David Rudenstine, Benjamin Cardozo law professor, wrote in 2013:
* If it is controlled too tightly the democratic state may succumb to the threat and thus disappear. The challenge is to thread the eye of this narrow needle to ensure that the democratic state survives the crisis without sacrificing its democracy.
Rossiter argues that the demands of dictatorship find its “rationale” in three basic facts. One, the complex system of an ordinary democratic government is “essentially designed to function under normal, peaceful conditions, and is often unequal to the exigencies of a great national crisis.”36 Two, during a national crisis, which Rossiter defines as during a time of war, rebellion or economic depression, the government will become stronger to overcome the peril and the people will have fewer rights.37 Three, the empowered crisis government, “which in some instances might become an outright dictatorship,”38 must have “no other purposes than the preservation of the independence of the state,
the maintenance of the existing constitutional order, and the defense of the political and social liberties of the people.”39 Rossiter states without reservation or hesitancy that the dictatorial regime may “act arbitrarily and even dictatorially in the swift adoption of measures designed to save the state and its people from the destructive effects of the particular crisis.”* Rossiter thought that the emergence of the Atomic Age meant that going forward the United States must always remain a powerful military power, that there would be no significant difference between a time of peace and a time of war, and that the defense and survival of the United States required a presidency that possessed power greater in scope and character than the power possessed by prior presidents.
