In honor of Washington’s Birthday, I’ll repeat a comment that I wrote on an SB thread two years ago:
The greatest damage that Washington did to our country was to govern like an honest man and resign like a saint, instead of behaving like the normal crook that most presidents have been.
Had Washington only taken bribes, abused his office, overreached his authorities, and then conjured up a mob to keep him in power, the Congress would have properly stamped him out and seen to it that strict limits were placed, from that day hence, on presidential discretion and prerogatives.
We could have had an executive that lived in fear of the legislature, if only Washington had had the decency to be corrupt. His uprightness is unforgivable.
Hmm, the Founding Fathers, including Washington, were all too aware of the risks of a tyrannical ruler, given their recent War of Independence. Moreover, Washington was specifically asked to play the role of first president due to his long, virtuous track record. I recall reading that Washington may have been the only person who could sufficiently sanctify the new Constitution with the unanimous acceptance of the state representatives.
More broadly, I also think we should recall that they were drafting a new Constitution to address the early issues discovered with the weaker national government established under the Articles of Confederation, which hadn’t even been in effect for a decade. It is my understanding that this was a general challenge during the Revolutionary War period—finding the balance between anarchy and tyranny to create a government with sufficient state capacity to act, yet with enough checks and balances to avoid a dictator.
Some states initially created weak executives, placing power in various committees and congresses in their founding governments shortly after declaring independence. Yet those governments were found to be exceptionally dysfunctional, particularly when it came to organizing and funding militaries to contribute to the war. Some of that was managed by the central Continental Congress, yet many state representatives were paranoid about ceding too much authority to what could become yet another tyrannical ruler.
This created quite the mess when the war ended—notably, the various currencies and bonds issued by different governments and the question of who would defend the newly independent states. Some states quickly ran into issues, such as Shays’ Rebellion in Massachusetts against state taxation. Massachusetts alone struggled to contain the uprising, and there was fear it could grow to destabilize all of New England. Thankfully, private funding by merchants allowed the state to raise a sufficient militia to defeat the rebellion before it turned into an actual civil war.
So the drafters of the Constitution were attempting to balance multiple concerns, influenced by recent experience with weak state and national governments. Moreover, they were operating under the constraints of divided state interests and continued paranoia about ceding authority only to empower a new tyrant. Lastly, time was of the essence—who knew where the next crisis would come from, possibly even renewed hostilities with Britain should they sense vulnerabilities?
All in all, the Founders did quite well given their constraints. And they were empowered to act with the universally admired Washington offering to sanctify the new government by serving as the first president. He recognized the weight of duty he took on. Moreover, we’d have quickly killed him with a reenactment of the assassination of Julius Caesar had we sensed the rise of a new tyrant. The near contemporary experience of revolutionary France suggests we were quite fortunate all things considered.
This, while interesting, is exactly wrong. If Washington had been a crook and fought with Congress, his personal standing was so great that he would have been able to take power and rule by decree, and we would have looked like all the petty dictatorships in all the newly independent countries around the world. Think how great it turned out in South America with Simon Bolivar or Santa Ana. I understand the thinking that Congress would have triumphed, but I actually think (in a probabilistic sense) that this corrupt alt-Washington would just have been President for life or a king.
Yes, I am, since I like scenarios that are well-specified and well laid out. You spelled out a precise scenario that assumed a specific outcome. I think the scenario is spelled out well, but the result you anticipate would be precisely the opposite. So it is wrong in a specific precise and exact way. You think Congress would have won, while I think the personal prestige and popularity of Washington would have allowed him to run roughshod over Congress, much as we see throughout history after liberation movements allow a country to gain independence.
“ Jane McHugh and Philip A. Mackowiak did an analysis in Clinical Infectious Diseases (2014), examining Miller's notes and records showing that the White House water supply was downstream of public sewage, and they concluded that he likely died of septic shock.”
Harrison’s intestines were full of corruption. Don’t try to whitewash it.
I believe the root of Madisonianism's deficiencies lies in its utopian origin story. It was the late-night dorm room stoner session of world constitutions: a bunch of guys (all dudes, all elites, many of them slave-owners) got together and whipped up this Most Awesomest Governance Model. There were some brilliant minds among them. They were very well read, in the main, and knew a great deal about political philosophy. But they were still human. And humans simply don't have enough knowledge and wisdom to come up with schemes likely to work very well, under a wide variety of circumstances, for a very long time. What Communism is to economic models, Madisonianism is to constitutional systems.
Contrast this with the Westminster model, which evolved organically, in dribs and drabs over centuries, jettisoning that which doesn't work and engaging in frequent experimentation.
Of course, Madison and Co. could have given the American polity the capacity to engage in frequent experimentation. We, too, could have enjoyed a constitutional order that gradually evolved, with time, toward greater stability and efficiency. But they made a huge foundational error in the method they bequeathed us for amending the Constitution. As I understand it, they thought we likely *would* be a polity characterized by a fair amount of constitutional experimentation. But they overestimated the ability of the 2/3rds+3/4ths amending formula to coexist with partisanship.
And so here we are, very likely to get our first real brush with authoritarianism.
I've never been one for the cult of the founders but I think you're giving short shrift to the realities of the time. They were operating in uncharted (or maybe only loosely charted) territory and still managed to kickstart something that's held for two and a half centuries, plus became the philosophical (though certainly not structural) model for how a liberal, free society operates. Cut them some slack.
I also think the implicit idea that a parliamentary system can't or is less likely to devolve into something authoritarian is underbaked.
Roughly a dozen of the leading parliamentary democracies in Europe are currently operating under a "cordon sanitaire" model in which virtually every other party forms a coalition to box out the far right, which is gradually transforming them into something that looks an awful lot like a two-party system.
It'll be amusing to listen to the people who have been criticizing the presidential model when all of Germany, Spain, Belgium, France... all fall under the sway of their own Orbanist illiberal democrats within the span of a decade or so as the cordon sanitaire finally breaks because people are fed up with their establishments.
And American democracy will be more or less functioning like it did in 1890, loudly, obnoxiously, corruptly... but exchanging power... which those same people will be calling "fascism".
Interesting point. Agreed that parliamentary systems in the EU are not looking so great. But are there non-EU countries where the criticism you're making applies? I ask because the EU's multi-national government is very unusual, and seems to have provoked backlash: the common monetary system has been associated with sustained negative growth and high unemployment in several countries, and I think the EU's multi-national immigration system has been controversial. For people not considering multi-national government, it may be fairer to compare with conventional national states that have their own fully independent government, monetary system, legal system etc.
Singapore and Japan are basically one-party states and very odd, Switzerland is even odder... Turkey and Israel are a long ways further down their Orbanist slide than the EU parliamentary states, Thailand and Pakistan are already at the bottom waiting for everyone to join them, India is slipping over the top edge (arguably, but it's so poor it needs a properly corrupt-but-active developmentalist phase anyway), Norway seems to be rudderless and drifting towards dysfunction in the same way as its Eurozone neighbors...
If you toss the EU, then the sample consists of another dozen-odd countries which seem to confirm that parliamentary systems can also easily slide into authoritarianism, three deeply odd outliers (Japan, Singapore, and Switzerland), and then Britain, the former "White Dominions," and Malaysia.
I guess you can claim that Britain and CANZUS are just plain magical?
Thanks for your response. It made me google around, and I learned a lot. I do think the evidence is idiosyncratic & limited, so it's hard to be sure of anything.
But I'm still genuinely interested if anyone can think of counter-examples to this theory: In rich nations with independent governments, prime ministerial systems are/have been less prone to democratic melt-down than presidential systems. By "democratic melt-down", I mean a change from properly democratic to not-properly-democratic.
After removing modern EU countries, where national governments are not fully independent, and Israel, which is very unusual, I know of the following cases with PMs:
Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Britain, Norway, Iceland, and many Pre-EU European governments. All have PMs rather than powerful presidents, and none have powerful, dangerous anti-system parties.
Singapore hasn't had a democratic melt-down because it's never really been democratic.
I think the tendency to almost always re-elect the same party is not really democratic. If I'm right, Japan has never been really democratic, and if I'm wrong, then Japan is still democratic.
So, I know of no counter-examples to the theory above, and I'd be interested if anyone does.
I have to admit, there isn't much evidence. The list of PM systems above is not that short, but there are so few successful examples with strong presidents. But at least the US has been going a long time, which does add up to a bit of evidence. The US has problems today and had a civil war. Are there comparable cases among the many PM countries that fit the theory?
Evidence aside, I think there's also a logic to the theory: relative to presidents, prime ministers are easily removed, so they must be coalition-builders, and it's hard for coalition-building personalities to be anti-system firebrands.
For less-high-income countries I think the theory might be right as a weak trend, but I'm less confident, and as you say, there are plenty of counter-examples.
I still give it a big 'maybe' and think we might be playing a bit of a shell game with definitions, plus over accounting for instability in one specific region of the world, i.e. Latin America.
Edit to add I hear what you're saying. There's absolutely a constitutional gap created by the way our system has evolved, creating a real possibility for the executive to play chicken with the constitution to disastrous results. That said, there's a mode of thinking where we decide every bad outcome has a systemic cause. Sometimes that's true, sometimes it's not.
I also think the idea that the founders were just off and somehow blinded by social class on this particular subject is pretty questionable. They were sitting with a small, fragile republic surrounded by imperial powers and hostile Indian tribes, and a former colonial master that while shoved out was still a looming presence. In those circumstances it isn't crazy to want an executive capable of decisive action to fight off external threats. That is not our situation now but they also didn't know we'd become the richest most powerful country in the history of the world.
It’s important to keep in mind that the executive in a Westminster system is actually *far more* powerful than one in a presidential system — Parliament is sovereign and there is no judicial review. That power derives from other members of parliament, however, and must be constantly maintained.
>I think you're giving short shrift to the realities of the time<
With respect, I think you've entirely missed the meaning of my comment. Re-read! In it I readily acknowledge they were accomplished political philosophers—very smart men. But even the smartest human beings can't predict conditions in sixty or eighty or two hundred years. Which is why constitutions should be characterized by a substantial degree of flexibility, adaptability and capacity to evolve.
The framers of our constitution got plenty of things right, but they got one little thing *very* wrong: 2/3rds + 3/4ths.
"What Communism is to economic models, Madisonianism is to constitutional systems." One of the most trenchant critiques of Communism was its utopian view of human nature, that it's possible for a system to work based on the expectation that everyone will selflessly go along and play their part, even against their own self-interest. In practice, that can look more like theocracy than anything else, if it works at all.
Ironically, a major focus of the Madisonian system is that it claims to start from a much more cynical view of human nature, that people will act selfishly and in their own self-interest. and so the goal and intent was to design a system that leans into this, rather than against it, and set up a scheme where self-interest checks self-interest. It was and is a good insight, but also the specifics depended on a social mileu that has vastly changed since the time of Madison, so the checks and balances don't seem to be working as intended any more.
This is kind of irrelevant, but I always thought this critique of communism was a bit bizarre. It makes sense when you're discussing anarcho whatever with your fellow philosophy undergrads over a nice bowl of weed, but actually existing communist states were/are not at all undergirded by this idea. If anything, they are characterized by extreme distrust and the overarching idea that people should not be allowed to act independently of some mode of social oversight. Even China's not-communist system basically evolved by applying this fundamental insight to a market-based economic model -- i.e., they threw out most of the other stuff, but the idea that humans are basically evil when left to their own devices was so central that it carried over through the era of reform.
It seems like Communist societies understood that the project would fail if you had people who were less than perfectly ideologically committed operating in the normal economic system. Which is why they invested so much in the secret police to root them out and kill them, or shunt them over to a parallel slave-labor system.
Capitalism aligns incentives within the economic system. There’s not a capitalism security service that breaks down your door in the middle of the night should you fail to maximize shareholder value. You just get less money.
China's not-communist system is, at the individual level, precisely that, not communist but rather market based, with the individual incentives of a market system.
The Soviet Union in fact had lots of problems with reconciliatiling individual selfish behavior with a system where everyone had everything provided to them, whether or not they worked diligently, came to work drunk, shirked their duties etc. They had a whole "stakhanovite" movement aimed at valorizing and honoring workers who went above and beyond even though there was no incentive to do so -- but that's kind of intense social pressure just to get people to do their jobs isn't sustainable and faded as the revolutionary fervor faded.
Yeah. Isn’t the way Khrushchev was “discovered” was that he got some award for harvesting the most wheat on the collective farm?
Edit: it’s, surprisingly, Gorbachev I was thinking of.
Per Wikipedia, “In 1948, [Gorbachev’s dad Sergey and him] harvested over 8,000 centners of grain, a feat for which Sergey was awarded the Order of Lenin and his son the Order of the Red Banner of Labour…in June 1950, he became a candidate member of the Communist Party.”
That seems like more of a Khrushchevvy thing though, I always think of Gorbachev as more of the educated high brow type and Khrushchev as the blue collar guy. I love Khrushchev’s concrete speech, he was the original YIMBY! https://archis.org/volume/industrialised-building-speech-1954/
The critique is not aimed at those regimes. It's aimed at western advocates campaigning for communist systems who do not themselves believe or acknowledge that extensive social oversight will be required to fulfill their vision.
