We had hoped Daniel Drezner would provide a thoughtful assessment of our book. He doesn’t. He mischaracterizes our arguments and offers ill-informed criticisms.

He goes off the rails in his very first sentence, saying we claim that “what ails America in 2020 is a powerless presidency.” What? We are well aware that presidential power has grown dramatically over time, and we say so. He goes on to portray our book as an unqualified argument for greater presidential power. Drezner is wrong again, setting the stage for a review that is weirdly disconnected from the book’s actual content.

This is what we do argue: the key to a more effective government—and to defusing the populist threat to democracy—lies in a recrafted presidency that (1) selectively adds to presidential power in ways that leverage its promise for better government and (2) imposes new constraints that weaken presidential power to protect against the fear that it may be put to antidemocratic ends. A major theme of the book is the need to balance the promise and fear. As we emphasize in chapter 4, “This is not a matter of making the president more or less powerful in some aggregate sense. It is about finding a combination of powers that best promotes a well-working democracy capable of meeting the needs of its people.”

Somehow, Drezner missed this major theme. Not surprisingly, he then finds our chapter on reform “by far the most puzzling element” of the book, noting—as though discovering a grand inconsistency—that “the overwhelming majority of these reforms…limit presidential power.” But these are simply our proposed reforms for addressing the fear, and they derive straight from our overall argument. There is nothing puzzling here.

Drezner claims we “fail to explain how current presidents have been insufficiently powerful to make government more efficient” and wonders why their unilateral powers will not suffice. But we deal with these matters at length. American government is inherently ineffective due to an antiquated design that traces back to the Constitution. Some (but only some) increases in presidential power have helped, but modernity has generated enormously disruptive problems that the system’s antiquated architecture cannot handle. With an institutionally perverse Congress at the lawmaking center, the unilateral powers of presidents will not set things right (and may actually cause harm). Fundamental structural reforms are needed.

Drezner keeps firing away. He claims, for example, that we cannot explain why more effective European governments with advanced welfare systems fell victim to populism. But we do explain it—and devote 13 pages to the topic. He also quips, “Empowering technocrats…seems like an odd remedy for populism”—without seriously engaging our core argument that a more effective government, one that harnesses the technical expertise required to solve modern problems, is needed to mitigate the anger, anxiety, and disaffection that fuel populism.

There is more, but with limited space we cannot correct all of Drezner’s missteps. We encourage you to read our book, see what we actually argue, and judge it for yourself.