This is the Kato Daily Podcast for Thursday, October 14, 2021.

I'm Caleb Brown.

The President's Power of the Pen has increased in recent years, along with growing partisanship,

and that increase in presidential power to

reshape American life also appears to move in concert with the growing unpopularity of

the president in general.

Gene Healy's new essay in Cato Policy Report is entitled

Political Sectarianism and the Presidential Cult. We spoke this week.

How has the cult of the presidency driven political polarization?

Well, it might have been because I spent a lot of our lockdown period in a basement office in a DC row house during a period through

the George Floyd protests and the January 6th capital riot when it seemed like the city was going to go up in flames, but it seemed to me that the signs that political hatred and mass polarization was on the rise were kind of hard to miss.

And this had become a also a big theme of Biden's inaugural address and his comments leading up to the inaugural.

He talked about this uncivil war that pits red against blue.

His inaugural address promised unity, used the word

unity something like 11 or 12 times. Unity is the path forward. But even in less turbulent times this has been a pretty familiar tune from Presidents, right?

George H.W. Bush is going to give us a kinder gentler nation.

His son talked about how he was a uniter, not a divider. Barack Obama was not just going to stop the oceans rise, he was going to Kumbayas all into one America

that was a post-partisan beyond red and blue.

So it's something we're used to hearing, but even though Donald Trump was an exception, like a pretty stark exception to these promises of the presidency acting as a unifier, it wasn't just

Trump's horrible Twitter etiquette and rageaholic erratic personality that has made the presidency

itself one of the biggest fault lines of polarization in America. What's done that is that the president increasingly

has the power to reshape vast areas of American life and law. The president can decide whether we have a trade war

...