In fact that gap, between communist ideals and real-world implementations, is a staple of anti-communist discourse. They're hardly unaware of it.
Hm, I suppose you're right, though I think this more true about the previous era of youth radicalism than it is now. The leftist youth these days think that the USSR was based, China is cool, and cracking down on subversive anti-proletarian activity with overwhelming force is just the bees' knees.
Ha, true enough. Antifa certainly doesn't have a utopian view of human nature. There are always people that can only imagine themselves as the overseers of our perfect future state.
I haven’t seen nostalgia for the USSR but I have seen admiration of the Chinese system in leftist shit that my Facebook feed shows me. I don’t trust that it’s not actually foreign propaganda rather than authentic, though.
I thought the point of those critiques *was* that that sentiment so utterly fails to describe the actual communist powers. That there is no path from theory to practice. If there was you'd expect someone to have at least tried to implement it, but you can't get there from here.
Not an expert, but I think this is a legitimate critique of some forms of communist *thought*, e.g., final-stage "from each according to their need, to each according to their ability", Engels's "withering away of the state", or some of the early Soviet stuff wherein they thought they could, through sophisticated social engineering, get people to love the state the way they love their families (which is what people like Steven Pinker are talking about when they say that communism "denies human nature"). I agree that it is not a sensible critique of any actual communist state that actually existed.
Anyone who wants to live under pure capitalism or pure socialism is an absolute nut; a mixed economy is obviously the best way. You get seniors and disabled people dying on the street and Hoovervilles in pure capitalism and slavery and poverty in pure communism.
I think America should move to be more socialist on the spectrum that exists, have a more robust safety net/UBI, tax the fuck out of billionaires, build more housing, and probably do more to encourage both sectoral bargaining and businesses to be run as co-ops, but it’s just optimizing along the spectrum we’re already on, which during my life has been pretty good. Could be better but could be a lot worse. We need a revolution and a dictatorship of the proletariat like we need a hole in the head. But we do need to restrict constitutional rights and the franchise to Democrats…
You like 20th century prose? Me too! Oddly, my parents actually trained me to speak 20th century prose when I was a kid. I hope ethnolinguists will be able to assemble a corpus of spoken and written 20th century prose, before the last speakers vanish.
I must admit I made that particular claim based on nothing but speculation. But, I've been led to believe wealthy elites in mid 18th century colonial America received an education well-grounded in classical works of European civilization—often in the languages of antiquity—as befit future gentlemen.
A counterpoint to the idea that our Constitution precludes experimentation and substantial changes to meet the changing times, from FDR's first inaugural address:
"Our Constitution is so simple and practical that it is possible always to meet extraordinary needs by changes in emphasis and arrangement without loss of essential form. That is why our constitutional system has proved itself the most superbly enduring political mechanism the modern world has produced."
Yes: talk of frequent experimentation ("bold persistent" experimentation in FDR's formulation) indeed calls to mind Roosevelt. He, of course, was ushered into office by a true calamity, the scale of which gave him the political capital and the sheer, titanic congressional margins to do so. And even at that, only a single constitutional amendment (repeal of prohibition) was adopted during his record-breaking tenure in office!
True, there was only one formal amendment. But in other areas, the popular and governing understanding of what the Constitution means was transformed as significantly as if there'd been formal amendments, most notably the balance of power between Congress and the President, and the understanding of the federal government's power to regulate interstate commerce. I think the former was more a true change to the Constitution; the latter (interstate commerce) was more a case of updating the doctrine to reflect the the changed fact that modern interstate commerce is simply more pervasive and inescapable than before, and therefore a power to regulate it, that has always existed, is also necessarily more pervasive, inescapable and significant than before.
I think yeah, the Founders were completely oblivious to the threat of oligarchy and the power of the wealthy, because they considered their own wealth to not actually give them power.
Plus, it was a different world. Preindustrial society just doesn't compare well to modern day. We had different classes of people, Founders obviously ones with much more power, but the magnitude and dynamics have some meaningful differences.
Yes, although I think all developed countries are still figuring out how to balance concentrated economic power with respect to political power. For example, in CCP China, billionaires disappear at times, commonly reemerging months later with a renewed commitment to Xi Jinping Thought. Conversely, in the U.S., billionaires commonly make large political contributions, and one recently bought his way into the administration—Trump’s Crypto & AI Czar, David Sacks, for reference. The narrative around Musk is likely far weirder.
The challenge seems related to the Madisonian insight that only power can check power. In the economic realm, free-market idealists hope for competition among economic actors with minimal rules—although they still want a state actor enforcing those rules with its “monopoly on violence.” Yet the minimalist rule set seems to lead to consolidated economic monopolies or, at best, oligopolies, with economic actors purchasing political power to defend their interests—defeating even the minimalist constraints on their actions.
Conversely, too much state intervention can result in economic stasis and falling behind peers in technological development. Not only does that impact material well-being and lead to resentment among the populace, but it can also diminish military might and make a nation vulnerable to foreign pressure. That seems to be well accepted in the broader narrative of why the USSR collapsed. The contemporary debate on whether Western European countries, notably Germany, are following a novel yet similar path to decline and collapse is far more contentious.
So in some ways, we too are just as ignorant as the Founders in addressing these concerns of industrial society—despite having over two additional centuries of relevant history to draw from.
The actual mechanism of wealth->power is TV advertising, which is a kind of crazy contingency. Both that mass communication and its economics would evolve in this way, and that voters could be so influenced by such trivialities.
I feel like people overestimate the degree to which money can change people's views and write off the fact people have issues we disagree with for lots of reasons.
Democrats have far outspent Republicans in recent elections, and people have poured stupid dumpsters full cash onto DEM/GOP candidates running for senate in places there is not a chance in hell could be won. Amy McGrath outraised Mitch McConnell $90 million to $57 million in a race people somehow thought was competitive, only for him to win by his largest margin ever.
Wealth put behind media is powerful, but its just not a world where Citizens United going the other way could have avoided the way things are now. Money lets people bring up stuff about the opposition that voters don't like or to bring up/astrotruf yourself in line with their favorable policies - but all that money doesn't make people take a side on issues, it flows the other way.
Presidents Day originally celebrated George Washington. Mr. Washington's remarkable contributions to the country can be summarized by three acts, each essential for our national survival:
1: He won the Revolutionary War.
2: As commander in chief after the war, he confounded everyone by stepping down, commenting that he had just defeated King George and didn't wish to become another King George.
3: After his second term as President, he retired, again confounding everyone.
We owe Washington a vast debt. He led us to a political system that has survived for 2 1/2 centuries. Indeed we now face a serious threat, as Matt outlines, but it's not the first, and with a bit of luck we'll pull through this one too.
It's unclear to me that us winning the revolutionary war was good. Losing might have given us a parliament and independence probably would have come anyway.
The Senate is a uniquely awful institution that only exists if Washington wins.
In the words of the Dude (Big Lebowski), "Well, that's just like your opinion, man." Hard to foretell alternate realities, but how did all that work out for India?
This exactly. I know we're all full of vaguely post modern self loathing these days, and not without some justification, but the founding of the United States did in fact influence the world in ways some might even consider positive.
It's not like the British Empire of the late 18th century was a bastion of enlightened liberalism. At minimum it is far from obvious that if our revolution fails the larger process of liberalization of the Anglosphere otherwise continues in the same way that it did.
Somewhere back in the mists of the comment section of yesteryear is a post from me saying that the rise of liberalism to something near-universal in scope globally was causally thin and the US's founding and meteoric growth were the only thing that ensured it happened.
I stand by that. Absent the US, its growth, its ability to stitch hugely diverse groups of people into Americans, its fabulous industrial and innovative capacity... liberalism and democracy may survive and come to gain increasing sway in Britain and parts of Europe, but they will not come to serve as the standard model of society to which most of the globe's people aspire and against which all other models must contend and compare.
Certainly the French Revolution wouldn’t have happened as soon as it did without the American Revolution and without that you wouldn’t have had Napoleon. Both of which were good for France and Europe despite their excesses. Would you have seen German and Italian unification so early had Napoleon not been a common enemy to all the little duchies and whatnot? I dunno. Would you have had Haussmann making Paris pretty without Napoleon? I doubt it, and that would be a massive, massive loss for the world.
I agree. My "India" comment was a little snarky and unfair. It's probably useful to compare the US with Canada and Australia, though of course each has its own special features.
The Senate strictly considered is not a uniquely awful institution. Lots of legislatures are bicameral. The Filibuster is a uniquely awful institution.
Nowadays it is unique among peer democracies. Our allies reformed their upper houses to be more democratic. Ours hasn't been reformed or neutered, and the constitution makes in nearly impossible to do so legally.
The U.S. House being a clown show now is mostly down to Republicans winning an election and Republicans being a clown show.
I think it is fine and good if there is a clear signal between "you vote for this party, this is what you get". The founding fathers complicated that dynamic too much in my opinion (they were the first to try and its hard to set up a good government).
Ultimately, democracy should involve people being able to vote for a party and then watching that party governor. Our constitutional system is making that too difficult and the results are worse IMO than just play old majority rule parliamentary democracy.
This reasoning is attractive, and I want to believe it, but I don’t. Parliamentary democracies seem like they should be much healthier than the US, but they aren’t. I really don’t know why.
I think a large chunk of the problem is that we focus too much on the presidency. Congress is where the problem really lies. It is no longer responsive to the will of the people. The overreach of both the presidency and the Supreme Court are driven by the urge to do the things that Congress ought to do, but won’t. Larry Lessig had it right. Fix Congress first.
This is just the "If men were angels no government would be necessary" sentiment. If your system can't handle immoral and willfully ignorant voters then it's a bad system. They are a constant.
I don’t think that’s true, there is still a need for coordination and collective/joint solutions between angels. But I don’t expect or hope for humans to become angels, only less ignorant and less immoral than today. Half of the US - the half that didn’t vote for Trump - is already decent.
I don't think I'd characterize a network of communication channels for coordination as a "government" unless it also had an enforcement mechanism. But that's mostly a semantic disagreement.
As for the voters I assure you that appreciably less than half of the people who didn't vote for Trump are decent. It's a *big* tent.
How else would one define decency? When it comes to politics, it’s a tautology. There are Trump voters who are good people that are just brainwashed by Fox News, etc, though. They just shouldn’t be permitted to vote.
I feel like this works well enough until the invention of television and then the internet really break regionalism.
In smaller countries and more ethnically, socially homogeneous ones this would be less of a check but the fact that New England, the mid Atlantic and the south were really different places with unique cultures really made Congress the natural star of the show and presidential ambitions mostly muted outside war time. The first past the post system made two brand named parties make sense but d or r didn’t convey much ideology in 1960.
As mass media made this far less substantial the views of the good life and government winnowed down to basically two. Then the internet shattered it totally and I could live 4,000 miles from home and not really miss anything. This makes everything election into a big fucking deal because a winning coalition has less road blocks.
What if Presidentialism just doesn’t work? When Latin American country’s wrote their constitutions following independence they chose presidential systems, and all experienced varying levels of constitutional crisis and periods of dictatorship. The country’s are unique, different political fault lines, etc but the commonality is a presidential system. While nations that move from a democratic to authoritarian system seem to evolve from in the direction; I am thinking of Hungary but the specifics elude me so apologies for clunky wording.
I am extremely skeptical of the counter factual that if the post-Spain colonies had adopted parliamentary systems they would have become stable democracies.
The human spine doesn't really work either, but over the past couple millions of years we've made do pretty well despite its obvious limitations.
Sometimes the best thing you can do is take a flawed initial starting position and by tinkering with it make it work at least adequately. Not a bad description of the American system 1789-2016.
On Hungary: I am reminded of when they came to Miklos Horthy and said, “Sir, you have been elected Regent!” And he was like “Nah, fam, go back and tell ‘em I want more power.”
Why? Not asking in a trollish way. I don’t think structure is the only reason but it can prevent democracy from becoming an established norm.
The fact you had country’s try a similar structure, experienced similar failings was what moved me. I used to think someone along the lines of Spanish and Portuguese rule ensured they wouldn’t develop into democracies.
Madisonian separation of powers is far superior to European parliamentary democracy at protecting individual rights and economic freedoms from the state. Honestly shocking to me that anyone still looks at Europe as a model to emulate as it becomes increasingly sclerotic and dysfunctional.
The Trumpian approach to allies and foreign policy is basically insane and Vance is a hack, but the broad critique of the Euro democracies as something like embarrassing freeloaders is largely correct. The collapse in competitiveness of the EU economies is shocking. It's like a whole continent run by a nimby school board.
half of European politics is now organized by expansive coalitions that strain credulity whose existence is entirely due to the need to preserve status quo systems from the threat of an insurgent far right. i would not say it's working out very well for them.
it's basically the same thing as the united states if moderate Republicans had their own party to play spoiler to Trump
As I said above, the cordon sanitaire will fail eventually, and its practitioners will reach the same end game we have, whereupon they will discover they have far fewer checks on the power of the right-populists. Along with fewer ways for the electorate to express displeasure once said coalitions blunder about like complete fucking imbeciles smashing the instruments of state.
Have you looked at European politics recently? They are extremely unhappy about it! And given their economic trajectory, they are going to be more unhappy about it.
It seems like Americans are pretty unhappy too despite different economic conditions. I’m not sure economics really explains it. It seems like Covid plus immigration backlash has some explanatory power.
