Hello newbie12, FDR, LBJ and Nixon are only 'naked' in hindsight. They tried very hard to appear to be as respectable as possible and to hide their power grabs as good as they could. The only person from that era that I could accuse of doing this openly was McCarthy, and ended up censured by the senate. Something has definitely changed.

Nothing happened openly in that era. It couldn't; there was no "open" in any sense we'd recognize here today on HN. You, as a normal citizen, might here about the highlights of political actions a couple of days later, you certainly couldn't hear about the details, and you lacked any effective method of connecting with hundreds or thousands of other people in any reasonable period of time to do anything about it if you did. And media was hardly unbiased, with documented instances of wars all but created from whole cloth by media personalities.

All that has happened is that it turns out that merely shining a bit of light on these practices didn't make them go away. The constraint now is people's bandwidth rather than raw ability to get them information, but that didn't turn out to be so much larger than the info conduit was in the first place.

Even if you are inclined to call what Bush did a "coup" (which I am not, but I'll take it for a moment), consider the implications of the fact that not only did the word "coup" already exist, it is in fact centuries old, and still far newer than the phenomena is describes.

I would say the change dates to Woodrow Wilson, Herbert Hoover, Theodore Roosevelt, and Franklin D. Roosevelt. Each of these men did not care about the limits of Presidential power. Both Roosevelt's thought the Constitution was just a guideline.

If you think GWB abused power, then the things FDR did would shock you. Other than trying to pack the Supreme Court, he violated the rights of many of his "enemies" in various ways only a government can get away with.

If the courts had ruled another way when these people were in power, the USA could be a much better place. Heck, Nixon had price controls (voted to him by a Democratic Congress). GWB is vilified far more than he deserves compared to other Presidents.

Thank you, off to do a lot of reading.

Taren, in her remarks at the service, said that Aaron believed that "the way to change something is to first understand it." Lessig also noted that Aaron had probably read more books than anyone in the room.

They didn't have the internet.

"The Powerbroker" by Robert Caro is an excellent book on Robert Moses, who held an enormous amount of power in NYC for decades.