This past week, politics in the United States have taken a turn for the surreal, where a simple, routine request to raise the ceiling on how much America is allowed to borrow could possibly be denied by intransigent, anti-government radicals masquerading as conservative Republicans. This comes on top of a refusal to fund the government – either through the regular budgeting process or via a temporary continuing resolution – that has resulted in a partial shutdown of the federal government.
With both sides refusing to back down, it would appear that our system, dreamed up by James Madison in the eighteenth century, could be headed for a legitimacy crisis the likes of which haven’t been seen in 150 years. Make no mistake – if one side or the other does not back down in time to secure the passage of a bill raising the debt limit ceiling, the situation might very well be disastrous for both the United States and the world. Overnight, the cornerstone of the world economy – the full faith and credit of the U.S. government – would come into question. What would happen afterward — well, it’s better not to think about it.
How we came to this impasse is a well-told story, but let’s review. After the country rejected the failed George W. Bush administration and the untold disasters unfettered Republican control of government unleashed, a radicalized Republican Party vowed to make President Obama a one-term President. This culminated in the Tea Party revolution of 2010 when many hardline right-wingers, via district gerrymandering, a media echo-chamber and a vast network of dark money groups, won control of the U.S. House – thus breaking the Democrats’ tenuous grip on America’s legislative branch.
Both parties to blame?
The chaos that has ensued since is obvious: no agreements on a long-term budget, austerity imposed by a mindless sequestration in the midst of the most prolonged economic downturn in postwar U.S. history and relentless attacks against the President’s signature domestic policy reform – the Affordable Care Act – that have no prospect for repealing or otherwise overturning its implementation. Even now, some members of the GOP caucus still believe that the tide of public and expert opinion still runs with them – which is why they have doubled down on the demands of their electoral base
Many, though not all, have thrown up their hands in frustration and blamed both sides for the problems we now collectively face. While this is easy to do, it is nonetheless a case of false equivalence that plays into the hands of the radicals attempting to bring the U.S. government to its knees. By making it seem like the Democrats have refused to negotiate or make concessions when in fact they have, purveyors of the ‘pox-on-both-their-houses’ mentality are merely enabling the radical right to make more and more outrageous demands using more and more illegitimate means.
In other words, such a view refuses to accept the fact that the GOP – the party of Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Eisenhower and even Ronald Reagan – has been transformed into something else, something that even long-term conservatives who disagree on points of principle with liberal Democrats are horrified by. The GOP, as many long-term observers including many former Republicans have pointed out, is in essence an “insurrectionist” party that does not just strive to counter the opposition politically, but views dissent from their point of view as treasonous, all while normal democratic politics – which take dissent, debate and compromise as an article of faith – as a capitulation to evil. They fundamentally do not see their opponents as having a legitimate right to participate in politics, let alone win elections and wield power therein.
A broken system
So, just to be clear, the current Republican Party is the primary antagonist in our current constitutional crisis cum Punch-and-Judy show. The crisis is of entirely their making, and they are ultimately responsible for all of the fallout if the worst should happen and the debt limit is – God forbid – breached. It is not, however, their fault. They are nihilistic fanatics and will do what nihilistic fanatics always do – tear down temples in order to honor sacred ideological cows. Rather, the fault lies with the voters who elected them and, ultimately, the constitutional system put in place by the Founding Fathers that allows an unaccountable, fanatical minority to wreak untold havoc from inside the very heart of the federal government.
Not every democracy on Earth functions this way, where tiny minorities can cause an entire governing system to freeze up and choke to death on its own inertia. For that, we have to blame our poorly designed Constitution, which may have been state-of-the-art in 1789 but has long-since passed its sell-by date. While often touted as an example of our Founding Fathers’ political genius, the document bequeathed by Jefferson, Madison, et al actually has numerous problems and at least one potentially fatal flaw.
The first, of course, is the degree to which it empowers small states over larger ones – the so-called Connecticut Compromise that provides for an upper house consisting of two Senators from each state, regardless of size of population. In an era when state identities meant something, ensuring representation of geographic expanses, not people, still made sense. Today, when it is combined with the Senate’s power to block appointments to the executive and the judiciary, it heavily skews legislative and judicial outcomes toward the interests of small-population states dominated by rural, conservative interests. What’s worse, given Senate rules like the filibuster, which effectively requires a supermajority to pass legislation, this bias is magnified and made much worse.
Second, while the House is ostensibly supposed to balance the Senate in our system of government, it is premised on representatives accurately reflecting the will of the majority of voters in the states they are from. In actuality, because House members are elected from much smaller districts than the state at large, the representative will in turn reflect the much narrower interests of his or her immediate community, not the entire state. Because we have districts whose populations elect a single member to the House of Representatives, this causes two devastating follow-on effects.
The first is that the borders of these districts matter immensely. Quite often parties can and do manipulate these lines on a map strategically in order to benefit their side. This can occur, obviously, because different voting blocs will be distributed across the state in different ways, and if one can pack supporters of the other party in as few districts as possible then one can create many districts where one is likely to win comfortably. Through such mapping legerdemain, politicians can effectively pick their own electorates and game the electoral system to their own advantage.
