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Observers were uncertain whether the American system, with its checks and balances and its diffusion of sovereign power across multiple levels of government, was up to the task of addressing these crises. Looking across the Atlantic, the political scientist Pendleton Herring pointed to the rising tide of authoritarianism: We face a world where discipline, organization, and the concentration of authority are placed before freedom for the individual and restraints on government. In this context, he asked: Can our government meet the challenge of totalitarianism and remain democratic? Is the separation of powers between the legislative and executive branches compatible with the need for authority?

For some, the answer was that the United States would have to abandon its constitutional system, at least temporarily, to meet the roiling crises of the period. Alfred E. Smith, the former New York governor and Democratic presidential nominee, asked in 1933: What does a democracy do in a war? It becomes a tyrant, a despot, a real monarch. Since the depression was doing more damage at home to our own people than the great war of 1917 and 1918 ever did, he reasoned, it was similarly necessary to suspend constitutional government in order to combat it. As war approached in the late 1930s, Herbert Emmerich recalled, Praise for the efficacy of the Fascist dictatorship in Italy was heard in surprisingly high places in the democracies. Some doubts were being expressed as to the ability of the American system to supply the bold dynamic leadership required for solution of the problems of modern government.

Emmerich was among a group of administrative reformers, now largely forgotten, who worked to formulate a different response. Beginning with the 1937 Presidents Committee on Administrative Management, and continuing through the early years of the Cold War, these reformers crafted a number of institutional mechanisms that would enable the executive branch to decisively address emergency situations without undermining the traditions of American democracy.

Two innovations in particular were key to the success of this process of governmental reform. First, an array of new administrative devices increased the presidents capacity to take decisive action without undermining democratic procedures. For instance, the delegatory statute gave the executive branch powers normally reserved for Congress to make regulations and issue executive orders while maintaining a check on this power. Second, the Executive Office of the President was established as an apparatus of technical support for the executive that could be reorganized according to changing demands, providing input and guidance on complex problems of economic policy, foreign relations, and military strategy. Over the ensuing years, U.S. presidents have relied extensively on the counsel of advisory bodies based in this office, from the National Resources Planning Board and Bureau of the Budget of the 1930s and 1940s, to the post-war National Security Council and Council of Economic Advisors.

Today the tools invented by these administrative reformers are largely taken for granted, assimilated into the everyday workings of government. But in the mid-twentieth century, they were seen to have monumental significance for the preservation of American democratic institutions. The political scientist Clinton Rossiter argued in 1949 that the reorganization of the executive branch had been a far more momentous constitutional fact that anyone seems yet to have realized. It may, he wrote, have saved the Presidency from paralysis and the Constitution from radical amendment. The historian Barry Karl proclaimed that the reorganization was the American alternative to revolution.

These adjustments in our governmental system have not, of course, prevented terrible abuses of executive power. Witness, for example, the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, or the extrajudicial imprisonment and torture of detainees at Guantanamo Bay. But they did allow the U.S. to navigate crises that brought down many of the worlds democratic governments in the first half of the twentieth century. And for seven decades the structure of executive authority established during the depression and the Cold War has enabled the American government to manage economic and military emergencies without resort to dictatorship or martial law.

How disturbing it is, then, to see Trump, within a week of his inauguration, using the very institutional mechanisms that were designed to preserve democracy in actual crises to undermine constitutional order in response to fictional crises. We should be alert to the strategic fabrication of more such crises by this administration. As Evan McMullin has warned, the president will likely endeavor to create a threat as broad, pervasive, nebulous, and yet urgent as possible. And unlike the reformers of the mid-twentieth century, Trumps goal will be to thwart constitutional protections rather than to sustain them.

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Trump's Fictional Crises and the Real Threats to American Democracy - New Republic