One of the more surprising elements in Bruno Leipold’s book Citizen Marx is just how fierce a critic Karl Marx was of what political scientists call presidential systems.

In presidential systems, the executive is invested with power that does not derive from the legislature, as in a parliamentary system. Instead, the executive is invested with power derived from elsewhere, most commonly election by the people themselves. Such systems tend to lionize the executive as a creature above and beyond the normal shabbiness of politics.

That kind of elevation of the executive in a presidential system is something that Alexander Hamilton, that old fox, was wise to, and why he advocated so forcefully for it.