisation.

Gilens, Martin, and Benjamin I. Page. “Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens.” Perspectives on Politics 12, no. 3 (September 2014): 564–81.

The empirical basis for the essay’s claim that the campaign finance system translates economic inequality directly into political inequality. Gilens and Page find that policy outcomes correlate strongly with elite preferences and weakly with majority opinion. Their methodology has attracted substantive critique — notably from Enns (2015) and Branham, Soroka, and Wlezien (2017) — but the dispute concerns magnitude, not direction; the existence and sign of the disparity are not contested. The essay’s argument rests on the direction, not on any specific quantification.

Levitsky, Steven, and Daniel Ziblatt. How Democracies Die. New York: Crown, 2018.

Runciman, David. How Democracy Ends. New York: Basic Books, 2018.

Snyder, Timothy. The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America. New York: Tim Duggan Books, 2018.