Frank Buckley is a Foundation Professor at George Mason University’s Scalia School of Law. He is a frequent media guest and has appeared on Morning Joe, CNN, Rush Limbaugh, C-SPAN’s Washington Journal, Newsmax, Radio France, the CBC, NPR, and many others. He is a Senior Editor at The American Spectator, a columnist for the New York Post, and has written for the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, US News, National Review, the American Conservative, the New Criterion, Real Clear Politics, the National Post, the Telegraph, amongst many others. His most recent books are The Way Back: Restoring the...
Overview
F.H. Buckley is the author of The Once and Future King, a book that shatters just about every myth surrounding American government, the Constitution and the Founders.
Most Americans believe that this country uniquely protects liberty, that it does so because of its Constitution, and that for this our thanks must go to the Founders, at their Convention in Philadelphia in 1787.
Buckley’s book debunks all these myths. America isn’t the freest country around, according to think tanks that study these things. And it’s not the Constitution that made it free, since parliamentary regimes are generally freer than presidential ones. Finally, what we think of as the Constitution, with its separation of powers, was not what the Founders had in mind. What they expected was a country in which Congress would dominate the government and in which the president would play a much smaller role.
Sadly, that’s not the government we have today. What we have instead is what Buckley calls Crown government, the rule of an all-powerful president. The country began in a revolt against one King, and today we see the dawn of a new kind of monarchy. What we have is what one of the Founders, George Mason, called an “elective monarchy,” which he thought was worse than the real thing.
Much of this is irreversible. Constitutional amendments to redress the balance of power are extremely unlikely, and most Americans seem to have accepted and even welcomed Crown government. In this lecture, Buckley suggests that the way back lies through Congress, and a healthy skepticism by voters of the trappings of power that have come to surround the presidency.
