Daniel McCarthy: The greatest threat to the Republic comes from the Oval Office.

AFTER EIGHT YEARS of George W. Bush, conservatives find themselves back at the beginning—that is, back at the beginning of the modern American Right, circa 1933. Once more the country is in a deep financial crisis (we don't call them"depressions" anymore) for which Republicans have taken the blame. And again a pragmatic Democratic president, backed by majorities in both chambers of Congress, promises to spend us back to prosperity. After conceding the president virtually his every whim during the Bush years—with the occasional Harriet Miers- sized exception—conservatives have begun to rediscover the virtues of checks upon executive power. The 1930s Old Right arose in reaction against Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal. But conservatives today need not look back quite so far to find articulate critics of presidential aggrandizement. Unlike Roosevelt's enemies in the 1930s, James Burnham and Willmoore Kendall, two of National Review's original senior editors, were not strict in their devotion to individual rights, the free market, or limited gov- ernment. Kendall, a"wild Yale don" in Dwight Macdonald's description, was a majority-rule democrat who held that legislatures could and should circumscribe personal liberties for the sake of national security. Burnham, a former New York University philosophy professor, was a Rockefeller Republican in politics and disciple of Machiavelli in philosophy. Yet both were as staunch as any Old Right libertarian in their hostility to presidential power. To them, the executive branch was not only the seat of liberalism but an incipient threat to the Republic.

Kendall and Burnham spoke for the mainstream Right in the 1950s and '60s. By 2007, however, right-wing attitudes toward executive power had undergone a sea change. Harvard University professor Harvey Mansfield, writing that year in the Wall Street Journal, gave voice to the new presidentialist attitude prevailing among conservatives in what he called,"the debate between the strong executive and its adversary, the rule of law." Mansfield argued that in times of emergency, executive power should be unfettered, both at home and, especially, in foreign policy."One man, or, to use Machiavelli's expression,uno solo, will be the greatest source of energy," he wrote."Such a person will have the greatest incentive to be watchful, and to be both cruel and merciful in correct contrast and proportion." Mansfield attributed"the difficulties of the war in Iraq" not to presidential overreach but to"a sense of inhibition."

Mansfield lent philosophic weight to the case for the strong executive, but Vice President Dick Cheney gave it the force of the policy. For 30 years, Cheney has been the Zelig of presidentialism, present whenever there is a constitutional dispute over the executive's prerogatives. As chief of staff under Gerald Ford, he chafed at the restraints Congress placed on the post-Watergate presidency's use of intelligence services. As a congressman in 1987, he was the ranking Republican on the committee investigating Iran-Contra. His minority report condemned"the boundless view of Congressional power [that] began to take hold in the 1970's, in the wake of the Vietnam War" and argued that presidents have"inherent executive powers under Article II of the Constitution" to employ secret agents and"a broad range of foreign policy powers" as they deem best. Three years later, as secretary of defense under George H.W. Bush, Cheney asserted before the Senate Armed Forces Committee that the president did not need a congressional authorization to commit forces to the Persian Gulf. (In an intimation of things to come, Cheney cited a United Nations resolution as"not authorization, but certainly ... support" for the president's intentions.)

Indeed, burnishing executive authority seems to be a Cheney family value. ...