Obama's supporters,  and to a less uniform extent the media — granted him a pass on this, evoking the bewitchment, pragmatic and moral stumbling that Raymond Aron described as "the opium of intellectuals" — progressive ideologies.

Instead of the current elective monarchy headed by a perversely idolised President, Buckley prefers the Westminster model of government in which the prestige of the head of state is separated from the heft of the head of government: "Freedom is more secure when the person with power is a jug-eared prince." Indeed, it is difficult for a prime minister to preserve his charismatic aura whilst fighting backbenchers from the pit of the Commons or on the hustings. In America, conversely, "the imperial style wears better. Presidents do not appear before Congress to face the brickbats thrown at prime ministers in Parliament. Instead, they appear once a year to deliver the quasi-regal State of the Union address." Quite unlike parliamentary prime ministers, American presidents are usually state governors, unruly senators, and outsiders who run their campaigns as self-appointed "mavericks" bent on "cleaning up Washington". They arrive in office as elected redeemers, nothing like prime ministers who are leaders of the pack, having already completed a fair amount of horse-trading in exchange for the energetic support of their party.

One wonders whether going through the weekly ordeal of Prime Minister's Questions, though, waters down executive power, or whether it is mostly a theatrical exercise. Stephen Harper's Conservative government in Canada prompts the cynical view. As Buckley notes, the Prime Minister's Office is the real site of political action, cabinet meetings nowadays briefings on party lines rather than negotiations. More telling, though, is the Harper government's informal modus operandi evidenced through recent controversies. It seemingly attempted to circumvent the law by allotting three places on the Supreme Court bench to Québécois in order to appoint a Conservative Party-friendly judge. It then leaked a nasty allegation that the Chief Justice broke constitutional protocol when her office called the prime minister's suggesting his proposed candidates might be constitutionally invalid. Finally, a Harper henchman secretly offered to pay off a senator's disputed expenses before they reached the light of day.

There has been, over the last year, a steady murmuring among the American conservative chattering classes that Obama ought to be impeached. The reasons given range from abandoning US allies abroad to the alleged backdoor passage of the Obamacare and DREAM Acts. And Buckley is all for impeachment, echoing Monroe's sentiment that impeachment is "the main spring of the great machine of government . . . If preserved in full vigor and exercised with perfect integrity, every branch will perform its duty." Tongue only partly in cheek, Buckley proposes that Congress should "impeach and remove presidents often: when their policies fail, when they are touched with scandal, or for no reason, just for the spirit of the thing." Buckley's critique falls in a class above such calls, focusing as he does on broader institutional developments.