There are many different political systems in Europe. How is that low life expectancy, crazy poverty rates and massive gun violence working out for you?
So... never set foot in US, have no interest in US, dislike US, understand nothing of history or social underpinnings of the problems you mention in US, and utterly incurious about various disasters towards which your own home continent is rapidly hurtling.
I've been in the US six times so far, my wife is an American citizen with an American father, I subscribe to a blog that is 90% about American politics, consume almost exclusively American media, write/speak English at the level of a native. What is your relation to Europe? Ever been here? Also, Europe is way more diverse than the US. What disasters are hurtling towards Norway exactly?
I’m not sure whether that makes it better or worse that your entire understanding of the rather large place is that of an angsty, leftist teenager.
As for me, I’ve worked for European firms and been to 5 European countries for work or travel, have some friends from or still in the continent, follow your politics and economic news…
Norway specifically has politics that are as adrift as your neighbors, the same looming demographic issues as most of the continent and no countervailing ability to accept and assimilate immigrants, and its economic advantage over its neighbors is based on a wasting asset.
When Germany’s cordon sanitaire falls, and it will because the establishment parties are run by feckless morons, the whole continent is going to be in for a hell of a ride.
Angsty teenager? I'm usually pointing out to Europeans that the US has much to learn from, especially when it comes to business climate and entrepreneurial attitudes. You however seem to have a very weird and limited view of Europe, starting with the idea that it is the same everywhere.
The birthrates of US is not much higher than the Scandinavian countries so I don't know what you're getting at. And "accepting immigrants" as a core US value? Well, clearly that's what we are seeing now... Your own country has a president who acts like a king, a constitutional crisis is coming, you have a national debt that is 4-5 times that of Scandinavian countries and quickly becoming unserviceable.
This is my last reply because frankly it feels like a waste of time to discuss with you if you think - as it seems - that the US is a paradise and Europe is hell.
Your first paragraph may be true, but the only glimpse of your views that I have to go on here was, "How is that low life expectancy, crazy poverty rates and massive gun violence working out for you?" If you want me to react to your nuanced and informed views, then, perhaps... share those, not this?
I don't think Europe is hell; there are a number of lessons the US should learn from various European nations on state capacity and regulatory topics... but I do think we now have ample reason to believe your political elites' total embrace of "the end of history" and general obsession with safetyism is short-sighted. It is both completely dependent on the American security umbrella and various other means of underwriting Europe, and incompatible with long-term economic, demographic, and social dynamism.
As to the original comment to which you replied, I think there's also very good reason to fear that if/when any of your neighbors succumb to authoritarianism, the citizenry will have fewer levers with which to fight back and a much lower chance of wresting back power compared to ours.
Probably not a disaster, but long term, the ~20% of your GDP from oil will eventually decline. At the same time, you're already trying to tax your billionaires out of existence (and even try to tax them when they leave), so I'm not sure you'll be able to get much more there. To be fair though, all countries are facing cuts in social guarantees as populations age.
I'd hesitate to say "far" superior. In fact, I probably wouldn't say "superior" at all, just "different". I, too, appreciate the strengths of the Madisonian system, but in making comparisons it's good to consider the impact of the bias that Jefferson put his finger on in the Declaration: "...[A]ll experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed."
It's been a while since I read the poli sci papers on this, but in general, parliamentary democracies were more likely to remain democracies, while presidential systems have had a greater tendency to turn into dictatorships or collapse.
I think that’s exactly why I prefer European systems. There are too many individual rights, too much economic negative freedom, not enough economic positive freedom in America.
And I don't really begrudge coming down on that side of things. To some degree it's a values question. Where I get testy is when people deny the trade-offs.
If we had a parliamentary system where the Republicans, led by Donald Trump, won a majority of seats (like they did in the House), we would have exactly the same problem we have right now: a supine, cowed party led by a dictator wannabe, faced only by a powerless opposition.
It's not the Presidency here folks. It's the total moral collapse of one of our two parties, both its "leaders" and its followers.
Yes, but the idea is that a major party would not have selected Trump as its nominee in the first place. The key idea is that you remove selecting nominees from the public.
Honestly, I don't even blame the Republican party for Trumpism. Virtually every single elected official, pundit, and party member had anti-Trump statements back in 2016, including people we think of as being very pro-Trumpy today. Instead he was directly popular with the voters, some of whom were new to the Republican party. In a parliamentary system, we could have simply not offered voters the option to vote for him. This is the way
Well, I think this is the kind of situation where we can hate the player *and* the game. The purpose of the system is to stop this kind of thing from happening, or at least if it happens to stop it from being damaging.
So what do you propose? We can all see problems, and maybe the modern American presidential system has reached a point of calcification where it's a slow-motion shipwreck happening in plain sight, with nobody able or willing to take hold of the tiller and change course a bit.
It seems to be in the nature of large bureaucracies that in time they do calcify and rot from within. For example, if you get an up-close view of how amazingly bureaucratic the Catholic Church is, it's a lot easier to understand how they let a long-running crisis like the sex-abuse scandal slowly reach a boil, until it nearly destroyed them. And we've seen many examples of large corporate bureaucracies unable to reform themselves and take advantage of the strengths of their positions, until they were displaced by new, more nimble competitors.
The federal government as it exists today is certainly a large bureaucracy, maybe too large for anyone to really manage effectively. How much of what the federal government does today could be broken up and done by state governments? Healthcare? Education? Some of the fifty states would develop into, maybe already have developed into, their own large sluggish bureaucracies. But they also exist in competition and comparison to each other, and the consequences to the nation as whole if some of the cylinders are not firing at any given time aren't that serious, and their competition with each other is likely to be more self-correcting than with a single large federal bureaucracy that monopolizes the field.
I propose that we retain our current system and just allow the major parties to screen who can run for office under their name. They can filter out obviously unqualified parties- Trump and Sanders in 2016 should have been gently shown the door by both parties. It's a perfectly functional system that worked for over 200 years, until do-gooders decided that anyone should be able to run for a major party's nomination- and pushed the American system to the brink.
Just return to the parties screening candidates, it's a very simple and easy fix. Primaries, if you have to have them, can be between 3-5 party-selected nominees. The way other every other political party in the world's other 159 democracies works
It may be too late now, but a policy 10 years ago of "to participate in national debates for our highest office, you have to have won some election somewhere running under the banner of our party" would have silently smothered those campaigns and a bunch of other vanity campaigns, too.
I think that bus has sailed though. What if the parties' base wants to nominate MTG and Ilhan Omar in 2028. You going to foreclose competition to them?
I think the US can handle the system that other 159 democracies on planet Earth run on.
A good recent example was the Virginia governor's election, where the Virginia GOP unilaterally ended primaries and instead switched to a convention system, specifically to keep out a whacko MAGA type they thought would lose in the general. They selected a more moderate Republican, Youngkin, and won because of it. Longtime party officials- who are not the 'base'- are in a good position to make rational election-winning decisions. Again, this is how all of the other democracies in the world work!
I think that's a broad overstatement. There are many selections in other countries that are quite terrible, so we're not unique in occasionally making bad choices. I would say that historically, we're above average.
Beyond that, look at the recent DNC chair election and tell me that "longtime party officials who are not the 'base'- are in a good position to make rational election-winning decisions."
Or think about in 2020 that most long term party officials probably would have chosen Elizabeth Warren over Joe Biden, and she would have lost. Now you did have a few elite officials choose Joe Biden over Bernie Sanders, but that's far different from the broader party's choice.
'Historically' we didn't allow random people to run for major party nominations. This is the system I'd like to return to. Also the US is not 'occasionally making bad choices', it is repeatedly making the same error over & over with open primaries and zero party control of nominations.
In my original comment, I just said that the party should choose a few candidates to run in a primary (here I was specifically thinking of presidential ones). The party chooses 4 or 5 nominees, Democratic voters in closed primaries can pick 1 of them. For Congress I'd prefer that local parties simply pick the nominees, as Congressional primaries are extremely low-turnout
"'Historically' we didn't allow random people to run for major party nominations."
Historically anyone could run, they just couldn't get attention/traction. I don't ever know of the parties have a formal mechanism for removing people. Can you point to me when people have been excluded from running?
"US is not 'occasionally making bad choices', it is repeatedly making the same error over & over with open primaries and zero party control of nominations."
Can you point to me where that is occurring? The most egregious recent nominations have been Republicans making terrible choices for Senate, and often those candidates were preferred by the current party leader (Trump).
I'll also say that the two party system is really strongly reinforced by the parties themselves. If we're going to move candidate selection away from the people and into the parties, then we should break open the two party system. Neither of which is likely to happen.
Trump winning in 2020, I hate to admit it, would have been a lot better than this timeline, I think. They didn’t have all this agenda 2025 stuff in play then, there wasn’t as much of the vindictiveness, and it would have gotten the Dems perhaps to pursue a more common sense agenda for 2024 - especially if Trump were wracked with the same inflation that hit Biden - which would probably have been worse bc he would have fought rate increases tooth and nail.
Though I still think all that inflation was the business community conspiring against a Democrat president, I said it when Biden got elected “ok, the corporate powers are gonna raise prices and crash the economy to punish us for electing a Democrat”
There's no constitutional right to compete for or win the nomination of a private political party. If that party thinks you're not on board with its platform and goals and kicks you out, your remedy is to go start your own party and try to outcompete them.
Or it would be, if it weren't for the fact that state action, through a web of ballot and funding laws, has entrenched the two state-sanctioned "major" parties in a duopoly as quasi-public and really private institutions, to the point where the theoretical self-help remedy of starting a competing party isn't a very meaningful one.
The only institutional power base i can see that might plausibly be both able and willing to dismantle this state-supported duopoly system is the judiciary. And even that, only after enough people do the slow boring work of developing and building support for the First Amendment and other legal doctrines and theories needed to do the job.
You'd then have to have something other than first past the post to try to actually make it feasible to have separate parties without just spoiling the party you just broke off from.
Arguably state governments are even less efficient, and local governments are often net negative for the greater good. Fed government is not that large and they mostly administer programs to help people with money and defence.
Expanding the House would help. A la, proper Congressional Apportionment. Additionally, ranked choice voting, and term limits across the board would be popular. I'm torn on the idea of mandatory voting
Just taking the cap off the number of Representatives and making it conform to population as the Founders intended would go a long way toward reforming Congress AND, by direct extension, the Electoral College, since it's numbers in large part depend on the number of House members.
Love this! It strikes me that the original Madisonian institutions were actually kind of parliamentary: the electoral college has a path to be decided in the House, for example. If the electors were just the House members, then it would be basically parliamentary. Likewise, impeachment/removal is basically an extreme/very difficult version of a non-confidence vote. So could we achieve a parliamentary system with two simple-sounding ammendments that don’t seem to advantage or disadvantage either party: 1) make the newly elected House the electoral college without any requirement how they vote (i.e. they don’t need to vote for anyone elected by popular vote or electoral college) 2) make impeachment and removal possible with a simple majority vote in the House. From there it would just require hustle and slow boring to get proportional representation at a state level.
I think it’s also worth noting that Elon and Trump have both been CEOs, but never of a ‘normal’ company with an independent board of directors and good corporate governance! There are plenty of corporate CEOs out there who have tried to implement dramatic transformations of the company only to face internal resistance, fail to win over key stakeholders, and eventually lose the confidence of the board!
This is why I see red whenever I hear anyone praise Trump as a "good businessman". Nothing he knows and nothing he's ever done in his career would qualify him for a responsible position in a publicly held company. Quite the contrary.
In all fairness he is the founder of Truth Social, a publicly held company with a market cap of $6.6B! 😜
But yes he and Elon just have a conception of a CEO that is very founder-dictator, not successor-steward or legacy-upholder. Certainly if you cherished and loved your 250 year old megacap conglomerate, your board would not nominate either man to a c-suite job!
Musk's success as an engineer is undeniable; I would grade his success in business as "incomplete", or maybe TBD. Unless we want to equate "success in business" with "success in attracting investors" rather than "success in generating consistent (and ideally increasing) profits".
I don’t like the guy personally these days, but it seems astonishing to grade the richest man on earth, founder of several of the most valuable companies in the world in their respective domains, as “incomplete”.
I see your point about profitable returns, but as Matt Levine could tell you, we are in a different era now. In the age of memecoins and Robinhood investors, hype and crypto, it seems kind of absurdly pedantic to judge Musk’s business success purely on a rubric for 20th-century entrepreneurship.
I am trying to take a purely objective view of the matter. Any framework for judging “success in business” which fails to give a high grade to the most successful businessman on the globe is, on its face, a failed rubric.
I am not trying to cast aspersions on your approach or your thinking, only to say that it seems inherently self-defeating to stick to an older, more foundational means of defining business success in a modern-day era where companies can so often succeed based on their skill at reacting to market dynamics which have nothing to do with traditional notions of profit or EBITDA or anything else.
This analysis is right about Madisonian institutions but it's wrong about the current situation and I think it's leading Matt to be too sanguine about the current situation. The difference in Canada or the UK or Japan is that it's much easier to pass laws, and that the head of the party gets to pick the legislative candidates. But what's happening right now is not that the Republicans can't pass laws, or that rogue legislators are defying the executive from their party.
