On February 10, 2026, Stanford political scientist Terry Moe joined us at BESI to present the argument of his recent book, Trajectory of Power: The Rise of the Strongman Presidency, coauthored with William Howell. The book focuses on a question of profound importance for understanding America’s ongoing crisis of democracy. How can it be that in a nation with such a long tradition of democratic self-governance, presidential power has expanded to the point that it presents a dire threat to democracy itself?
In this talk, Moe shows that presidents of both parties approached power in roughly the same ways throughout most of the nation’s history and largely stayed within democratic guardrails. However, starting about 50 years ago, this equilibrium increasingly gave way to a dangerous asymmetry. The asymmetry was (and is) driven by the Republican Party’s heightened backlash against the progressive administrative state, along with new social forces that propelled its growing populism and extremism. All of this, Moe argues, motivated Republicans to seek a presidency of extraordinary power and, ultimately, a strongman presidency that governs unilaterally in defiance of democracy and the rule of law.
