Lest Australian observers of these peculiarities are tempted to feel smug, we might ask if we, too, are not wading in our own policy paralysis, with no leader or major party powerful enough to put principle above pragmatism. Australian governments share many of the same problems, some of them inherited from the United States. We are even less able than Americans, it seems, to implement policies on hard issues such as climate change, fast broadband, refugees, and Indigenous people. Even though we have a secular Constitution, a parliamentary system, metric measurement, compulsory voting, no capital punishment, and reasonable access to abortion (except in Queensland), Australia still tends to imitate the worst and ignore the best features of the United States.

We have recently adopted the American habit of declaring war on anything and everything, from graffiti to unemployment. In the United States, wars on poverty, crime, drugs, and terror appear to give whichever president declares them unilateral authority. Yet no one knows what a victory in these or other pseudo-wars would be. They have no end, so they merely fade away and are replaced by more wars – ‘endless war for endless peace’, as Donald Rumsfeld liked to say. He meant real wars, but pseudo-wars are waged for equally spurious reasons. They ‘prepare the public mind for the proposition that presidential unilateralism is always a legitimate option in the twenty-first century’, Bruce Ackerman warns in The Decline and Fall of the American Republic.

Ackerman, a professor of law and political science at Yale, is concerned about the sweeping legal authority that the modern American presidency has won from Congress to declare emergencies and respond with unilateral action to crises, whether serious or trivial. He points to the energetic use that presidents ever since Harry Truman have made of this power. ‘When the president does it, that means it’s not illegal,’ Richard Nixon famously declared. Even without a president, where America goes Australia follows: the power of a prime minister to send Australians to war without a vote, a budget, a clear purpose, or an exit strategy, and in defiance of international law, is even less constrained than that of the US president. A few voices in Melbourne and Sydney, including those of former senior military personnel, have recently been calling for the war powers to be specified, to guard against more Iraqs and Afghanistans in the future: so far to no avail.

Ackerman believes that a presidency responding to evolving dynamics of power poses a serious threat to constitutional freedom in the United States; a Congress that frustrates the president’s initiatives changes notions of legitimacy and creates a crisis of governability; and in such a crisis, presidential unilateralism, or a ‘runaway presidency’, may grudgingly be accepted, with what Ackerman expects to be catastrophic consequences. Taking over where Arthur Schlesinger’s The Imperial Presidency (1973) left off, and following other recent American ‘doomsday’ writers, he predicts America’s decline, some aspects of which are already evident. His argument has three themes: extremism, irrationality, unilateralism. Election of presidents, he predicts, will increasingly go to ‘charismatic outsider types’, with support from one extreme or the other of public opinion; media consultants who shrink debate using electronic soundbites will target segmented micropublics with a ‘politics of unreason’; and presidents will increasingly govern by executive order through staff loyalists, bypassing or dominating the bureaucracy.

As the military becomes more politicised, presidents will use it to enforce executive orders; they will rely more on emergency powers; they will deploy public opinion polls as mandates to override Congress; and White House lawyers will loyally vindicate the constitutionality of their actions. A final prospect horrifies Ackerman: that a president may establish a régime of law and order in ways that Watergate, Iran-Contra, and the ‘war on terror’ anticipated, and an intimidated Supreme Court may legitimise them. A crisis, he quotes Obama’s former chief of staff as saying, is a terrible thing to waste.

The test of Ackerman’s theory is how a president responds to a crisis. The WikiLeaks revelations, the Middle East revolt, and the Fukushima meltdown, which all occurred after The Decline and Fall of the American Republic was written, had no disastrous effect on Barack Obama. Perhaps the crisis he has in mind, without saying so, is much bigger, such as another 9/11 event. Obama, he admits, is no runaway president. Anyway, the fall of the Republic would not mean the end of the American empire or of democracy. A cycle of renewal has always prevailed in the United States, so this century appears no different to many Americans. It is their complacency, however, that Ackerman wants to dispel. To save them from ‘the next insurgent president’, he advocates reversing the politics of unreason, executive illegality, legal subservience, and the politicisation of the military. The damage-control measures he proposes are courageous, in the Yes Minister sense: a national Deliberation Day two weeks before presidential elections, on which voters discuss the issues; Canons of Military Ethics to apply to the officer corps; the Senate to have power to confirm top White House officials; revision of the Electoral College; protection from punishment for those who offer contrary advice to the president; a Supreme Executive Tribunal, funded by Congress, to interpret the law for the president; a Presidential Commission on civilian–military relations; the National Security Advisor to be a civilian office; a ‘cleanup’ of Guantánamo Bay and the practice of torture; and, for good measure, a National Endowment for Journalism.

None of these is a bad idea. But will any of them happen? Watching Obama’s struggle for health reform and the budget, let alone for gun restrictions or his own re-election, many observers will roll their eyes and just hope the cycle of renewal kicks in.