Why does Zohran Mamdani Sound So Presidential?
The Founders feared a king. We elected thousands of them.
When Zohran Mamdani took the stage on election night to celebrate his victory in New York City’s mayoral race, he invoked the familiar pantheon of political leadership.
“It always seems impossible until it is done,” he said, quoting Nelson Mandela.
He mentioned Franklin Roosevelt, nodded toward Reagan’s “shining city on a hill,” and framed his campaign as a moral renewal of democracy. It was an accomplished speech. Yet its structure revealed a deeper pattern in American political life: nearly every public appeal, whether in New York or Washington, is built around the image of the executive hero.
In the United States, the idea of leadership has become inseparable from executive power. Even when politicians invoke “the people,” they do so through the first-person singular — I will fight, I will fix, I will heal. The assumption is that change arrives through one person’s capacity to act.
This reflex now extends through every level of government. Presidents, governors, and mayors are expected to “get things done,” while legislatures are seen as procedural or obstructive. The verbs diverge: executives lead; legislatures deliberate. One connotes motion, the other inertia.
The Inversion of Constitutional Design
This cultural habit reverses the original hierarchy of American government.
The Constitution names Congress first for a reason. The legislative branch was designed to define the nation’s priorities, allocate its resources, and hold the executive to account. The president’s role — and by analogy, every executive’s role — was not to originate policy but to carry it out.
In theory, the executive governs at the direction of the legislature.
In practice, the relationship has flipped.
Presidents propose budgets and legislative packages. Governors announce “plans.” Mayors campaign on “visions.” Elected executives now set agendas that legislatures ratify or resist. The line of authority that once ran from the many to the one has become a feedback loop orbiting the individual at the top.
The Founders’ Ambivalence
The founders were not naïve about this danger. Their correspondence shows both admiration for and anxiety about George Washington. He embodied republican virtue yet stood close enough to monarchy to make his peers uneasy. Washington himself recognized the risk. He refused the title “Your Excellency,” served only two terms, and deferred to Congress in most public matters.
His restraint reflected the constitutional expectation: the executive was to be an instrument, not an author. The legislature would express the public will through law; the executive would execute it faithfully.
That hierarchy was not moral but mechanical. Power would flow from representation to administration, not the reverse. The entire design depended on keeping those functions distinct.
The Expansion of Executive Identity
The steady enlargement of executive power across the twentieth century had several proximate causes — but behind them all was a deeper, quieter one: the disappearance of public-facing legislative leadership.
Legislatures did not simply lose power; they lost presence.
Without visible national figures capable of articulating the institution’s collective will, the executive became the only branch that could perform leadership in public. Once that void existed, every other factor exploited it.
Two forces accelerated the trend:
Crisis centralization.
War, depression, and industrialization demanded rapid coordination. Legislatures, designed for deliberation, turned inward — focusing on negotiation rather than narration. The absence of a clear legislative voice left the public looking to presidents and governors for coherence during emergencies.Mass communication.
Radio and television required singular faces and simple stories. Executives could provide both. Legislative institutions, diffuse by design, could not. As they receded from public view, the presidency expanded to fill the representational vacuum.
The causal order matters.
It was not that executives seized the spotlight; it was that legislatures abandoned it.
Congress, state houses, and city councils remained powerful on paper but increasingly invisible in practice — forums of process rather than platforms of purpose.
The more legislators spoke only to one another, the more executives came to speak for everyone.
The Effects of Executive-Centric Politics
The dominance of executive identity reshapes how power operates.
Legislative atrophy. Lawmaking becomes reactive, defined by endorsement or opposition to an executive agenda rather than independent initiative.
Public expectation. Voters judge government by the performance of one individual rather than by the quality of deliberation among many.
Media distortion. Coverage centers on executive personalities, treating institutional processes as background noise.
Accountability drift. Responsibility for outcomes moves upward, even when legal authority does not.
Each symptom traces back to the same origin: a legislature that no longer performs representation in public. When the branch meant to embody the people retreats behind procedure, the executive naturally becomes the interpreter of national will.
Reconsidering the Executive’s Role
If constitutional sequence still matters, the executive is not a coequal partner in governance but an agent of it. Executives are meant to implement decisions reached elsewhere — to make laws function, not to make them up.
In that sense, executive office should be administrative apprenticeship, not personal dominion. It is the branch where law meets logistics, where ideals are translated into budget lines. Its value lies in execution, not inspiration.
Re-establishing that understanding would not require diminishing executive competence; it would require restoring legislative confidence — and, crucially, a legislative voice capable of speaking to the nation in its own name.
The Structural Vacuum
The absence of that voice is now self-reinforcing. Legislatures rarely compete for attention because the executive dominates the narrative space. The executive dominates the narrative space because legislatures rarely compete for attention. The result is a republic in which the public face of government is always singular, even though its authority is supposed to be plural.
Without visible legislative leadership — without figures who speak for the deliberative branch as the President speaks for the administrative one — the equilibrium of power can only tilt one way.
Conclusion
The founders’ design was imperfect, and their motives often contradictory. Yet they understood that collective judgment, however slow, was the safeguard against concentrated will.
The long expansion of executive power reflects not just ambition from above but withdrawal from below — a legislature that turned inward and left the public stage empty.
Executives did not steal that stage; they inherited it.
And until the legislative branch rediscovers how to speak to the nation as its own institution, the vocabulary of American democracy will remain executive in every tense.