If gerrymandering, as the process is known, wasn’t bad enough, single-member districts also inevitably create a two-party system. Indeed, so well are single-member districts and the two-party system correlated there is a political theory describing it, known as Duverger’s Law, which comes as close to being an actual scientific law as this notoriously squishy field of inquiry gets. The result comes about for the simple reason that if only one candidate is elected to a representative body from a district, voters will not be stupid by casting a ballot in such a way that their least-preferred option wins. Instead, they will most often vote to ensure that some preferable – though usually not most preferred – candidate wins the seat.
Though occasionally people do dumbly vote for impossible-to-win candidates that are their first choice, this has the natural effect of taking away votes from a good-enough candidate that could actually beat the person the voter would very much like to see defeated. Thus, we get people voting for Ralph Nader in 2000, and while they may have preferred Al Gore to George W. Bush, they got Bush instead. People quickly learn from being burned like this, and soon a ‘lesser-of-two-evils’ mentality sets in on the voters, virtually destroying any chance third-party candidates have to win an election. It can happen, but like planetary alignments and celestial eclipses, they are extremely rare.
The will of the people
The net result is the creation of catch-all parties like the Democrats and what used to be the Republicans that only vaguely represent the interests of the people who vote for them. Like the firelit reflections dancing on Plato’s cave walls, the parties we have are only a glimmering, pale reflection of what the voters, taken as an aggregate, really want. Take all this together and it is obvious that both the House and the Senate have serious biases inherent in their constitutional and electoral design that make both bodies relatively unrepresentative of the nation as a whole.
Elected senators, for instance, may accurately reflect the popular will of the states they represent, but since the states have very unequal populations and only two senators get elected from each state, the body has a whole is greatly biased away from a popular, national majority. In turn, the House is not a reflection of a popular national majority either, but rather an amalgamation of narrowly defined constituencies created so as to maximize the chances of a sitting representative getting re-elected or of a particular party winning the majority of a state’s delegation to the House of Representatives.
Far from being the pure distillation of popular will, then, Congress is at best a misshapen, funhouse-mirror reflection of it. In fact, under the system set up by Madison and company in 1789, only two elected officials – the president and vice president – are elected by a nationally representative electorate. True, the Electoral College and the small-state bias within it do have some impact, but the winner of the White House nonetheless has a much bigger, much more representative majority backing his or her legitimacy and pretensions to national leadership than do either houses of Congress.
The Constitution’s fatal flaw
This, in turn, brings us to the final, truly fatal institutional flaw in the U.S. Constitution. While the presidency is the only elected office to benefit from the electoral backing of a clear majority of the national population, it is nonetheless a very weak office that must constantly kowtow to the prerogatives of the Congress in nearly everything it does, especially on domestic matters. This has several pernicious effects that all work to make democratic governance in the United States far more inefficient and problematic than in other democratic countries.
First, it creates partisan gridlock of the type we are seeing now. In our system, bills are very easy to kill and for most part the only way to get through the tortuous process of having a bill become a law is to load it up with so much pork and attach it to something truly vital – such as defense spending – that no one in Congress dares vote against it. This means legislation is grossly inefficient when it passes, resulting as it does from cobbled together policies that look like Rube-Goldberg machines. Obamacare, such as it is, is so awful precisely because it had to satisfy so many different constituencies that it came out looking like a Frankenstein’s Monster. It was engineered to pass Congress, not work as well as possible.
Second, the division of power between the different branches of Congress and the White House makes political accountability very difficult for voters and seems tailor-made to produce citizen apathy and cynicism. With both branches able to blame the other for policy failure and gridlock, the average voter is often at a loss as to who to punish for poor performance come Election Day. Should he or she vote against the President, even though it was a minority filibuster in the Senate that stopped his policy program? Or should he or she vote against their Congressperson, even though the member is good for the district because they bring home the bacon? As there is no clear answer, accountability for poor performance can quickly get lost.
Finally, the division of power between the White House and the Congress that is explicit in presidential democracies of the sort we have, as a result, are profoundly unstable. Though it may not seem like it to Americans, presidential democracy has largely been a failure nearly everywhere it has been tried and often leads to the collapse of democracy itself. Why this is so should be clear by now – government paralysis leads to an unsolvable crisis of the type we are seeing today in Washington. If the presidency is weak vis-à-vis other domestic factions, he or she will often be forced from power by a military coup. If, on the other hand, the president is strong vis-à-vis the rest of government, he or she can conduct an autogolpe against the legislative branch in order to rule by dictatorial decree.
Conclusion
All in all, then, the U.S. system of presidential democracy, where authority and power are split between an elected legislature and an elected president, is simply a poor system that is made much worse by the unique way we have engineered our political institutions. This is especially the case when, as now, polarization has made partisan gridlock exponentially worse.
Can we do better? Almost certainly – parliamentary democracy of the type that exists in Europe is a far better option for such a sprawling, diverse and messy country as ours. In a forthcoming column we’ll examine some of the major parliamentary options that exist in Europe, and which one might be a better model for the United States.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Mint Press News’ editorial policy.