It is important to note that parlimentary systems can, and have, descended into authoritarianism. Our system is designed, first and foremost, to prevent someone from making himself king. Things look bad now, but the story is not over. People need to come to terms with the fact that Trump won. Not just the electoral college, but the popular vote and he brought the trifecta along with him. He is supposed to be in charge.
Recently I’ve been pretty bullish on Madisonian democracy, with its real separation of executive and legislative functions. It provides a whole extra level of checks and balances not present in a parliamentary system. Even if that can cause gridlock, in a parliamentary system the courts are often the only check on the government (and often time not even that strong of a check).
Epistemic status: not a natural-born American, not educated in American schools, became US citizen at the age of 36, please point out any egregious errors I've made in this comment.
This is a pre-Trump problem, but I've been thinking about this for years now: the worship of the US Constitution is one of America's problems.
The Constitution was a brilliant document for its time (minus some unfortunate *cough*three-fifths*cough moral blind spots) in terms of establishing the US as a country of laws, not men. The authors did their darnedest to prevent America from falling into tyranny, which was their greatest fear.
But they did not know, and couldn't have known, how the function of government would expand over the next 200+ years. In the 1780s, the federal government did the following:
-monopoly on the legitimate use of force (the first function of every nation's government)
-foreign policy
-some infrastructure: roads, canals
-the US Postal Service
-a census of the US population every 10 years
and that was pretty much it. No Medicare, no Social Security, no agencies like FDA or NIH, very little (if any?) help for the poor and needy, who were expected to rely on family or private charity
So now, every time someone wants to change how the government works, the question arises: "Is this Constitutional?" And the honest answer is "Hell if I know, the Founding Fathers didn't *have* opinions on 'How should we regulate speech on social media?' or 'Should we have Medicare?' it just wasn't on their mental radar."
Silly analogy time: It's sort of as if a group of mothers had written The One and Only Parenting Manual to Rule Them All back in 1787, and every mother was required, by law, to follow all the regulations in the Manual. If it's anti-Manual, you're not allowed to do it!
So, 2025 rolls around, and I ask: "Am I allowed to buy this 2400-piece LEGO set for my nine-year-old?" And there's a big argument over how this comports with The Manual, with one side arguing, "Well, the Manual mentions it's ok to provide your children with toys" and the other side saying, "But in 1787, toys meant a horsey whittled out of wood and a rag doll sewn from scraps, not a goddamn LEGO set made of plastic that didn't even exist back then" and both sides have a point, and neither side considers that the right answer is "Hey guys, it's 2025, mayyyyybe we shouldn't be forever bound by the Manual that was written back when a mother's biggest concern was how do I prevent my children from dying of infectious diseases by age 5, not what kind of toys to buy."
I visited the Jefferson Memorial in DC, and there's a quote on the wall that says (paraphrased from memory) that the Constitution should change with the times, and having the same Constitution over decades, with no changes, is like "expecting a man to still wear the coat that fit him when he was a boy."
Of course, the Constitution, flawed as it is by the standards of 2025, is a Schelling point, so we really can't propose getting rid of it without blowing up whatever slender threads still hold this country together. So I don't have a solution. I just wanted to point out the problem.
Say what you will about Poland, for example, our first Constitution was ratified on May 3, 1791 (a national holiday in Poland), but nowadays absolutely nobody refers to it to decide how to run the country and if you suggested it, people would look at you like you were nuts. "What does the Constitution of 1791 say about this?" The only sane answer is, "Who gives a damn, that was one partition, two world wars, a Nazi occupation and a Soviet occupation ago! The world has changed!"
The issue isn't the constitution. Our constitution has been changed quite a few times since it was originally written. Our populace just no longer wants to put in the effort to convince people to change it these days. We also look to the federal government to solve everything now and care more about imposing laws we want onto people 2000 miles away from us than we care about having a functional government in the town we live in.
Big sweeping change should be difficult at the federal level. Culture war topics should only reach the federal government when one side has such overwhelming support it can be written into an amendment. We should be battling these things out between citizens.
I disagree with your evaluation of the Constitution, but certainly understand where you're coming from. More importantly, I think that you're absolutely right that trying to replace it would blow us apart. And if we succeeded in coming up with a new constitution that held the Union together, it would probably have a much stronger government and much weaker protection of individual rights than we have now. I've probably had more exposure than most SB readers to the people on the Right who dream of a second Constitutional Convention, and some of the ideas that they agree on are more than disturbing, and were quite Project 2025 before Project 2025 was a thing.