Instead, Trump and Musk and Vought want to (a) ignore a bunch of laws, (b) gut the civil service, and (c) abrogate existing financial commitments. None of these are allowed in the UK or Canada either. I think they want to move quicker than laws would pass even if they had total agreement, they don't want to do the coalition management needed for a small majority (needed even with a parliamentary system), they don't want to tell anyone what they want to do, and they don't want to be constrained even by some new law they wrote. But most fundamentally they seem to think they should get to be dictators which is not how parliamentary systems work either.
Not sure about your 2nd paragraph. The UK and Canada practice parliamentary sovereignty, so neither government is constrained by the judiciary. The Prime Minister of the UK could absolutely gut the civil service if they wanted to, there are far less constraints over there.
The PM of the UK is a lot closer to a dictator than the President of the US could ever be. The real difference is that the parties select the PM candidate so as to screen out obviously unqualified demagogues
The check is 50%+1 votes. They cannot gut thr civil service without parliament going along, and they have the option to just not vote for it, and if they do it's a new, immediate election.
The failure mode of parliaments is when they over centralize PM powers and let them act like presidents.
Parliamentary systems have much higher party discipline than our system does. There's no equivalent to Manchin or Synema or Liberman deciding that they want to vote against the executive on some matter. For one thing, the party controls who runs for office in the first place, and if an MP was problematic they'd simply be ejected from the party. 'Eh I feel like voting against my party on this one' is way, way less of a thing in a parliament.
A prime minister is generally quite a bit more powerful than a president. Especially in a majoritarian system like Britain's
It depends on the system. If this were literally true, then no formed parliamentary government would ever lose a confidence vote, but they have. And its true if you don't like an MP, you can push them out of office, but then again they can form their own party and run against you pulling out some of your voters causing you to lose.
Sort of. The major failure in parliamentary systems is when they try to make the prime minister into a president like figure. In particular when they do a general membership leadership election, as opposed to a caucus selected leader. Using congress as the electors keeps it towards the caucus selected leader, which keeps caucus as much more like a board of directors, with the moral authority to remove someone they put in place.
It wouldn't, particularly. But in such a system the party would be much stronger and therefore it would be very hard for someone like Trump to just take it over as an outsider (in parliamentary systems, populists usually try forming their own party instead, as we see in many European countries).
1. Both Canada and the UK are absolutely constrained by the judiciary, just less than the US.
2. The PM can (often) pass laws that they want. They can't unilaterally not follow the laws. They can't fire the civil service, but they can get their legislature to pass a law getting rid of it. Note that this isn't what's happening today in the US, and that id you think about Justin Trudeau, you can see this power is not absolute -- he couldn't get a law passed today gutting the civil service.
"Unlike in some other jurisdictions, such as the United States, English law does not permit judicial review of primary legislation (laws passed by Parliament)"
2. "They can't fire the civil service, but they can get their legislature to pass a law getting rid of it" A distinction without a difference
That the courts can strike down legislation which the government can then use a different procedure to override is not the same as the courts having no power. Just like having to pass a law is actually different from being able to take unilateral action -- parliamentary governments do not always succeed in getting the laws they want passed.
Sure. But your statement that 'Both Canada and the UK are absolutely constrained by the judiciary' is clearly incorrect- neither country is 'absolutely constrained'. Parliament is the highest power, unlike say in the US or Germany
It sounds like you were confused by the use of the word "absolutely" as something like an intensifier here? I was not trying to say that there is some form of constraint called "absolute constraint" which applies to Canada. Canadian politics is constrained, in practice as well as in theory, by the judiciary, although it is a smaller constraint than in the US. Furthermore, the idea that constraints only include formal rules is a serious confusion -- for example, UK prime ministers are constrained in practice by public opinion even though public opinion does not have a formal role in the UK governance process.
Trump can't "unilaterally not follow the laws" either. At least he can't if someone stops him.
I don't think we're talking about different institutions here. I think we're talking about different political cultures, at least as presently constituted.
The courts in the UK don’t have the Marbury v. Madison regularity of judicial review that happens in the United States but they are beholden to the courts’ decisions.
UK courts literally cannot overturn laws passed by parliament. And any ruling from the courts, parliament can simply pass a new law overruling it
"Unlike in some other jurisdictions, such as the United States, English law does not permit judicial review of primary legislation (laws passed by Parliament)"
The Canadian Conservatives have been pushing a talking point that they will win a “supermajority”. This is not a thing and it’s pretty clear to me they are hoping to use their win to upend and even eliminate longstanding institutions. They’re committed to defunding the CBC for example and have talked about firing the central banker, gutting the public service and using the notwithstanding clause more liberally to override Charter rights.
"Instead, Trump and Musk and Vought want to (a) ignore a bunch of laws, (b) gut the civil service, and (c) abrogate existing financial commitments."
This implicates Madisonian republicanism because it's the executive trying to have the powers a prime minister has through their majority in parliament.
My point is that prime ministers do not actually have unlimited power over everything in the government. They have more power than the US president but Canada is not a plebiscitary dictatorship.
It's actually a tribute to America as a nation that we were able to maintain this immensely flawed system for so long. I think that there was just this understanding in the past that having a dictator was something that Americans would simply never countenance.
But Donald Trump is a very unique leader in that he demands monarch-like authority, inspires cult-like devotion in his followers, and has zero qualms about destroying our system. He is a one-man perfect storm to end America.
Without him, destroying our system would never have been possible because pretty much everyone in politics believed in the system. A president (Jeb) Bush, Rubio, DeSantis, et al, would have certainly sought to undermine the liberal project, but none of them would ever have sought to turn America into a version of post-Soviet Russia.
Today's Russia is a failing state with a shrinking population and a crumbling economy, BUT it's leader has ultimate power. And that is the important part for Trump.
It's basically all outcome preference. Matt prefers stronger public institutions. The Madisonian system prioritizes shielding the private sphere from the state at the expense of public capacity. Plenty of people have the opposing values.
The Madisonian system was perfectly compatible with a regime of racial apartheid, which is about as unshielded from the state as the private sphere can get.
Living in the US, Canada, and New Zealand, I've been struck by the different personality types advanced by prime-ministerial vs presidential systems. I believe it was a desire to lock-out a dangerous personality type (the polarizing anti-system firebrand) that motivated the US founders to setup indirect electoral-college elections. The US founder's plan for the electoral college failed. But it looks to me like indirect prime-ministerial elections do achieve what the US founders intended, by promoting personality types more oriented towards coalition building. I think this might be because:
- with a constant risk of being kicked out by a simple majority, prime ministers have to be careful about annoying people and throwing their weight around.
- with no direct mandate, it's harder for a prime ministers to claim to be truer representatives of "real" patriots than legislators.
- if you're working closely with legislators every day, it's hard to convince them support you if you spend your time watching cable or tweeting, or if you're too lazy to read legislation.
- legislators care about passing legislation, which means they have to care about counting votes and building winning coalitions.
There are downsides to coalition builders - they can be transactional and talk in euphemisms. Also, anti-system critics are important for an honest debate. Also, there are a few exceptions to the trend I think I see.
Still, I looks to me like having legislators elect the chief executive achieves what the US founders tried but failed to achieve with the electoral college.
I wouldn't be so sure. As David Frum has pointed out, Canadian governments tend to be either as short as a sneeze or so long that the whole country eventually gets sick of them. And I find it hard to squeeze Justin Trudeau into the model above.
Agreed that Canada sometimes produces governments that last a long time (as does New Zealand). If this is a problem then the fix is term limits.
But regardless of term limits, I'm suggesting that the president/prime minister distinction might affect the probability of dangerous personality types becoming chief executives.
When you say you're having trouble fitting Justin Trudeau into the model, are you saying that Canada is polarized, or that Trudeau is a polarizing anti-system firebrand? If you're saying that there is still polarization in countries with prime-ministerial systems then I agree. I'm just saying that the chief executives in such systems seem less likely to be polarizing anti-system firebrands.
My information sources may be biased. The Canadians I talk to are mainly expats, as am I. Expats leave their countries for a host of reasons, and citizens of the Anglosphere tend to become instant friends when they venture outside it, whatever their differences when they're at home. Talk to the Canadian ones for any time at all and dislike of the Trudeau government, with illustrations, emerges. Most of the Canadian writers that I read write for Quillette and are similarly critical.
My impression is that Trudeau has been in fact as polarizing in Canada as Obama was accused (falsely, in my view) of being in the US, and that very much unlike Obama, Trudeau has been that way on purpose. It may seem strange to consider anyone "anti-system" who has made cabinet government practically a hereditary institution, but then again, maybe not. And at a deeper level, I don't know what to call things like the proliferation of mandatory "land acknowledgements" and whole bizarre "decolonization" ideology pushed by this government if not "anti-system" in the profound sense of undermining nationhood itself.
Very very interesting comment, which made me think. In New Zealand, tension has developed between representation of native tribes in governance (beyond property ownership) and 1-person-1-vote principles. EU governance is a major system-change, relative to independent nations. These movements been pushed by highly university-educated establishment folks, but they are anti-system in the sense of significantly changing old systems. I don't think these movements are pushed by chief executives who are populist anti-system firebrands, so I'm sticking with my beliefs about the personality types advanced by presidential vs prime-ministerial systems. But I agree there is something polarizing, and I think reckless, in some of the changes pushed by some establishment, highly educated subcultures.
Thanks for the insight on New Zealand. That was my impression as well, but I am by no means an expert on Kiwi politics and did not want to get out over my skis in respect to them. They're too small and remote to influence the rest of the Anglosphere very much and many of their issues are uniquely their own, and I wish them well, in finding solutions and in general.
I think, after this is over the path with the least constitutional modification you have is to realize the president should be more of a 'Chief Administtative Office' and not an executive in the modern understanding.
To that end the elected members of the house should be the electors, and congress should have an unbound vote on who they want the president to be. This takes the president off the ballot, and removes a lot of moral authority from them as well.
Congress also needs a simple removal authority as well, for any reason. Noting that congress picks, they should be able to simply unpick the president.
This puts policy making back in the hands of congress, the elected body.
To that end, the senate needs to be cut back so that it's clear which house is pre-eminant to avoid the level of gridlock you have now. Maybe senate going back to state pick? Again by being appointed it would loose the moral authority to be agenda setting, but would have a role as the house of 'sober second thought'.
I was a Slate reader from the Michael Kinsley days right up to the day that Will Saletan jumped ship -- or was pushed -- to land at the Bulwark. Never again!
In honor of Washington’s Birthday, I’ll repeat a comment that I wrote on an SB thread two years ago:
The greatest damage that Washington did to our country was to govern like an honest man and resign like a saint, instead of behaving like the normal crook that most presidents have been.
Had Washington only taken bribes, abused his office, overreached his authorities, and then conjured up a mob to keep him in power, the Congress would have properly stamped him out and seen to it that strict limits were placed, from that day hence, on presidential discretion and prerogatives.
We could have had an executive that lived in fear of the legislature, if only Washington had had the decency to be corrupt. His uprightness is unforgivable.
This gives Slatepitch and I'm here for it
We’re bringing back all the old faves today — retread post, retread comments, and retread webzines.
We going to try a little, it's called, lazy commenting
Hmm, the Founding Fathers, including Washington, were all too aware of the risks of a tyrannical ruler, given their recent War of Independence. Moreover, Washington was specifically asked to play the role of first president due to his long, virtuous track record. I recall reading that Washington may have been the only person who could sufficiently sanctify the new Constitution with the unanimous acceptance of the state representatives.
More broadly, I also think we should recall that they were drafting a new Constitution to address the early issues discovered with the weaker national government established under the Articles of Confederation, which hadn’t even been in effect for a decade. It is my understanding that this was a general challenge during the Revolutionary War period—finding the balance between anarchy and tyranny to create a government with sufficient state capacity to act, yet with enough checks and balances to avoid a dictator.
Some states initially created weak executives, placing power in various committees and congresses in their founding governments shortly after declaring independence. Yet those governments were found to be exceptionally dysfunctional, particularly when it came to organizing and funding militaries to contribute to the war. Some of that was managed by the central Continental Congress, yet many state representatives were paranoid about ceding too much authority to what could become yet another tyrannical ruler.
This created quite the mess when the war ended—notably, the various currencies and bonds issued by different governments and the question of who would defend the newly independent states. Some states quickly ran into issues, such as Shays’ Rebellion in Massachusetts against state taxation. Massachusetts alone struggled to contain the uprising, and there was fear it could grow to destabilize all of New England. Thankfully, private funding by merchants allowed the state to raise a sufficient militia to defeat the rebellion before it turned into an actual civil war.
So the drafters of the Constitution were attempting to balance multiple concerns, influenced by recent experience with weak state and national governments. Moreover, they were operating under the constraints of divided state interests and continued paranoia about ceding authority only to empower a new tyrant. Lastly, time was of the essence—who knew where the next crisis would come from, possibly even renewed hostilities with Britain should they sense vulnerabilities?
All in all, the Founders did quite well given their constraints. And they were empowered to act with the universally admired Washington offering to sanctify the new government by serving as the first president. He recognized the weight of duty he took on. Moreover, we’d have quickly killed him with a reenactment of the assassination of Julius Caesar had we sensed the rise of a new tyrant. The near contemporary experience of revolutionary France suggests we were quite fortunate all things considered.
