A POST-MODERN FEAST DAY FOR FLAWED SAINTS, BUT WITH NO GOOD EATS.

That's "Presidents' Day," the attempt to be inclusive rather than take two separate days off for Washington and Lincoln, unless you're in Illinois, where the public officials got a four day weekend this year as the state still observes Lincoln's Birthday on the 12th.  Reason's Billy Binion correctly describes the holiday.

Presidents aren't saints. They aren't monarchs. They aren't celebrities. And they aren't your friends! The executive leader is an employee of the country—someone whose job was, and still should be, limited in size and scope.

It has become something decidedly different over the years, with each president becoming more powerful than the next. That maybe explains, to some degree, why the political fangirling has grown in tandem.

Not to mention, the presidency becoming destructive to a state of good repair in the country, with each Chief Executive being put in office to sign executive orders that impose the preferences of one faction on members of the other faction, and then to sign continuing resolutions that continue business as pretty much usual.

Democrats, according to [Chicago Law's Eric] Posner, benefit more from a heightened executive role than do Republicans, particularly on issues like climate and immigration. But that comes with a huge caveat: "True, when Mr. Trump took power, he reversed some of Mr. Obama's unilateral actions, causing damage to the environment, the immigration system, health insurance and financial regulation," Posner concedes. "He also used his unilateral powers to unleash a destructive trade war."

Put more plainly, those in Posner's camp are "in for a rude surprise when the other team wins, notes Reason's Jacob Sullum. For now, however, the tug of war continues: Biden kicked off his tenure with a series of executive orders, many of which just undid Trump's free-flow of directives.

That cognitive dissonance isn't going away anytime soon, and it will take quite some time before we see the air let out of the presidency. Maybe we never will.

On the other hand, Donald Trump's detractors have it about half right. Take frustrated technocrat Tom Nichols.

The Republicans have repeatedly betrayed both Lincoln and the Union. The party whose first president died as a martyr at the hands of an insurrectionist is now controlled by empty, hollow people who rolled their eyes and lazed their way through the trial of a president who was manifestly guilty of inciting an insurrection.

If nothing else, perhaps this disgusting dishonoring of the memory of our 16th president should persuade the rest of us to bring back the actual Feb. 12 and Feb. 22 birthdays of Presidents Lincoln and Washington as national holidays, so that we do not confuse their heroism and nobility with the cult of personality practiced by modern Republicans.

Nobility? The last five occupants of the Oval Office have been a cuckold, a legacy, a fake messiah, a reality show host, and a coot. And yet, each has his adoring fans.

And Abraham Lincoln saw the tragedy coming.

While the 1830s mobs “hang gamblers, or burn murders,” he cautioned, tomorrow’s mobs would hang and burn the innocent — “and thus it goes on, step by step, till all the walls erected for the defense of the persons and property of individuals, are trodden down, and disregarded.”

While after January 2021’s Capitol riot we’ve all seen the ruthless efficiency with which our government is capable of cracking down on lawlessness, we too saw the summer before, when months of attacks on federal officers, politicians, police, private homes, courthouses, and innocent bystanders met calculated indifference and shrugged excuses for “historic racial injustices.”

This too, was well familiar to Lincoln, who knew the mob will go further and spread deeper, warning, “by instances of the perpetrators of such acts going unpunished, the lawless in spirit, are encouraged to become lawless in practice; and having been used to no restraint, but dread of punishment, they thus become, absolutely unrestrained.”

“On the other hand,” he predicted, “good men, men who love tranquility, who desire to abide by the laws, and enjoy their benefits, who would gladly spill their blood in the defense of their country; seeing their property destroyed; their families insulted, and their lives endangered; their persons injured; and seeing nothing in prospect that forebodes a change for the better; become tired of, and disgusted with, a Government that offers them no protection; and are not much averse to a change in which they imagine they have nothing to lose.”

Combined, he warned, these seemingly opposing feelings come to one terrible conclusion: “the strongest bulwark of any Government, and particularly of those constituted like ours, may effectually be broken down and destroyed — I mean the attachment of the People.”

There's nothing like annoying and frequently ineffective executive orders, whether signed by the coot, or by the various dictatorial (and that's only the beginning of a list of their shortcomings) governors, that will make people tired of, and disgusted with, "government" that offers them no protection.  We could start, as Mr Nichols notes, by not worshipping "an abstract office."