Here’s a question Americans could benefit from asking…
What’s the difference between a king, CEO, and president?
As Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayer recently noted, it’s not clear that most Americans understand how the rule of law works or what a president can / can’t do within the constitution.
While there are technical answers to this question, I think it’s worth really focusing on the practical differences and, especially, how confusing the work of a president vs. king vs. CEO is dangerous for our nation.
Kings – this is pretty simple, kings originally were appointed by divine right aka the church, or sometimes just the person themselves, said “god selected me to rule.” Basically, they ruled everything… they were treated as both symbolic and visionary as well as functional, but they made all the decisions with little to no input from regular people actually doing the hard work of farming, ranching, manufacturing, trade, etc.
There are still some kings, like in England, but they’re more symbolic and no longer make the day-to-day decisions. We also can’t avoid the reality that many kings were consistently not mentally/emotionally well, they might make a decision simply based on their mood on a given day, with no real reason for it, and then the next day just change it. That’s a big reason many kingdoms were chaotic, violent places, with constant power struggles, murders, and assassinations.
CEOs – on the most basic level, private and public company CEOs take on the symbolic parts of being a king, with extra financial responsibility. They focus on vision, public speaking, and convincing people the company is valuable and on the right track. Sometimes they’re also the operational head, focused on the day-to-day, and in this case they would be named president and CEO.
Reputation and public perception matters a lot to companies, because if your product is bad or it’s widely discussed how your workplace is awful, that can harm your financial results.
But CEOs are appointed by a board of directors, and in a system where short term extreme profits aka maximum shareholder value dominates, even if someone’s doing a lot of harm, they basically often get treated like kings, which is why you see some of the same chaos and power struggles of a kingdom.
There is so much more I could say about that, but the important thing to remember is that even if you work for or are subject to a “nice” or "benevolent" king or CEO, that could change at literally any time. It’s also why I believe we need more worker owned businesses, cooperatives, etc. but that’s a topic for another time.
Presidents – here, I am talking about an elected leader in a democracy or democratic republic. One of the reasons I sat down to think about this topic is that a lot of ultra wealthy people, the billionaires and multi-millionaires, want us to think the role of the president as closer to a CEO or king. In fact, they spend hundreds of millions of dollars to convince us of this every year through lobbying, campaign donations, and policy analysis using loaded phrases like “free enterprise” and “free market” as well as more common phrases like “entrepreneurship” and “innovation.”
In the US, presidents serve both in symbolic and operational roles. They’re the head of state and they’re also the chief executive. But they are elected by and accountable to the people, if and when we choose to vote. While it varies by state, it’s pretty similar for mayors and governors.
But that’s not all. Our founders, who framed the constitution and wrote the declaration of independence, were very specific about separating powers and very clear about the role of the president. They were imperfect people and in some cases cruel, like Jefferson who enslaved over 600 people in his lifetime, including locking up a mistress who he sexually assaulted repeatedly. Yet, they had dealt with kings for a long time and when they said things like “no taxation without representation” they meant it.
And that’s where the three branches of government come from. Congress makes legislation and laws, the president executes them and acts as head of state, and the courts interpret laws and protect the basic freedoms of all Americans.
Some kings and CEOs try to be clever and create versions of these, like Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta/Facebook Oversight Board, but ultimately, there’s no accountability, and as we’ve seen, they can just change their mind, crush free speech and dissent, and violate the basic human rights of their workers or “subjects” for any reason, whether it’s to make more money or just because of their personal opinion.
If that doesn’t sound very good or fair to the rest of us, that’s accurate.
A president in a democracy or democratic republic is very different from a king or CEO, and if we appreciate and want to keep those differences, we’re going to have to really work for it consistently because, as we’ve seen this year, there are some very rich people who are already turning the government into their personal cash cow.