This, while interesting, is exactly wrong. If Washington had been a crook and fought with Congress, his personal standing was so great that he would have been able to take power and rule by decree, and we would have looked like all the petty dictatorships in all the newly independent countries around the world. Think how great it turned out in South America with Simon Bolivar or Santa Ana. I understand the thinking that Congress would have triumphed, but I actually think (in a probabilistic sense) that this corrupt alt-Washington would just have been President for life or a king.
“ This, while interesting, is exactly wrong.”
So, you’re giving me points for exactness?
Yes, I am, since I like scenarios that are well-specified and well laid out. You spelled out a precise scenario that assumed a specific outcome. I think the scenario is spelled out well, but the result you anticipate would be precisely the opposite. So it is wrong in a specific precise and exact way. You think Congress would have won, while I think the personal prestige and popularity of Washington would have allowed him to run roughshod over Congress, much as we see throughout history after liberation movements allow a country to gain independence.
The worst thing you can be is "not even wrong."
“ The worst thing you can be is "not even wrong."”
So you might think. But there was that time when I was not even “not even wrong,” and it was worse.
Well, that's oddly right.
If it’s not even and it’s not odd, then it’s lost all integrity.
"instead of behaving like the normal crook that most presidents have been."
You'd better not be including James Garfield in that "most." Good dude.
Also, of course, let's not forget the unsullied, corruptionless reputation of William Henry Harrison's term in office.
Harrison? Corruptionless?
“ Jane McHugh and Philip A. Mackowiak did an analysis in Clinical Infectious Diseases (2014), examining Miller's notes and records showing that the White House water supply was downstream of public sewage, and they concluded that he likely died of septic shock.”
Harrison’s intestines were full of corruption. Don’t try to whitewash it.
Garfield really was a good dude! His essentially random assassination is one of the more disturbing pivot points in global history.
It was worse than a crime, it was a mistake. Yet all of our presidents were mostly honest, at least until Buchanan
I believe the root of Madisonianism's deficiencies lies in its utopian origin story. It was the late-night dorm room stoner session of world constitutions: a bunch of guys (all dudes, all elites, many of them slave-owners) got together and whipped up this Most Awesomest Governance Model. There were some brilliant minds among them. They were very well read, in the main, and knew a great deal about political philosophy. But they were still human. And humans simply don't have enough knowledge and wisdom to come up with schemes likely to work very well, under a wide variety of circumstances, for a very long time. What Communism is to economic models, Madisonianism is to constitutional systems.
Contrast this with the Westminster model, which evolved organically, in dribs and drabs over centuries, jettisoning that which doesn't work and engaging in frequent experimentation.
Of course, Madison and Co. could have given the American polity the capacity to engage in frequent experimentation. We, too, could have enjoyed a constitutional order that gradually evolved, with time, toward greater stability and efficiency. But they made a huge foundational error in the method they bequeathed us for amending the Constitution. As I understand it, they thought we likely *would* be a polity characterized by a fair amount of constitutional experimentation. But they overestimated the ability of the 2/3rds+3/4ths amending formula to coexist with partisanship.
And so here we are, very likely to get our first real brush with authoritarianism.
I've never been one for the cult of the founders but I think you're giving short shrift to the realities of the time. They were operating in uncharted (or maybe only loosely charted) territory and still managed to kickstart something that's held for two and a half centuries, plus became the philosophical (though certainly not structural) model for how a liberal, free society operates. Cut them some slack.
I also think the implicit idea that a parliamentary system can't or is less likely to devolve into something authoritarian is underbaked.
Roughly a dozen of the leading parliamentary democracies in Europe are currently operating under a "cordon sanitaire" model in which virtually every other party forms a coalition to box out the far right, which is gradually transforming them into something that looks an awful lot like a two-party system.
It'll be amusing to listen to the people who have been criticizing the presidential model when all of Germany, Spain, Belgium, France... all fall under the sway of their own Orbanist illiberal democrats within the span of a decade or so as the cordon sanitaire finally breaks because people are fed up with their establishments.
And American democracy will be more or less functioning like it did in 1890, loudly, obnoxiously, corruptly... but exchanging power... which those same people will be calling "fascism".
Interesting point. Agreed that parliamentary systems in the EU are not looking so great. But are there non-EU countries where the criticism you're making applies? I ask because the EU's multi-national government is very unusual, and seems to have provoked backlash: the common monetary system has been associated with sustained negative growth and high unemployment in several countries, and I think the EU's multi-national immigration system has been controversial. For people not considering multi-national government, it may be fairer to compare with conventional national states that have their own fully independent government, monetary system, legal system etc.
Ok, let's set the EU aside.
Singapore and Japan are basically one-party states and very odd, Switzerland is even odder... Turkey and Israel are a long ways further down their Orbanist slide than the EU parliamentary states, Thailand and Pakistan are already at the bottom waiting for everyone to join them, India is slipping over the top edge (arguably, but it's so poor it needs a properly corrupt-but-active developmentalist phase anyway), Norway seems to be rudderless and drifting towards dysfunction in the same way as its Eurozone neighbors...
If you toss the EU, then the sample consists of another dozen-odd countries which seem to confirm that parliamentary systems can also easily slide into authoritarianism, three deeply odd outliers (Japan, Singapore, and Switzerland), and then Britain, the former "White Dominions," and Malaysia.
I guess you can claim that Britain and CANZUS are just plain magical?
Thanks for your response. It made me google around, and I learned a lot. I do think the evidence is idiosyncratic & limited, so it's hard to be sure of anything.
But I'm still genuinely interested if anyone can think of counter-examples to this theory: In rich nations with independent governments, prime ministerial systems are/have been less prone to democratic melt-down than presidential systems. By "democratic melt-down", I mean a change from properly democratic to not-properly-democratic.
After removing modern EU countries, where national governments are not fully independent, and Israel, which is very unusual, I know of the following cases with PMs:
Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Britain, Norway, Iceland, and many Pre-EU European governments. All have PMs rather than powerful presidents, and none have powerful, dangerous anti-system parties.
Singapore hasn't had a democratic melt-down because it's never really been democratic.
I think the tendency to almost always re-elect the same party is not really democratic. If I'm right, Japan has never been really democratic, and if I'm wrong, then Japan is still democratic.
So, I know of no counter-examples to the theory above, and I'd be interested if anyone does.
I have to admit, there isn't much evidence. The list of PM systems above is not that short, but there are so few successful examples with strong presidents. But at least the US has been going a long time, which does add up to a bit of evidence. The US has problems today and had a civil war. Are there comparable cases among the many PM countries that fit the theory?
Evidence aside, I think there's also a logic to the theory: relative to presidents, prime ministers are easily removed, so they must be coalition-builders, and it's hard for coalition-building personalities to be anti-system firebrands.
For less-high-income countries I think the theory might be right as a weak trend, but I'm less confident, and as you say, there are plenty of counter-examples.
The idea that a parliamentary system *cannot* devolve into authoritarianism is wrong, agreed.
The idea that a parliamentary system is *less likely* to devolve into authoritarianism has been empirically demonstrated.
I still give it a big 'maybe' and think we might be playing a bit of a shell game with definitions, plus over accounting for instability in one specific region of the world, i.e. Latin America.
Edit to add I hear what you're saying. There's absolutely a constitutional gap created by the way our system has evolved, creating a real possibility for the executive to play chicken with the constitution to disastrous results. That said, there's a mode of thinking where we decide every bad outcome has a systemic cause. Sometimes that's true, sometimes it's not.
I also think the idea that the founders were just off and somehow blinded by social class on this particular subject is pretty questionable. They were sitting with a small, fragile republic surrounded by imperial powers and hostile Indian tribes, and a former colonial master that while shoved out was still a looming presence. In those circumstances it isn't crazy to want an executive capable of decisive action to fight off external threats. That is not our situation now but they also didn't know we'd become the richest most powerful country in the history of the world.
It’s important to keep in mind that the executive in a Westminster system is actually *far more* powerful than one in a presidential system — Parliament is sovereign and there is no judicial review. That power derives from other members of parliament, however, and must be constantly maintained.
>I think you're giving short shrift to the realities of the time<
With respect, I think you've entirely missed the meaning of my comment. Re-read! In it I readily acknowledge they were accomplished political philosophers—very smart men. But even the smartest human beings can't predict conditions in sixty or eighty or two hundred years. Which is why constitutions should be characterized by a substantial degree of flexibility, adaptability and capacity to evolve.
The framers of our constitution got plenty of things right, but they got one little thing *very* wrong: 2/3rds + 3/4ths.
And so here were are.
"What Communism is to economic models, Madisonianism is to constitutional systems." One of the most trenchant critiques of Communism was its utopian view of human nature, that it's possible for a system to work based on the expectation that everyone will selflessly go along and play their part, even against their own self-interest. In practice, that can look more like theocracy than anything else, if it works at all.
Ironically, a major focus of the Madisonian system is that it claims to start from a much more cynical view of human nature, that people will act selfishly and in their own self-interest. and so the goal and intent was to design a system that leans into this, rather than against it, and set up a scheme where self-interest checks self-interest. It was and is a good insight, but also the specifics depended on a social mileu that has vastly changed since the time of Madison, so the checks and balances don't seem to be working as intended any more.
This is kind of irrelevant, but I always thought this critique of communism was a bit bizarre. It makes sense when you're discussing anarcho whatever with your fellow philosophy undergrads over a nice bowl of weed, but actually existing communist states were/are not at all undergirded by this idea. If anything, they are characterized by extreme distrust and the overarching idea that people should not be allowed to act independently of some mode of social oversight. Even China's not-communist system basically evolved by applying this fundamental insight to a market-based economic model -- i.e., they threw out most of the other stuff, but the idea that humans are basically evil when left to their own devices was so central that it carried over through the era of reform.
It seems like Communist societies understood that the project would fail if you had people who were less than perfectly ideologically committed operating in the normal economic system. Which is why they invested so much in the secret police to root them out and kill them, or shunt them over to a parallel slave-labor system.
Capitalism aligns incentives within the economic system. There’s not a capitalism security service that breaks down your door in the middle of the night should you fail to maximize shareholder value. You just get less money.
China's not-communist system is, at the individual level, precisely that, not communist but rather market based, with the individual incentives of a market system.
The Soviet Union in fact had lots of problems with reconciliatiling individual selfish behavior with a system where everyone had everything provided to them, whether or not they worked diligently, came to work drunk, shirked their duties etc. They had a whole "stakhanovite" movement aimed at valorizing and honoring workers who went above and beyond even though there was no incentive to do so -- but that's kind of intense social pressure just to get people to do their jobs isn't sustainable and faded as the revolutionary fervor faded.
Yeah. Isn’t the way Khrushchev was “discovered” was that he got some award for harvesting the most wheat on the collective farm?
Edit: it’s, surprisingly, Gorbachev I was thinking of.
Per Wikipedia, “In 1948, [Gorbachev’s dad Sergey and him] harvested over 8,000 centners of grain, a feat for which Sergey was awarded the Order of Lenin and his son the Order of the Red Banner of Labour…in June 1950, he became a candidate member of the Communist Party.”
That seems like more of a Khrushchevvy thing though, I always think of Gorbachev as more of the educated high brow type and Khrushchev as the blue collar guy. I love Khrushchev’s concrete speech, he was the original YIMBY! https://archis.org/volume/industrialised-building-speech-1954/
The critique is not aimed at those regimes. It's aimed at western advocates campaigning for communist systems who do not themselves believe or acknowledge that extensive social oversight will be required to fulfill their vision.
In fact that gap, between communist ideals and real-world implementations, is a staple of anti-communist discourse. They're hardly unaware of it.
Hm, I suppose you're right, though I think this more true about the previous era of youth radicalism than it is now. The leftist youth these days think that the USSR was based, China is cool, and cracking down on subversive anti-proletarian activity with overwhelming force is just the bees' knees.
Ha, true enough. Antifa certainly doesn't have a utopian view of human nature. There are always people that can only imagine themselves as the overseers of our perfect future state.
"The leftist youth these days think that the USSR was based"
I highly doubt that.
I haven’t seen nostalgia for the USSR but I have seen admiration of the Chinese system in leftist shit that my Facebook feed shows me. I don’t trust that it’s not actually foreign propaganda rather than authentic, though.
I thought the point of those critiques *was* that that sentiment so utterly fails to describe the actual communist powers. That there is no path from theory to practice. If there was you'd expect someone to have at least tried to implement it, but you can't get there from here.
Nuns!
Not an expert, but I think this is a legitimate critique of some forms of communist *thought*, e.g., final-stage "from each according to their need, to each according to their ability", Engels's "withering away of the state", or some of the early Soviet stuff wherein they thought they could, through sophisticated social engineering, get people to love the state the way they love their families (which is what people like Steven Pinker are talking about when they say that communism "denies human nature"). I agree that it is not a sensible critique of any actual communist state that actually existed.
Anyone who wants to live under pure capitalism or pure socialism is an absolute nut; a mixed economy is obviously the best way. You get seniors and disabled people dying on the street and Hoovervilles in pure capitalism and slavery and poverty in pure communism.
