It is counterintuitive to argue that what ails America in 2020 is a powerless presidency. That is nonetheless the bold claim of William Howell and Terry Moe’s new book, Presidents, Populism, and the Crisis of Democracy. It is a natural successor to their 2016 book Relic, which is subtitled, “How Our Constitution Undermines Effective Government—and Why We Need a More Powerful Presidency.” But although their claim is provocative, their specific proposals raise questions that subvert their thesis.

The book’s overarching argument is clear enough. Howell and Moe examine the crisis of populism that has swept across the advanced industrialized democracies. They attribute the cause to government failures to ameliorate a wave of economic shocks—“globalization, technological change, and immigration” (p. 51) in particular—that have hit working and middle classes in the Global North hard. In their anger and dislocation, white working-class voters gravitated toward populism, particularly of the GOP variety. The results were the Trump administration and GOP control over all the levers of power after 2016. The GOP under Trump has furthered a populist doom loop in which he disrupts government, alienating his supporters from the state even more and, in turn, causing them to double down in their support of populists.

The key conceptual leap that Howell and Moe make is their hypothesis that the populist turn could have been blunted had the federal government proved more adept at responding to these long-term economic trends: “if the United States had a government that was institutionally well equipped to deal with the problems of modern time, Donald Trump would never have been elected president” (p. 6). The problem, of course, is that the federal government is far from efficient. It was designed that way—the framers of the Constitution created a system with checks and balances designed to frustrate any kind of rapid policy response.

At this point there are some empirical objections one can raise to this analytic narrative. For one thing, Howell and Moe’s thesis fails to explain why populism permeated European governments that possess larger and more efficient social safety nets—and why it has not affected Pacific Rim economies with less generous welfare states. For another, their framework leaves unclear why parties that tried to improve state capacity subsequently got punished at the ballot box. In Barack Obama’s first two years, Democrats passed a sizable fiscal stimulus, the Affordable Care Act, and Dodd-Frank. For their troubles, the party received a serious drubbing during the 2010 midterms.

For now, however, let’s grant Howell and Moe their premise. How do they think this problem should be fixed? Moe and Howell are skeptical of greater legislative control, for standard Political Science 101 reasons: members of Congress prioritize their narrow interest over the national interest, obsess over reelection, and paralyze themselves into gridlock due to polarization. In contrast, they argue that presidents are incentivized to serve the national interest and to keep one eye on their historical legacy. Only if presidents are more empowered will they be able to ensure that the federal government ameliorates popular ills before they curdle into populism.

Presidents, Populism, and the Crisis of Democracy sits firmly within the tradition of arguing that presidential power fails to match the public’s outsized expectations of presidential performance (Jeremi Suri, The Impossible Presidency, 2017). There are strengths to this analysis. For one thing, Howell and Moe reject the “both sides” nature of much political commentary and political science. They are quite explicit in arguing that Republicans bear the bulk of the blame for populism: “If American democracy is to defeat the populist threat, the Democrats must be the ones to do it. This is not a statement of partisan favoritism. It is just the brute reality of the situation” (p. 209). They are also refreshingly irreverent when it comes to the US Constitution. They heap scorn on those who extol the Constitution as the Platonic ideal of democratic governance. They assign this pathology to conservative legal thinkers in particular: “originalist thinking is a bizarre —and recent, since the 1980s—way to interpret the Constitution for modern times” (p. 188). Their skepticism about the ability of Congress to be the engine of better governance is well founded. If they had their druthers, they would prefer switching to a parliamentary government, but they recognize that to be a non-option; hence, their preference for a stronger presidency.

However, there are two large problems with the argument in Presidents, Populism, and the Crisis of Democracy. The first is that Howell and Moe fail to explain how current presidents have been insufficiently powerful to make government more efficient. Although the authors reference Richard Neustadt’s (Presidential Power and the Modern Presidents, 1990) theory of the presidency as a persuasive institution, the past 50 years have largely played out in a manner more consistent with Arthur Schlesinger Jr.’s imperial presidency thesis. Indeed, Howell (Power without Persuasion, 2003, p. 134) has made this argument explicitly in his previous work, writing, “The notion that a watchful Congress will rise up and snub any President who dares challenge it could hardly be further from the truth.” A dominant strand of the presidential studies literature suggests that, as Congress has become more paralyzed by polarization, the president has been able to step into the power vacuum to exercise authority (Phillip Cooper, By Order of the President, 2002; Andrew Rudalevige, The New Imperial Presidency, 2003; Linda Fowler, Watchdogs on the Hill: The Decline of Congressional Oversight of US Foreign Relations, 2015).

Howell and Moe acknowledge that Trump’s use of executive power has vastly exceeded his predecessors. If presidents have displayed an increasing ability to act unilaterally, however, why is that not reflected in better and more efficient government?

By far the most puzzling element of Howell and Moe’s book, however, comes in their last chapter, which delineates how to enhance presidential power sufficiently to incentivize better government. Their first proposed reform—an expansion of “fast-track” authority beyond trade, requiring up-or-down votes from Congress on other important pieces of legislation—would undeniably empower the executive office of the president. The two other major reforms they propose, however, are (1) to insulate the intelligence agencies and Department of Justice from political interference and (2) to restrict and reduce the number of political appointments in the executive branch. They also propose amending the 1976 Emergencies Act to prevent presidential overreach, placing limits on presidential pardons, and requiring presidents to disclose their financial interests. And they offer a drive-by dismissal of unitary executive theory: “legal arguments asserting the president’s ‘absolute right’ under the Constitution to control… the entire executive branch… are bogus and need to be put to rest by the courts and judicial scholars” (p. 186).

Moe and Howell’s proposed reforms are eminently sensible. Versions of some of their ideas have been proffered in other books on the Trump presidency (Bob Bauer and Jack Goldsmith, After Trump: Reconstructing the Presidency, 2020). Indeed, as the author of The Toddler in Chief, many of their suggestions would qualify as “toddler-proofing” the office of the presidency from a future immature leader. The overwhelming majority of these reforms, however, limit presidential power. Some of their proposals would enhance the expertise and autonomy of executive-branch bureaucracies, but that is quite different from presidential power. Only one of their proposed moves—one that would require amending the Constitution— enhances presidential authority.

It is also far from clear whether their ideas would alleviate the populist pressures in the manner they prescribe. Applying fast-track to other legislation might enhance presidential power. It is worth remembering, however, that this very power enabled presidents to engage in wide-ranging trade liberalization. As Howell and Moe note, that embrace of globalization was clearly one of the spurs for the populist backlash in the first place. Empowering technocrats also seems like an odd remedy for populism. Although apolitical bureaucracies tend to outperform politicized ones, the pandemic has highlighted how even an insulated organization like the CDC falls short during a crisis.

Howell and Moe believe that a weak president exacerbates populism, but clearly the reverse is also true: populism exposes the dangers of presidential systems as compared to parliamentary democracies. Thirty years ago, Juan Linz (“The Perils of Presidentialism,” Journal of Democracy, 1990, p. 57), commenting on the widespread instability of presidential systems, suggested that the United States was an outlier because “the preponderance of voters is centrist, agrees on the exclusion of extremists, and expects both rightist and leftist candidates to differ only within a larger, moderate consensus.” Under those conditions, “the divisiveness latent in presidential competition is not a serious problem.” Given the current state of the American body politic, it seems odd to empower the presidency even further. Maybe that is why Howell and Moe’s actual prescriptions resemble a variant of Montesquieu’s dictum: useless presidential powers weaken necessary ones.