Appendix A

How Legitimacy Travels: A Contemporary Illustration

This appendix offers a contemporary illustration of how legitimacy transfer operates over time. It is not an evaluation of presidents as individuals, nor a ranking of moral success or failure. Its purpose is narrower: to make visible how different forms of legitimacy expand, contract, and travel under pressure—even within systems explicitly designed to constrain them.

The United States presidency is a useful case for this purpose not because it is universal, but because it is deliberately constructed to limit legitimacy transfer. Authority is time-bound, procedurally conferred, and subject to renewal. When legitimacy nevertheless outpaces accountability in such a system, the mechanisms at work become easier to see.

What follows traces how legitimacy traveled across recent presidencies—not by intent, but by inheritance.

The Design Assumption

The U.S. presidency is primarily a form of procedural legitimacy. Authority is granted through election, constrained by law, contested through courts and legislatures, and renewed at fixed intervals. In principle, legitimacy belongs to the process, not the person.

At scale, however, every office accumulates office-based legitimacy. Powers exercised successfully tend to persist. Precedents harden into permission. What one officeholder is allowed to do becomes what successors are expected to manage.

The danger is not that authority persists—that is necessary for continuity—but that it persists without renewed accountability or constraint.

Crisis and the Expansion of Office-Based Legitimacy

The presidency of George W. Bush illustrates how emergency conditions accelerate legitimacy transfer.

Following the attacks of September 11, 2001, authority shifted rapidly from procedural constraint toward office-based legitimacy. Surveillance powers increased, executive discretion widened, and emergency justification became a durable rationale. Many actions were framed as temporary, but several became precedents embedded in the office itself.

The key dynamic here is not intent, but inheritance. Authority exercised under crisis conditions proved difficult to retract once normalized. Accountability remained attached to the moment of decision; legitimacy traveled forward through the office.

This illustrates how harm tolerated under necessity can become harm normalized through precedent.

Restraint Without Structural Retraction

The presidency of Barack Obama exemplifies procedural legitimacy combined with example-based restraint.

Norms were emphasized. Deliberation was foregrounded. Authority was exercised carefully and often reluctantly. Yet many expanded powers inherited from prior administrations were left intact rather than dismantled. The office remained structurally enlarged, even as its occupant modeled moral seriousness.

This reveals a central limitation of restraint at scale: example does not reliably constrain inheritance. Authority that is not actively bounded continues to travel, even when exercised with care.

Here, legitimacy did not become sacralized—but neither was it meaningfully reduced.

Personalization and Sacralization Risk

The presidency of Donald Trump demonstrates how legitimacy can shift away from procedure toward personalization.

Norms were treated as optional. Criticism was framed as disloyalty. Authority was increasingly justified as a personal mandate rather than a procedural role. Among supporters, legitimacy took on sacralized legitimacy characteristics—moral exemption, identity fusion, and resistance to contestation.

Importantly, this shift did not require the creation of new powers. It was amplified by permissions already embedded in the office. Authority that had accumulated over time proved easier to press when restraint was abandoned.

This illustrates how sacralized legitimacy does not require formal authoritarianism. It can emerge within existing institutions when office-based authority is personalized and insulated from challenge.

Procedural Restoration and Structural Inertia

The presidency of Joe Biden represents an explicit attempt to restore procedural legitimacy and institutional norms. Emphasis returned to lawful process, professional administration, and rhetorical restraint.

At the same time, the structural authority of the office remained largely unchanged. Executive powers continued to be exercised, precedents remained in force, and the accumulated legitimacy of the presidency was inherited rather than unwound.

This illustrates the asymmetry of legitimacy transfer: authority expands more easily than it contracts. Norms can be restored faster than structures can be redesigned.

What This Illustration Shows

Across these presidencies, a pattern becomes visible:

• Crisis accelerates legitimacy transfer

• Restraint does not automatically reverse inheritance

• Office-based authority accumulates even under good faith

• Sacralization becomes possible when contestability erodes

• Restoration of norms does not guarantee restoration of limits

No single presidency “breaks” the system. Instead, each leaves behind an office slightly easier to use, slightly harder to constrain, and more dependent on the character of its occupant.

This is not a story of individual failure. It is a story of authority traveling farther than accountability.

Why This Matters Beyond the Presidency

The presidency is not unique in this respect. It is merely visible.

The same pattern appears wherever authority:

• persists beyond proximity to consequence

• accumulates through precedent

• relies on restraint rather than enforceable limits

• is inherited without reauthorization

Organizations, movements, institutions, and families all face versions of this dynamic at different scales.

The lesson is not that authority must be distrusted, but that legitimacy must be deliberately bounded. Where authority travels without friction, harm no longer requires choice—it proceeds automatically.

Legitimacy failures are rarely caused by a single actor. They emerge when authority is asserted, affirmed, and inherited without renewed judgment.