I think America should move to be more socialist on the spectrum that exists, have a more robust safety net/UBI, tax the fuck out of billionaires, build more housing, and probably do more to encourage both sectoral bargaining and businesses to be run as co-ops, but it’s just optimizing along the spectrum we’re already on, which during my life has been pretty good. Could be better but could be a lot worse. We need a revolution and a dictatorship of the proletariat like we need a hole in the head. But we do need to restrict constitutional rights and the franchise to Democrats…
As an aside I always like reading constructions like “in the main.” Reminds me of a certain sort of 20th century prose style that I enjoy.
You like 20th century prose? Me too! Oddly, my parents actually trained me to speak 20th century prose when I was a kid. I hope ethnolinguists will be able to assemble a corpus of spoken and written 20th century prose, before the last speakers vanish.
Can one even “speak” prose?
“ Can one even “speak” prose?”
Oui, Monsieur. Tout ce qui n’est point prose est vers, et tout ce qui n’est point vers est prose.
At least, that’s how it works in Jourdainian.
Citation needed: https://thehumanist.com/magazine/january-february-2013/features/speaking-prose-all-our-lives/
Deep cut, yall.
The 2011 Humanist of the Year! Any word on who the top candidates for 2025 are?
TIL of the “ne…point” construction.
Oh, well, we 20th century oldsters...
I must admit I made that particular claim based on nothing but speculation. But, I've been led to believe wealthy elites in mid 18th century colonial America received an education well-grounded in classical works of European civilization—often in the languages of antiquity—as befit future gentlemen.
A counterpoint to the idea that our Constitution precludes experimentation and substantial changes to meet the changing times, from FDR's first inaugural address:
"Our Constitution is so simple and practical that it is possible always to meet extraordinary needs by changes in emphasis and arrangement without loss of essential form. That is why our constitutional system has proved itself the most superbly enduring political mechanism the modern world has produced."
https://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/froos1.asp
“He who saves his Country does not violate any Law” - Donald Trump
CorporateNeedsYouToFindTheDifference.jpg
Yes: talk of frequent experimentation ("bold persistent" experimentation in FDR's formulation) indeed calls to mind Roosevelt. He, of course, was ushered into office by a true calamity, the scale of which gave him the political capital and the sheer, titanic congressional margins to do so. And even at that, only a single constitutional amendment (repeal of prohibition) was adopted during his record-breaking tenure in office!
True, there was only one formal amendment. But in other areas, the popular and governing understanding of what the Constitution means was transformed as significantly as if there'd been formal amendments, most notably the balance of power between Congress and the President, and the understanding of the federal government's power to regulate interstate commerce. I think the former was more a true change to the Constitution; the latter (interstate commerce) was more a case of updating the doctrine to reflect the the changed fact that modern interstate commerce is simply more pervasive and inescapable than before, and therefore a power to regulate it, that has always existed, is also necessarily more pervasive, inescapable and significant than before.
I think yeah, the Founders were completely oblivious to the threat of oligarchy and the power of the wealthy, because they considered their own wealth to not actually give them power.
Plus, it was a different world. Preindustrial society just doesn't compare well to modern day. We had different classes of people, Founders obviously ones with much more power, but the magnitude and dynamics have some meaningful differences.
Yes, although I think all developed countries are still figuring out how to balance concentrated economic power with respect to political power. For example, in CCP China, billionaires disappear at times, commonly reemerging months later with a renewed commitment to Xi Jinping Thought. Conversely, in the U.S., billionaires commonly make large political contributions, and one recently bought his way into the administration—Trump’s Crypto & AI Czar, David Sacks, for reference. The narrative around Musk is likely far weirder.
The challenge seems related to the Madisonian insight that only power can check power. In the economic realm, free-market idealists hope for competition among economic actors with minimal rules—although they still want a state actor enforcing those rules with its “monopoly on violence.” Yet the minimalist rule set seems to lead to consolidated economic monopolies or, at best, oligopolies, with economic actors purchasing political power to defend their interests—defeating even the minimalist constraints on their actions.
Conversely, too much state intervention can result in economic stasis and falling behind peers in technological development. Not only does that impact material well-being and lead to resentment among the populace, but it can also diminish military might and make a nation vulnerable to foreign pressure. That seems to be well accepted in the broader narrative of why the USSR collapsed. The contemporary debate on whether Western European countries, notably Germany, are following a novel yet similar path to decline and collapse is far more contentious.
So in some ways, we too are just as ignorant as the Founders in addressing these concerns of industrial society—despite having over two additional centuries of relevant history to draw from.
The actual mechanism of wealth->power is TV advertising, which is a kind of crazy contingency. Both that mass communication and its economics would evolve in this way, and that voters could be so influenced by such trivialities.
I feel like people overestimate the degree to which money can change people's views and write off the fact people have issues we disagree with for lots of reasons.
Democrats have far outspent Republicans in recent elections, and people have poured stupid dumpsters full cash onto DEM/GOP candidates running for senate in places there is not a chance in hell could be won. Amy McGrath outraised Mitch McConnell $90 million to $57 million in a race people somehow thought was competitive, only for him to win by his largest margin ever.
Wealth put behind media is powerful, but its just not a world where Citizens United going the other way could have avoided the way things are now. Money lets people bring up stuff about the opposition that voters don't like or to bring up/astrotruf yourself in line with their favorable policies - but all that money doesn't make people take a side on issues, it flows the other way.
I mean do you think wealthy people lacked power before TV advertising? The largest landowners in the US had enormous amounts of power.
I'm waiting for Richard Gadsden's view on the awesomeness of the British model.
I mean, apart from Question Time, which is hands down the greatest manifestation of politics ever conceived by humans.
Presidents Day originally celebrated George Washington. Mr. Washington's remarkable contributions to the country can be summarized by three acts, each essential for our national survival:
1: He won the Revolutionary War.
2: As commander in chief after the war, he confounded everyone by stepping down, commenting that he had just defeated King George and didn't wish to become another King George.
3: After his second term as President, he retired, again confounding everyone.
We owe Washington a vast debt. He led us to a political system that has survived for 2 1/2 centuries. Indeed we now face a serious threat, as Matt outlines, but it's not the first, and with a bit of luck we'll pull through this one too.
It's unclear to me that us winning the revolutionary war was good. Losing might have given us a parliament and independence probably would have come anyway.
The Senate is a uniquely awful institution that only exists if Washington wins.
In the words of the Dude (Big Lebowski), "Well, that's just like your opinion, man." Hard to foretell alternate realities, but how did all that work out for India?
Ya, if Gore had won we could have been in a world where a Trump-Obama ticket wins and they push gay marriage so they can marry each other.
Shut down the comments for the day. You win.
The more obvious analogues are Canada and Australia, no?
Which turned out the way they did precisely because Parliament saw how the American story played out for them.
This exactly. I know we're all full of vaguely post modern self loathing these days, and not without some justification, but the founding of the United States did in fact influence the world in ways some might even consider positive.
It's not like the British Empire of the late 18th century was a bastion of enlightened liberalism. At minimum it is far from obvious that if our revolution fails the larger process of liberalization of the Anglosphere otherwise continues in the same way that it did.
Somewhere back in the mists of the comment section of yesteryear is a post from me saying that the rise of liberalism to something near-universal in scope globally was causally thin and the US's founding and meteoric growth were the only thing that ensured it happened.
I stand by that. Absent the US, its growth, its ability to stitch hugely diverse groups of people into Americans, its fabulous industrial and innovative capacity... liberalism and democracy may survive and come to gain increasing sway in Britain and parts of Europe, but they will not come to serve as the standard model of society to which most of the globe's people aspire and against which all other models must contend and compare.
Certainly the French Revolution wouldn’t have happened as soon as it did without the American Revolution and without that you wouldn’t have had Napoleon. Both of which were good for France and Europe despite their excesses. Would you have seen German and Italian unification so early had Napoleon not been a common enemy to all the little duchies and whatnot? I dunno. Would you have had Haussmann making Paris pretty without Napoleon? I doubt it, and that would be a massive, massive loss for the world.
I agree. My "India" comment was a little snarky and unfair. It's probably useful to compare the US with Canada and Australia, though of course each has its own special features.
"My "India" comment was a little snarky and unfair."
Yes. And analytically weak.
India is interesting. It's definitely turned out better than Pakistan, which was not obviously fore-ordained.
The Senate strictly considered is not a uniquely awful institution. Lots of legislatures are bicameral. The Filibuster is a uniquely awful institution.
Nowadays it is unique among peer democracies. Our allies reformed their upper houses to be more democratic. Ours hasn't been reformed or neutered, and the constitution makes in nearly impossible to do so legally.
To be fair to the U.S. model, the House is a clown show.
Agreed, though the diffusion of responsibility surely plays a role enabling their lackluster performance.
The U.S. House being a clown show now is mostly down to Republicans winning an election and Republicans being a clown show.
I think it is fine and good if there is a clear signal between "you vote for this party, this is what you get". The founding fathers complicated that dynamic too much in my opinion (they were the first to try and its hard to set up a good government).
Ultimately, democracy should involve people being able to vote for a party and then watching that party governor. Our constitutional system is making that too difficult and the results are worse IMO than just play old majority rule parliamentary democracy.
Tell me about it. And that Cambrian Explosion? What a wrong turn that was!
If only we had a Time Machine to go back and nip that in the bud!
363 days a year I might agree with you, but on this holiday, I have to disagree.
USA! USA!
At the current moment, a celebration of presidents doesn’t totally activate my patriotism.
The French National Assembly did not cover unicameralism in glory. Personalities matters.
This reasoning is attractive, and I want to believe it, but I don’t. Parliamentary democracies seem like they should be much healthier than the US, but they aren’t. I really don’t know why.
I think a large chunk of the problem is that we focus too much on the presidency. Congress is where the problem really lies. It is no longer responsive to the will of the people. The overreach of both the presidency and the Supreme Court are driven by the urge to do the things that Congress ought to do, but won’t. Larry Lessig had it right. Fix Congress first.
I disagree: Congress is extremely responsive to the people's will.
The people have a lot of complaints, especially about any solution ever proposed.
The problem is immoral and willfully ignorant voters. If they voted better these problems wouldn’t exist.
This is just the "If men were angels no government would be necessary" sentiment. If your system can't handle immoral and willfully ignorant voters then it's a bad system. They are a constant.
I don’t think that’s true, there is still a need for coordination and collective/joint solutions between angels. But I don’t expect or hope for humans to become angels, only less ignorant and less immoral than today. Half of the US - the half that didn’t vote for Trump - is already decent.
I don't think I'd characterize a network of communication channels for coordination as a "government" unless it also had an enforcement mechanism. But that's mostly a semantic disagreement.
As for the voters I assure you that appreciably less than half of the people who didn't vote for Trump are decent. It's a *big* tent.
How else would one define decency? When it comes to politics, it’s a tautology. There are Trump voters who are good people that are just brainwashed by Fox News, etc, though. They just shouldn’t be permitted to vote.
This is worth a read:
https://open.substack.com/pub/randimccallian/p/democrats-rural-america-doesnt-hear/
What is this "will of the people" of which you speak?
It's the subtext. Or something.
I feel like this works well enough until the invention of television and then the internet really break regionalism.
In smaller countries and more ethnically, socially homogeneous ones this would be less of a check but the fact that New England, the mid Atlantic and the south were really different places with unique cultures really made Congress the natural star of the show and presidential ambitions mostly muted outside war time. The first past the post system made two brand named parties make sense but d or r didn’t convey much ideology in 1960.
As mass media made this far less substantial the views of the good life and government winnowed down to basically two. Then the internet shattered it totally and I could live 4,000 miles from home and not really miss anything. This makes everything election into a big fucking deal because a winning coalition has less road blocks.
What if Presidentialism just doesn’t work? When Latin American country’s wrote their constitutions following independence they chose presidential systems, and all experienced varying levels of constitutional crisis and periods of dictatorship. The country’s are unique, different political fault lines, etc but the commonality is a presidential system. While nations that move from a democratic to authoritarian system seem to evolve from in the direction; I am thinking of Hungary but the specifics elude me so apologies for clunky wording.
I am extremely skeptical of the counter factual that if the post-Spain colonies had adopted parliamentary systems they would have become stable democracies.
"...the post-Spain colonies..."
Exactly. The trick was to be post-England.
Well… the countries aren’t that unique. They were all breakaways from Bolivar’s revolution.
The human spine doesn't really work either, but over the past couple millions of years we've made do pretty well despite its obvious limitations.
Sometimes the best thing you can do is take a flawed initial starting position and by tinkering with it make it work at least adequately. Not a bad description of the American system 1789-2016.
On Hungary: I am reminded of when they came to Miklos Horthy and said, “Sir, you have been elected Regent!” And he was like “Nah, fam, go back and tell ‘em I want more power.”
Why? Not asking in a trollish way. I don’t think structure is the only reason but it can prevent democracy from becoming an established norm.
The fact you had country’s try a similar structure, experienced similar failings was what moved me. I used to think someone along the lines of Spanish and Portuguese rule ensured they wouldn’t develop into democracies.
Madisonian separation of powers is far superior to European parliamentary democracy at protecting individual rights and economic freedoms from the state. Honestly shocking to me that anyone still looks at Europe as a model to emulate as it becomes increasingly sclerotic and dysfunctional.
