Early in my career, I wrote a paper on "constitutional theory and the faces of power." It borrowed from an older concept in political science to reflect on the less examined ways in which constitutions shape and limit political outcomes and constrain the exercise of power. That particular paper did not exactly light the scholarly world on fire, but it reflected a general theme of my work on constitutions.
Constitutional lawyers in particular tend to focus on the countermajoritarian checks -- the veto points -- built into our constitutional system. That is, after all, where constitutional law lives. But those veto points are what might be characterized as only the "first" and most explicit face of power in a political system. There are more subtle but still extremely important ways in which constitutions limit power, and we are getting a lesson in them now. President Donald Trump's latest social media post about Rosie O'Donnell is just the latest example of how he presses on those most subtle -- and ultimately more important -- constitutional constraints.
As political science was remaking itself into its more modern form in the postwar era, the great Yale democratic theorist Robert Dahl pushed scholars of politics to think more carefully about the concept of power. What was it, and how could one know when it was being exercised? Dahl posited a formulation that "A has power over B to the extent that he can get B to do something that B would not otherwise do." Dahl leveraged this idea to launch his long-running battle with a "ruling elite model" of American politics. (Dahl himself eventually came around to conceding some points to his antagonists in that debate.) He denounced a so-called "realistic" view of politics that knowingly asserted that an amorphous "'they' run things: the old families, the bankers, the City Hall machine, or the party boss behind the scene."
