In my post, The Messy Nature of America’s Democratic Structures, steve222 asked a very reasonable question that I thought deserved a post as an answer.
I have agreed with you before that our system is seriously flawed, but then it has been flawed for a long time. Why has it deteriorated so much over the last 10-30 years? I dont think we had big changes in our system but rather the electorate. Ask yourself this question. If we had a better system now, would the governance be a lot better? Color me doubtful. The fact that we even have people like Paxton running suggests to me that voters are broken.
Now ask it the other way. What if the voters weren’t broken? In that case, if voters actually made attempts to be informed, if they weren’t so tribal, if they were unwilling to elect obviously corrupt or inept candidates, I think our system would matter a lot less.
This is a reasonable and common response to a lot of us who are arguing for reform. I get the notion that the problem is just bad voters and bad candidates, and if we could just get back to some semblance of normal, things would revert to some sort of status quo ante.
Let me state from the top that I don’t think that the voters are necessarily any worse now, in the aggregate, than they have ever been. I sit typing this in a state that elected George Wallace a number of times. Strom Thurmond was in the Senate forever. The nation put Richard Nixon into the White House in a landslide. Those are just prominent examples off the top of my head. I have little doubt that it would not be hard to find candidates in the past just as awful as Ken Paxton. It seems worth noting that part of the reason that we amended the Constitution to elect Senators was rampant corruption.
I hate to just point to Wikipedia, but: List of American federal politicians convicted of crimes.
Further, back when the system was “working,” we had things like Vietnam, Watergate, and stagflation (to name three big successes from my childhood). Throw in some other big-ticket awesomeness from when things worked would include Iran-Contra, the Iraq War, the “management” of Katrina, and the global financial crisis/Great Recession.
(If one wants to go big picture, there was slavery, the slaughter of indigenous people during western expansion, the Civil War, and Jim Crow.)
I note all of that because it is always easy to remember the past as better than it was because, well, it’s the past and we don’t have to deal with it any longer.
I mean, we did win WWII and we passed the New Deal, the Great Society, the Civil RIghts Act, and the Voting Rights Act! We won the Cold War and passed the ACA. So, not all blemishes.
Still, when we look back to how well things have worked, there is a lot needed for such an assessment.
I am a big fan of the quip that democracy is the worst form of government there is, except for all the others that have been tried. Finding a way to engage in collective governance is hard.
But still, was there less dysfunction in the past in Washington? I think that it is fair to say yes, there was.
So what happened?
First and foremost, we need to level-set this discussion. The United States of America did not become a full liberal democracy until 1965 with the Voting Rights Act. So, when we assess how well things worked in the past, we need to keep that in mind. That was a mere 61 years ago.
A key element, as James alluded to in his response to the question, that has happened in the period of time between 1965 and 2026 (and especially in the last 30 years) that helps explain why things have further degenerated is the resorting of the parties. For various reasons, many of which were linked to the US Civil War, the South was solidly Democratic. This alone meant that the Democratic Party in Congress had a built-in conservative wing. Further, with the advent of the New Deal’s popularity, this created a situation in which Democrats had a nearly unbroken chain of majorities in the House, often quite large, and frequent control of the Senate. (Just scroll back through these numbers to get a sense of how things have changed.)
This alone made governing one hell of a lot easier than it has been.
The one-party South started a slow erosion in the 1960s, which picked up some steam in the 1980s, and the dam broke at the Congressional level in 1994. It took another ten to twenty years for that to filter down to state governments.
I have written several posts about this. Here are two that provide the basic data and history:
In basic terms: the party system has thoroughly reorganized itself into the exact configuration guaranteed to expose and amplify every single pathology in our institutional structures.
Let’s throw in a few other factors.
- In 1972, we shifted to using primaries as the main mechanism to nominate presidential candidates. This was yet another weakening of American political parties and the further personalization of presidential politics, an already inherently personalistic mechanism.
- The polarized and sorted nature of the parties has increased the odds of government shutdowns as political tools.
- The polarized and sorted nature of the parties has increased the value of the filibuster as a political tool.
- The media environment has become fragmented and partisan.
- There is very little control over campaign spending.
- The end of the Cold War took away a central political goal around which the overwhelming majority of Americans had basic agreement.
I feel like I am missing something obvious, but this is a pretty good overview for sitting on the porch with my coffee this morning.
If I had to pick the three most important: the geographical sorting of the parties, the change in the media environment, and the end of the Cold War.
There is a lot more that could be said about presidentialism’s effects (I said some of it in my recent Liberal Currents essay).
The structural ingredients needed to get us where we are have been in place for a long time. Keep in mind we have a system that was designed without understanding political parties and now has a rigid, polarized two-party system that makes politics into a constant zero-sum game, with an electoral system that shuts most of us out from seriously competitive elections. We also have a system (presidentialism) that holds within it a major flaw that can be exploited by an authoritarian-oriented president. Since the president controls all the mechanisms of law enforcement, where is the institutional capacity to rein him in?
So, to my overall list, I would simply note two key design flaws:
- A system designed without regard to the existence of political parties.
- Presidentialism (i.e., separation of powers).*
These are simple time bombs in the Constitution that have finally blown up in our faces (not that political science hasn’t been concerned about all of this for some time).
In regard to better voters, I would note that we have managed to keep an utter demagogue out of office for most of our existence, but we have been playing institutional chicken for quite some time. But if you take the initial design, plus the way things have evolved since 1965, getting to where we are is not that big of a surprise, especially when you throw into the electoral mix a massive global pandemic and the economic effects that roiled our politics heading into the 2024 election. Regardless of any other factors, that election was going to be an anti-incumbent one. The bad news for the world was that the Republicans bowed to the incentives the system produced (i.e., Trump’s influence with the base and his ability to crowd out challengers given his status as a former president), and they retained Trump as their nominee.**
Let me conclude with a return to a component of steve222’s question:
Ask yourself this question. If we had a better system now, would the governance be a lot better?
I ask myself this all the time, and while I must acknowledge that counterfactuals are impossible to prove, I still think that the answer is “yes.”
Some simple examples:
- A system with stronger parties, in terms of control of nominations, would not have produced Trump in 2016.
- A system that allowed for the popular vote winner to become president would not have produced Trump in 2016.***
- If we had a system that provided voters with more than two choices, it would be easier to contain extremes. MAGA should not be able to control one of the two major parties, and yet it does.
- A system that produced truly competitive elections, with proportional outcomes in the House, would produce a more engaged electorate and increase the odds of more serious legislating.
- A system that better represented state populations in the Senate would produce more democratic outcomes.
I could go on and on and on (and on and on).
Some of this (like the GOP elite consensus in 2016) is just a matter of looking at the past and thinking about how different rules would have structured outcomes differently.
A lot of this is demonstrable via comparative study of other institutional structures globally.
Rules matter. Any sports fan knows this. It matters that it takes but one foot inbounds for a completed pass in college football, but it requires two in the NFL. The fact that PI is a spot foul in the NFL is a huge deviation from the college rule, etc.
*Brazil has been doing a good job of showing the flaws of presidentialism of late, and France (a semi-presidential system) may well be about to have an election that will likewise demonstrate the problems of reducing national angst down to a choice between extremes.
**A lot more could be said about that, of course.
***And without Trump in 2016, you never get him in 2024. Further, even if the nomination system had produced him in 2016 and the popular vote was the deciding factor, the GOP would have turned away from MAGA as a bunch of losers instead of embracing it. Rules. Matter.