You must have liked JD Vance’s speech
The Trumpian approach to allies and foreign policy is basically insane and Vance is a hack, but the broad critique of the Euro democracies as something like embarrassing freeloaders is largely correct. The collapse in competitiveness of the EU economies is shocking. It's like a whole continent run by a nimby school board.
Maybe, but it is not like they are too unhappy with it. For some reasons tons of Americans became very pissed and put the dumbest people in power.
half of European politics is now organized by expansive coalitions that strain credulity whose existence is entirely due to the need to preserve status quo systems from the threat of an insurgent far right. i would not say it's working out very well for them.
it's basically the same thing as the united states if moderate Republicans had their own party to play spoiler to Trump
As I said above, the cordon sanitaire will fail eventually, and its practitioners will reach the same end game we have, whereupon they will discover they have far fewer checks on the power of the right-populists. Along with fewer ways for the electorate to express displeasure once said coalitions blunder about like complete fucking imbeciles smashing the instruments of state.
Have you looked at European politics recently? They are extremely unhappy about it! And given their economic trajectory, they are going to be more unhappy about it.
It seems like Americans are pretty unhappy too despite different economic conditions. I’m not sure economics really explains it. It seems like Covid plus immigration backlash has some explanatory power.
In fact, they are (according to average approval ratings of their respective heads of government) significantly more unhappy about it than the US!
There are many different political systems in Europe. How is that low life expectancy, crazy poverty rates and massive gun violence working out for you?
So... never set foot in US, have no interest in US, dislike US, understand nothing of history or social underpinnings of the problems you mention in US, and utterly incurious about various disasters towards which your own home continent is rapidly hurtling.
Got it.
I've been in the US six times so far, my wife is an American citizen with an American father, I subscribe to a blog that is 90% about American politics, consume almost exclusively American media, write/speak English at the level of a native. What is your relation to Europe? Ever been here? Also, Europe is way more diverse than the US. What disasters are hurtling towards Norway exactly?
I’m not sure whether that makes it better or worse that your entire understanding of the rather large place is that of an angsty, leftist teenager.
As for me, I’ve worked for European firms and been to 5 European countries for work or travel, have some friends from or still in the continent, follow your politics and economic news…
Norway specifically has politics that are as adrift as your neighbors, the same looming demographic issues as most of the continent and no countervailing ability to accept and assimilate immigrants, and its economic advantage over its neighbors is based on a wasting asset.
When Germany’s cordon sanitaire falls, and it will because the establishment parties are run by feckless morons, the whole continent is going to be in for a hell of a ride.
Angsty teenager? I'm usually pointing out to Europeans that the US has much to learn from, especially when it comes to business climate and entrepreneurial attitudes. You however seem to have a very weird and limited view of Europe, starting with the idea that it is the same everywhere.
The birthrates of US is not much higher than the Scandinavian countries so I don't know what you're getting at. And "accepting immigrants" as a core US value? Well, clearly that's what we are seeing now... Your own country has a president who acts like a king, a constitutional crisis is coming, you have a national debt that is 4-5 times that of Scandinavian countries and quickly becoming unserviceable.
This is my last reply because frankly it feels like a waste of time to discuss with you if you think - as it seems - that the US is a paradise and Europe is hell.
Your first paragraph may be true, but the only glimpse of your views that I have to go on here was, "How is that low life expectancy, crazy poverty rates and massive gun violence working out for you?" If you want me to react to your nuanced and informed views, then, perhaps... share those, not this?
I don't think Europe is hell; there are a number of lessons the US should learn from various European nations on state capacity and regulatory topics... but I do think we now have ample reason to believe your political elites' total embrace of "the end of history" and general obsession with safetyism is short-sighted. It is both completely dependent on the American security umbrella and various other means of underwriting Europe, and incompatible with long-term economic, demographic, and social dynamism.
As to the original comment to which you replied, I think there's also very good reason to fear that if/when any of your neighbors succumb to authoritarianism, the citizenry will have fewer levers with which to fight back and a much lower chance of wresting back power compared to ours.
Probably not a disaster, but long term, the ~20% of your GDP from oil will eventually decline. At the same time, you're already trying to tax your billionaires out of existence (and even try to tax them when they leave), so I'm not sure you'll be able to get much more there. To be fair though, all countries are facing cuts in social guarantees as populations age.
I'd hesitate to say "far" superior. In fact, I probably wouldn't say "superior" at all, just "different". I, too, appreciate the strengths of the Madisonian system, but in making comparisons it's good to consider the impact of the bias that Jefferson put his finger on in the Declaration: "...[A]ll experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed."
It's been a while since I read the poli sci papers on this, but in general, parliamentary democracies were more likely to remain democracies, while presidential systems have had a greater tendency to turn into dictatorships or collapse.
I think that’s exactly why I prefer European systems. There are too many individual rights, too much economic negative freedom, not enough economic positive freedom in America.
And I don't really begrudge coming down on that side of things. To some degree it's a values question. Where I get testy is when people deny the trade-offs.
If we had a parliamentary system where the Republicans, led by Donald Trump, won a majority of seats (like they did in the House), we would have exactly the same problem we have right now: a supine, cowed party led by a dictator wannabe, faced only by a powerless opposition.
It's not the Presidency here folks. It's the total moral collapse of one of our two parties, both its "leaders" and its followers.
Yes, but the idea is that a major party would not have selected Trump as its nominee in the first place. The key idea is that you remove selecting nominees from the public.
Honestly, I don't even blame the Republican party for Trumpism. Virtually every single elected official, pundit, and party member had anti-Trump statements back in 2016, including people we think of as being very pro-Trumpy today. Instead he was directly popular with the voters, some of whom were new to the Republican party. In a parliamentary system, we could have simply not offered voters the option to vote for him. This is the way
What Marc said.
Well, I think this is the kind of situation where we can hate the player *and* the game. The purpose of the system is to stop this kind of thing from happening, or at least if it happens to stop it from being damaging.
So what do you propose? We can all see problems, and maybe the modern American presidential system has reached a point of calcification where it's a slow-motion shipwreck happening in plain sight, with nobody able or willing to take hold of the tiller and change course a bit.
It seems to be in the nature of large bureaucracies that in time they do calcify and rot from within. For example, if you get an up-close view of how amazingly bureaucratic the Catholic Church is, it's a lot easier to understand how they let a long-running crisis like the sex-abuse scandal slowly reach a boil, until it nearly destroyed them. And we've seen many examples of large corporate bureaucracies unable to reform themselves and take advantage of the strengths of their positions, until they were displaced by new, more nimble competitors.
The federal government as it exists today is certainly a large bureaucracy, maybe too large for anyone to really manage effectively. How much of what the federal government does today could be broken up and done by state governments? Healthcare? Education? Some of the fifty states would develop into, maybe already have developed into, their own large sluggish bureaucracies. But they also exist in competition and comparison to each other, and the consequences to the nation as whole if some of the cylinders are not firing at any given time aren't that serious, and their competition with each other is likely to be more self-correcting than with a single large federal bureaucracy that monopolizes the field.
I propose that we retain our current system and just allow the major parties to screen who can run for office under their name. They can filter out obviously unqualified parties- Trump and Sanders in 2016 should have been gently shown the door by both parties. It's a perfectly functional system that worked for over 200 years, until do-gooders decided that anyone should be able to run for a major party's nomination- and pushed the American system to the brink.
Just return to the parties screening candidates, it's a very simple and easy fix. Primaries, if you have to have them, can be between 3-5 party-selected nominees. The way other every other political party in the world's other 159 democracies works
While I agree with you, this change would be extremely unpopular with normie voters and so I fear it will never be politically viable.
It may be too late now, but a policy 10 years ago of "to participate in national debates for our highest office, you have to have won some election somewhere running under the banner of our party" would have silently smothered those campaigns and a bunch of other vanity campaigns, too.
Wouldn’t you just end up with more people founding their own party if they really want to run?
I think that bus has sailed though. What if the parties' base wants to nominate MTG and Ilhan Omar in 2028. You going to foreclose competition to them?
I think the US can handle the system that other 159 democracies on planet Earth run on.
A good recent example was the Virginia governor's election, where the Virginia GOP unilaterally ended primaries and instead switched to a convention system, specifically to keep out a whacko MAGA type they thought would lose in the general. They selected a more moderate Republican, Youngkin, and won because of it. Longtime party officials- who are not the 'base'- are in a good position to make rational election-winning decisions. Again, this is how all of the other democracies in the world work!
I think that's a broad overstatement. There are many selections in other countries that are quite terrible, so we're not unique in occasionally making bad choices. I would say that historically, we're above average.
Beyond that, look at the recent DNC chair election and tell me that "longtime party officials who are not the 'base'- are in a good position to make rational election-winning decisions."
Or think about in 2020 that most long term party officials probably would have chosen Elizabeth Warren over Joe Biden, and she would have lost. Now you did have a few elite officials choose Joe Biden over Bernie Sanders, but that's far different from the broader party's choice.
'Historically' we didn't allow random people to run for major party nominations. This is the system I'd like to return to. Also the US is not 'occasionally making bad choices', it is repeatedly making the same error over & over with open primaries and zero party control of nominations.
In my original comment, I just said that the party should choose a few candidates to run in a primary (here I was specifically thinking of presidential ones). The party chooses 4 or 5 nominees, Democratic voters in closed primaries can pick 1 of them. For Congress I'd prefer that local parties simply pick the nominees, as Congressional primaries are extremely low-turnout
"'Historically' we didn't allow random people to run for major party nominations."
Historically anyone could run, they just couldn't get attention/traction. I don't ever know of the parties have a formal mechanism for removing people. Can you point to me when people have been excluded from running?
"US is not 'occasionally making bad choices', it is repeatedly making the same error over & over with open primaries and zero party control of nominations."
Can you point to me where that is occurring? The most egregious recent nominations have been Republicans making terrible choices for Senate, and often those candidates were preferred by the current party leader (Trump).
I'll also say that the two party system is really strongly reinforced by the parties themselves. If we're going to move candidate selection away from the people and into the parties, then we should break open the two party system. Neither of which is likely to happen.
Trump winning in 2020, I hate to admit it, would have been a lot better than this timeline, I think. They didn’t have all this agenda 2025 stuff in play then, there wasn’t as much of the vindictiveness, and it would have gotten the Dems perhaps to pursue a more common sense agenda for 2024 - especially if Trump were wracked with the same inflation that hit Biden - which would probably have been worse bc he would have fought rate increases tooth and nail.
Though I still think all that inflation was the business community conspiring against a Democrat president, I said it when Biden got elected “ok, the corporate powers are gonna raise prices and crash the economy to punish us for electing a Democrat”
There's no constitutional right to compete for or win the nomination of a private political party. If that party thinks you're not on board with its platform and goals and kicks you out, your remedy is to go start your own party and try to outcompete them.
Or it would be, if it weren't for the fact that state action, through a web of ballot and funding laws, has entrenched the two state-sanctioned "major" parties in a duopoly as quasi-public and really private institutions, to the point where the theoretical self-help remedy of starting a competing party isn't a very meaningful one.
The only institutional power base i can see that might plausibly be both able and willing to dismantle this state-supported duopoly system is the judiciary. And even that, only after enough people do the slow boring work of developing and building support for the First Amendment and other legal doctrines and theories needed to do the job.
You'd then have to have something other than first past the post to try to actually make it feasible to have separate parties without just spoiling the party you just broke off from.
Arguably state governments are even less efficient, and local governments are often net negative for the greater good. Fed government is not that large and they mostly administer programs to help people with money and defence.
Expanding the House would help. A la, proper Congressional Apportionment. Additionally, ranked choice voting, and term limits across the board would be popular. I'm torn on the idea of mandatory voting
Just taking the cap off the number of Representatives and making it conform to population as the Founders intended would go a long way toward reforming Congress AND, by direct extension, the Electoral College, since it's numbers in large part depend on the number of House members.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/03/28/danielle-allen-democracy-reform-house-representatives-districts/
Love this! It strikes me that the original Madisonian institutions were actually kind of parliamentary: the electoral college has a path to be decided in the House, for example. If the electors were just the House members, then it would be basically parliamentary. Likewise, impeachment/removal is basically an extreme/very difficult version of a non-confidence vote. So could we achieve a parliamentary system with two simple-sounding ammendments that don’t seem to advantage or disadvantage either party: 1) make the newly elected House the electoral college without any requirement how they vote (i.e. they don’t need to vote for anyone elected by popular vote or electoral college) 2) make impeachment and removal possible with a simple majority vote in the House. From there it would just require hustle and slow boring to get proportional representation at a state level.
So long as districts were drawn by algorithm and not by state legislatures!
I think it’s also worth noting that Elon and Trump have both been CEOs, but never of a ‘normal’ company with an independent board of directors and good corporate governance! There are plenty of corporate CEOs out there who have tried to implement dramatic transformations of the company only to face internal resistance, fail to win over key stakeholders, and eventually lose the confidence of the board!
This is why I see red whenever I hear anyone praise Trump as a "good businessman". Nothing he knows and nothing he's ever done in his career would qualify him for a responsible position in a publicly held company. Quite the contrary.
In all fairness he is the founder of Truth Social, a publicly held company with a market cap of $6.6B! 😜
But yes he and Elon just have a conception of a CEO that is very founder-dictator, not successor-steward or legacy-upholder. Certainly if you cherished and loved your 250 year old megacap conglomerate, your board would not nominate either man to a c-suite job!