Yeah. We should have a second constitutional convention but only after our right wing is gone, or they have to be completely cut out of the process…Tbh a lot of the left is pretty unserious too…in fact we should just get Matt to write a new constitution.
Just looking at the final paragraph in the Tushnet paper: that hardball will continue until Republicans take over all branches or realize they cannot do so. Now, they have done so. I wonder if Matt or someone would pick up where Tushnet drops off...what is the next paragraph....
Does Tushnet conclude that once Republicans control all branches the need for hardball is moot and a constitutional moment will occur - still within the basic boundaries?
Would Tushnet find what is happening now a constitutional moment within the basic structure, or a constitutional crisis?
Well, I got tired of waiting for hypotheticals and decided to go to the source. I asked Professor Tushnet via email and he replied.
"You pose a really interesting question. Here's a stab: In 2024 an ideologically unified Republican Party gained unified control of the national government and started to play what we might call Extreme Hardball. Yet, their control of the government was not fully consolidated. Narrow margins in the House and Senate in particular posed a threat that the need to enact statutes (tax and spending, in particular) and external events (inflation, for example) might lead to the unraveling of a consistent governing majority. Republicans acted as if they had already moved through a constitutional moment to a new regime--and time might prove them correct. As of the first quarter of 2024, though, that remains and open question." ~ Mark Tushnet
From the Vox article: "In a parliamentary system, deadlocks get resolved. A prime minister who lacks the backing of a parliamentary majority is replaced by a new one who has it. If no such majority can be found, a new election is held and the new parliament picks a leader. It can get a little messy for a period of weeks, but there’s simply no possibility of a years-long spell in which the legislative and executive branches glare at each other unproductively."
If the counter for Linz's views historically has been the United States of America, than the counter for the view above in recent years has been Belgium. The problems may run deeper than constitutional forms, or the combination of aggressive Russian and Chinese disinformation campaigns supercharged by unregulated (in the West) social media, or we all may just be randomly going through a particularly bad time. It could be all of the above -- but if I had to bet, my money would be on the disinformation.
I propose that in the future, presidents be elected as follows:
Thirty members of the House of Representatives, chosen by lot, shall choose nine state governors. The nine governors shall choose forty senators, who shall in turn choose twelve of themselves by lot. The twelve senators shall choose twenty-five mayors, who shall in turn choose nine county executives. The nine county executives shall choose forty-five adult citizens, who shall in turn choose eleven tenured and tenure-track members of the Yale University Department of Mathematics, who shall then choose the President.
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 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.
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.
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!
Despite the problems with Presidential systems, we've had a remarkable run - surviving a civil war and several previous imperial presidencies. For all the flaws of our system, it's been remarkably resilient. That's one reason I'm not a doomer about Trump. Chances are the Democrats, in spite of themselves, will do well in the mid-terms, and then in four years, the Trump era will be over.
I felt that way during Trump 1.0, but judging from the damage that he'd done during just the first month and the team from Project 2025 that he has around him, I'm not nearly so optimistic. I hope that you're right and I'm wrong.
(1) I have seen parliamentary systems criticized as having a weak executive, although strong prime ministers like Tony Blair and Angela Merkel seem to be counterexamples. Do you have a comment? (2) What about the French system that involves both a president and a prime minister?
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.
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.
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
Matt, Your Vox article is unbelievably brilliant and prophetic. And so many of the comments here are very insightful and helpful in processing what you've posted today and in the Vox article. Seems to me that you have provided a focus now that our best minds need to get to work on to figure out how to bring us through this crisis.
Any critique of the our presidential system or American democracy in general (and I've got plenty) has to grapple with the fact that we are currently shockingly wealthy and powerful on a global scale. Our nearest friendly competitors are not even particularly close, and the dark empires that arose to explicitly challenge us were left in rubble, sometimes glowing. We had advantages, surely, but nearly every place does. Remember that whatever governance problems we have and whatever technocratic fixes you wish to apply have a high bar to clear.
Can we say that the Trump administration, instead of being engaged in Constitutional Hardball, is engaged in Constitutional Calvinball?
