That's a pretty scary idea, but there's an inevitability about it. The country is reduced to being a war machine with a symbolic god king at the head. It makes sense when the Republicans own the gun toting religious vote.

You point out that two models of the presidency are at odds, one whose founding father was George Washington, the other whose founding father was Richard Nixon. But I wonder if ever the Nixon point of view has been accepted as a model by anybody?

Bipin,
Nixon's model was the constitution is a defective instrument that can be remedied by unlimited executive power.This has been accepted by Bush and Cheny who have acted on it.It is also accepted by Rudolph Giuliani, one of the top tier Republican Presidential candidates.

Given the 'success' of both the Nixon and Bush Jnr presidencies, its not too hard to imagine the next US election determining the future of democracy in america. If the US public are convinced by the Spectacle of an imperial presidency, or, more likely ambivalent towards it, debacles like Iraq and Katrina will inevitably be repeated. Even Giuliani, who may be more pro-active than Bush (who seems to believe leadership itself is a Spectacle) will be susceptible to a Republican party enamored by its own mythology.

The decay of institutional checks and balances already in decline will further erode public participation and confidence in the political process. The hope being fostered by growing networks of public political blogs etc will be increasingly marginalized from a political class of individuals wealthy enough to buy themselves into the realms of power.

The new political class will have been too long divorced from analysis, debate, review and cooperation and will be too subservient to vested interests to make any return to the ideals inherent in the US Constitution possible only by an act of revolution.

In this article at Daily Kos it is argued that:

The modern political era [in the US] has been characterized by a virtual Republican lock on the White House and a Democratic lock on Congress. So it only makes sense that Republicans would want to make an all-out assault on whatever powers the Congress had, vis-a-vis the executive branch. We've all known that this was Dick Cheney's primary objective all along, but it's not just to avenge Watergate. It also makes sense because it tilts the balance toward the one branch they always have a reliable shot at winning, and means they can control the government by winning just one election, whereas -- if we lose the big one -- our only shot at controlling government is winning 357 elections. Any less and it's a stalemate at best, or else a series of capitulations that spell victory for the White House, and it can last as long as any Republican president wants.

Suprisingly, the Democrats have not gone all outin aggressively defending the prerogatives of the legislative branch, since that's where their power appears to lie over the long term.