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W. E. B. DU BOIS ON BLOWING UP THE WHITE HOUSE’S EAST WING  
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Corey Robin
October 26, 2025
Jacobin [[link removed]]

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_ The vision of W. E. B. Du Bois was one of congressional democracy,
critical of presidential regimes that concentrate power in the hands
of one individual, one who can, say, impose his vision of a White
House ballroom in the sky upon all of us. _

Author, sociologist, historian, and civil rights activist W. E. B. Du
Bois poses for a portrait at home in Brooklyn, New York. (David Attie
/ Getty Images), David Attie / Getty Image

 

 

One of the elements of W. E. B. Du Bois’s argument in _Black
Reconstruction in America_ that surprised me most the last time that I
taught it (or maybe the time before that), was just how much attention
he pays to the Radical Republican vision of congressional power and
congressional government over and against a Constitution based on
presidential power and presidential government.

 

 
Du Bois even suggests that had the Radicals won, we might have had a
system more like the parliamentary democracies of Europe, or at least
of Britain, where the chief executive is simply the leader of the
party in parliament, and not an office completely apart from that
party and that parliament. For Du Bois, that vision of parliamentary
government, as opposed to presidential government, was very much tied
to the Radicals’ vision of racial equality and small
property–owning democracy — even, at the edges, of workers’
democracy.

I bring this up as I read about Trump’s plans
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denying such plans) to demolish entirely the East Wing of the White
House, which are grotesque in every way you can imagine, for the sake
of building the biggest ballroom ever. Incidentally, that desire, and
its frustration, is a recurrent grievance in Trump’s many complaints
in one of his many campaign books prior to 2016, about how he
repeatedly called the White House to offer to pay for a big new
ballroom there and how Obama, snoot that he was, never would take his
call.

Against Trump’s plan, the Democrats are insisting that the White
House is the “people’s house.” That, too, is an old trope in
American politics, but it’s flawed. It’s premised on a populist
idea of the presidency, where the president is the only official in
government who can speak to and for the whole people. Hamilton, as
always one step ahead of everyone else, saw the possibilities
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if you could make the president speak for the whole, to represent the
unity of the people, Congress would be delegitimized, or at least
lowered in the people’s esteem. Thus lowered, Congress would never
be able to truly counter the president.

Against that vision, we have that of Du Bois and the Radicals of
Reconstruction: a vision of congressional democracy. This was a vision
shared by Marx, who also was critical of presidential regimes; the
power of the executive and the weakness of the legislature was one of
his major criticisms
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of the constitution of France’s Second Republic, which he made even
before Louis Bonaparte established his dictatorship. It is a vision of
a world that does not hinge upon what happens every four years in one
election, of a world where one individual can’t impose his vision of
a ballroom in the sky upon all of us, of a world in which our actions
and those of our representatives, on a day-to-day, more proximate (in
time and space) basis, matter most.

That, it seems to me, is what we should be working toward in the long
term.

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Corey Robin is the author of _The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from
Edmund Burke to Donald Trump_
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and a contributing editor at _Jacobin_.

* W. E. B. Du Bois
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