Well, Musk has succeeded in business beyond Trump’s wildest dreams. Failing in casinos so profoundly and repeatedly is quite something.
Musk's success as an engineer is undeniable; I would grade his success in business as "incomplete", or maybe TBD. Unless we want to equate "success in business" with "success in attracting investors" rather than "success in generating consistent (and ideally increasing) profits".
I don’t like the guy personally these days, but it seems astonishing to grade the richest man on earth, founder of several of the most valuable companies in the world in their respective domains, as “incomplete”.
I see your point about profitable returns, but as Matt Levine could tell you, we are in a different era now. In the age of memecoins and Robinhood investors, hype and crypto, it seems kind of absurdly pedantic to judge Musk’s business success purely on a rubric for 20th-century entrepreneurship.
You're certainly entitled to your opinion - and your values. Ours are obviously not the same, but unlike you, I won't venture to categorize yours.
I am trying to take a purely objective view of the matter. Any framework for judging “success in business” which fails to give a high grade to the most successful businessman on the globe is, on its face, a failed rubric.
I am not trying to cast aspersions on your approach or your thinking, only to say that it seems inherently self-defeating to stick to an older, more foundational means of defining business success in a modern-day era where companies can so often succeed based on their skill at reacting to market dynamics which have nothing to do with traditional notions of profit or EBITDA or anything else.
I apologize if I came off as aggressive.
He’s still banned from being on the board of a non-profit in New York State
This analysis is right about Madisonian institutions but it's wrong about the current situation and I think it's leading Matt to be too sanguine about the current situation. The difference in Canada or the UK or Japan is that it's much easier to pass laws, and that the head of the party gets to pick the legislative candidates. But what's happening right now is not that the Republicans can't pass laws, or that rogue legislators are defying the executive from their party.
Instead, Trump and Musk and Vought want to (a) ignore a bunch of laws, (b) gut the civil service, and (c) abrogate existing financial commitments. None of these are allowed in the UK or Canada either. I think they want to move quicker than laws would pass even if they had total agreement, they don't want to do the coalition management needed for a small majority (needed even with a parliamentary system), they don't want to tell anyone what they want to do, and they don't want to be constrained even by some new law they wrote. But most fundamentally they seem to think they should get to be dictators which is not how parliamentary systems work either.
Not sure about your 2nd paragraph. The UK and Canada practice parliamentary sovereignty, so neither government is constrained by the judiciary. The Prime Minister of the UK could absolutely gut the civil service if they wanted to, there are far less constraints over there.
The PM of the UK is a lot closer to a dictator than the President of the US could ever be. The real difference is that the parties select the PM candidate so as to screen out obviously unqualified demagogues
The check is 50%+1 votes. They cannot gut thr civil service without parliament going along, and they have the option to just not vote for it, and if they do it's a new, immediate election.
The failure mode of parliaments is when they over centralize PM powers and let them act like presidents.
Parliamentary systems have much higher party discipline than our system does. There's no equivalent to Manchin or Synema or Liberman deciding that they want to vote against the executive on some matter. For one thing, the party controls who runs for office in the first place, and if an MP was problematic they'd simply be ejected from the party. 'Eh I feel like voting against my party on this one' is way, way less of a thing in a parliament.
A prime minister is generally quite a bit more powerful than a president. Especially in a majoritarian system like Britain's
This is true to a significant extent but it’s also true that the UK has had six PMs in the last ten years. So there is that form of accountability.
It depends on the system. If this were literally true, then no formed parliamentary government would ever lose a confidence vote, but they have. And its true if you don't like an MP, you can push them out of office, but then again they can form their own party and run against you pulling out some of your voters causing you to lose.
You can eject them from the party but not from parliament.
Sort of. The major failure in parliamentary systems is when they try to make the prime minister into a president like figure. In particular when they do a general membership leadership election, as opposed to a caucus selected leader. Using congress as the electors keeps it towards the caucus selected leader, which keeps caucus as much more like a board of directors, with the moral authority to remove someone they put in place.
If Trump were a PM and we only had the House and not the Senate, how would it be different?
It wouldn't, particularly. But in such a system the party would be much stronger and therefore it would be very hard for someone like Trump to just take it over as an outsider (in parliamentary systems, populists usually try forming their own party instead, as we see in many European countries).
1. Both Canada and the UK are absolutely constrained by the judiciary, just less than the US.
2. The PM can (often) pass laws that they want. They can't unilaterally not follow the laws. They can't fire the civil service, but they can get their legislature to pass a law getting rid of it. Note that this isn't what's happening today in the US, and that id you think about Justin Trudeau, you can see this power is not absolute -- he couldn't get a law passed today gutting the civil service.
1. No lol, this is simply untrue. Canada and the UK practice parliamentary sovereignty.
https://www.justice.gc.ca/eng/csj-sjc/rfc-dlc/ccrf-ccdl/check/art33.html- Canada's notwithstanding clause, which explicitly allows Parliament to overrule the courts
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judicial_review_in_English_law
"Unlike in some other jurisdictions, such as the United States, English law does not permit judicial review of primary legislation (laws passed by Parliament)"
2. "They can't fire the civil service, but they can get their legislature to pass a law getting rid of it" A distinction without a difference
That the courts can strike down legislation which the government can then use a different procedure to override is not the same as the courts having no power. Just like having to pass a law is actually different from being able to take unilateral action -- parliamentary governments do not always succeed in getting the laws they want passed.
Sure. But your statement that 'Both Canada and the UK are absolutely constrained by the judiciary' is clearly incorrect- neither country is 'absolutely constrained'. Parliament is the highest power, unlike say in the US or Germany
It sounds like you were confused by the use of the word "absolutely" as something like an intensifier here? I was not trying to say that there is some form of constraint called "absolute constraint" which applies to Canada. Canadian politics is constrained, in practice as well as in theory, by the judiciary, although it is a smaller constraint than in the US. Furthermore, the idea that constraints only include formal rules is a serious confusion -- for example, UK prime ministers are constrained in practice by public opinion even though public opinion does not have a formal role in the UK governance process.
Trump can't "unilaterally not follow the laws" either. At least he can't if someone stops him.
I don't think we're talking about different institutions here. I think we're talking about different political cultures, at least as presently constituted.
In our current moment...who stops him?
The courts in the UK don’t have the Marbury v. Madison regularity of judicial review that happens in the United States but they are beholden to the courts’ decisions.
UK courts literally cannot overturn laws passed by parliament. And any ruling from the courts, parliament can simply pass a new law overruling it
"Unlike in some other jurisdictions, such as the United States, English law does not permit judicial review of primary legislation (laws passed by Parliament)"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judicial_review_in_English_law
The Canadian Conservatives have been pushing a talking point that they will win a “supermajority”. This is not a thing and it’s pretty clear to me they are hoping to use their win to upend and even eliminate longstanding institutions. They’re committed to defunding the CBC for example and have talked about firing the central banker, gutting the public service and using the notwithstanding clause more liberally to override Charter rights.
"Instead, Trump and Musk and Vought want to (a) ignore a bunch of laws, (b) gut the civil service, and (c) abrogate existing financial commitments."
This implicates Madisonian republicanism because it's the executive trying to have the powers a prime minister has through their majority in parliament.
My point is that prime ministers do not actually have unlimited power over everything in the government. They have more power than the US president but Canada is not a plebiscitary dictatorship.
It's actually a tribute to America as a nation that we were able to maintain this immensely flawed system for so long. I think that there was just this understanding in the past that having a dictator was something that Americans would simply never countenance.
But Donald Trump is a very unique leader in that he demands monarch-like authority, inspires cult-like devotion in his followers, and has zero qualms about destroying our system. He is a one-man perfect storm to end America.
Without him, destroying our system would never have been possible because pretty much everyone in politics believed in the system. A president (Jeb) Bush, Rubio, DeSantis, et al, would have certainly sought to undermine the liberal project, but none of them would ever have sought to turn America into a version of post-Soviet Russia.
Today's Russia is a failing state with a shrinking population and a crumbling economy, BUT it's leader has ultimate power. And that is the important part for Trump.
I would love to hear Matt discuss this with someone who is a defender of the system.
It's basically all outcome preference. Matt prefers stronger public institutions. The Madisonian system prioritizes shielding the private sphere from the state at the expense of public capacity. Plenty of people have the opposing values.
Does it?
The Madisonian system was perfectly compatible with a regime of racial apartheid, which is about as unshielded from the state as the private sphere can get.
True, the whole slavery thing wasn't destabilizing to the system at all. /s
Well, I’m talking about Jim Crow.
That’s why we have private sector billionares taking over the government oligarch style. The wall clearly holds. /s
Living in the US, Canada, and New Zealand, I've been struck by the different personality types advanced by prime-ministerial vs presidential systems. I believe it was a desire to lock-out a dangerous personality type (the polarizing anti-system firebrand) that motivated the US founders to setup indirect electoral-college elections. The US founder's plan for the electoral college failed. But it looks to me like indirect prime-ministerial elections do achieve what the US founders intended, by promoting personality types more oriented towards coalition building. I think this might be because:
- with a constant risk of being kicked out by a simple majority, prime ministers have to be careful about annoying people and throwing their weight around.
- with no direct mandate, it's harder for a prime ministers to claim to be truer representatives of "real" patriots than legislators.
- if you're working closely with legislators every day, it's hard to convince them support you if you spend your time watching cable or tweeting, or if you're too lazy to read legislation.
- legislators care about passing legislation, which means they have to care about counting votes and building winning coalitions.
There are downsides to coalition builders - they can be transactional and talk in euphemisms. Also, anti-system critics are important for an honest debate. Also, there are a few exceptions to the trend I think I see.
Still, I looks to me like having legislators elect the chief executive achieves what the US founders tried but failed to achieve with the electoral college.
I wouldn't be so sure. As David Frum has pointed out, Canadian governments tend to be either as short as a sneeze or so long that the whole country eventually gets sick of them. And I find it hard to squeeze Justin Trudeau into the model above.
Agreed that Canada sometimes produces governments that last a long time (as does New Zealand). If this is a problem then the fix is term limits.
But regardless of term limits, I'm suggesting that the president/prime minister distinction might affect the probability of dangerous personality types becoming chief executives.
When you say you're having trouble fitting Justin Trudeau into the model, are you saying that Canada is polarized, or that Trudeau is a polarizing anti-system firebrand? If you're saying that there is still polarization in countries with prime-ministerial systems then I agree. I'm just saying that the chief executives in such systems seem less likely to be polarizing anti-system firebrands.
My information sources may be biased. The Canadians I talk to are mainly expats, as am I. Expats leave their countries for a host of reasons, and citizens of the Anglosphere tend to become instant friends when they venture outside it, whatever their differences when they're at home. Talk to the Canadian ones for any time at all and dislike of the Trudeau government, with illustrations, emerges. Most of the Canadian writers that I read write for Quillette and are similarly critical.
My impression is that Trudeau has been in fact as polarizing in Canada as Obama was accused (falsely, in my view) of being in the US, and that very much unlike Obama, Trudeau has been that way on purpose. It may seem strange to consider anyone "anti-system" who has made cabinet government practically a hereditary institution, but then again, maybe not. And at a deeper level, I don't know what to call things like the proliferation of mandatory "land acknowledgements" and whole bizarre "decolonization" ideology pushed by this government if not "anti-system" in the profound sense of undermining nationhood itself.
Very very interesting comment, which made me think. In New Zealand, tension has developed between representation of native tribes in governance (beyond property ownership) and 1-person-1-vote principles. EU governance is a major system-change, relative to independent nations. These movements been pushed by highly university-educated establishment folks, but they are anti-system in the sense of significantly changing old systems. I don't think these movements are pushed by chief executives who are populist anti-system firebrands, so I'm sticking with my beliefs about the personality types advanced by presidential vs prime-ministerial systems. But I agree there is something polarizing, and I think reckless, in some of the changes pushed by some establishment, highly educated subcultures.
Thanks for the insight on New Zealand. That was my impression as well, but I am by no means an expert on Kiwi politics and did not want to get out over my skis in respect to them. They're too small and remote to influence the rest of the Anglosphere very much and many of their issues are uniquely their own, and I wish them well, in finding solutions and in general.
I think, after this is over the path with the least constitutional modification you have is to realize the president should be more of a 'Chief Administtative Office' and not an executive in the modern understanding.
To that end the elected members of the house should be the electors, and congress should have an unbound vote on who they want the president to be. This takes the president off the ballot, and removes a lot of moral authority from them as well.
Congress also needs a simple removal authority as well, for any reason. Noting that congress picks, they should be able to simply unpick the president.
This puts policy making back in the hands of congress, the elected body.
To that end, the senate needs to be cut back so that it's clear which house is pre-eminant to avoid the level of gridlock you have now. Maybe senate going back to state pick? Again by being appointed it would loose the moral authority to be agenda setting, but would have a role as the house of 'sober second thought'.
I will not pay to read Slate. #SorryNotSorry
Haven’t read it since Matt wrote moneybox
I was a Slate reader from the Michael Kinsley days right up to the day that Will Saletan jumped ship -- or was pushed -- to land at the Bulwark. Never again!