It is important to note that parlimentary systems can, and have, descended into authoritarianism. Our system is designed, first and foremost, to prevent someone from making himself king. Things look bad now, but the story is not over. People need to come to terms with the fact that Trump won. Not just the electoral college, but the popular vote and he brought the trifecta along with him. He is supposed to be in charge.
Recently I’ve been pretty bullish on Madisonian democracy, with its real separation of executive and legislative functions. It provides a whole extra level of checks and balances not present in a parliamentary system. Even if that can cause gridlock, in a parliamentary system the courts are often the only check on the government (and often time not even that strong of a check).
Epistemic status: not a natural-born American, not educated in American schools, became US citizen at the age of 36, please point out any egregious errors I've made in this comment.
This is a pre-Trump problem, but I've been thinking about this for years now: the worship of the US Constitution is one of America's problems.
The Constitution was a brilliant document for its time (minus some unfortunate *cough*three-fifths*cough moral blind spots) in terms of establishing the US as a country of laws, not men. The authors did their darnedest to prevent America from falling into tyranny, which was their greatest fear.
But they did not know, and couldn't have known, how the function of government would expand over the next 200+ years. In the 1780s, the federal government did the following:
-monopoly on the legitimate use of force (the first function of every nation's government)
-foreign policy
-some infrastructure: roads, canals
-the US Postal Service
-a census of the US population every 10 years
and that was pretty much it. No Medicare, no Social Security, no agencies like FDA or NIH, very little (if any?) help for the poor and needy, who were expected to rely on family or private charity
So now, every time someone wants to change how the government works, the question arises: "Is this Constitutional?" And the honest answer is "Hell if I know, the Founding Fathers didn't *have* opinions on 'How should we regulate speech on social media?' or 'Should we have Medicare?' it just wasn't on their mental radar."
Silly analogy time: It's sort of as if a group of mothers had written The One and Only Parenting Manual to Rule Them All back in 1787, and every mother was required, by law, to follow all the regulations in the Manual. If it's anti-Manual, you're not allowed to do it!
So, 2025 rolls around, and I ask: "Am I allowed to buy this 2400-piece LEGO set for my nine-year-old?" And there's a big argument over how this comports with The Manual, with one side arguing, "Well, the Manual mentions it's ok to provide your children with toys" and the other side saying, "But in 1787, toys meant a horsey whittled out of wood and a rag doll sewn from scraps, not a goddamn LEGO set made of plastic that didn't even exist back then" and both sides have a point, and neither side considers that the right answer is "Hey guys, it's 2025, mayyyyybe we shouldn't be forever bound by the Manual that was written back when a mother's biggest concern was how do I prevent my children from dying of infectious diseases by age 5, not what kind of toys to buy."
I visited the Jefferson Memorial in DC, and there's a quote on the wall that says (paraphrased from memory) that the Constitution should change with the times, and having the same Constitution over decades, with no changes, is like "expecting a man to still wear the coat that fit him when he was a boy."
Of course, the Constitution, flawed as it is by the standards of 2025, is a Schelling point, so we really can't propose getting rid of it without blowing up whatever slender threads still hold this country together. So I don't have a solution. I just wanted to point out the problem.
Say what you will about Poland, for example, our first Constitution was ratified on May 3, 1791 (a national holiday in Poland), but nowadays absolutely nobody refers to it to decide how to run the country and if you suggested it, people would look at you like you were nuts. "What does the Constitution of 1791 say about this?" The only sane answer is, "Who gives a damn, that was one partition, two world wars, a Nazi occupation and a Soviet occupation ago! The world has changed!"
The issue isn't the constitution. Our constitution has been changed quite a few times since it was originally written. Our populace just no longer wants to put in the effort to convince people to change it these days. We also look to the federal government to solve everything now and care more about imposing laws we want onto people 2000 miles away from us than we care about having a functional government in the town we live in.
Big sweeping change should be difficult at the federal level. Culture war topics should only reach the federal government when one side has such overwhelming support it can be written into an amendment. We should be battling these things out between citizens.
It’s *always* right to buy your kids (and you) a 2500 piece Lego set (unless they’re too young and will choke)
I disagree with your evaluation of the Constitution, but certainly understand where you're coming from. More importantly, I think that you're absolutely right that trying to replace it would blow us apart. And if we succeeded in coming up with a new constitution that held the Union together, it would probably have a much stronger government and much weaker protection of individual rights than we have now. I've probably had more exposure than most SB readers to the people on the Right who dream of a second Constitutional Convention, and some of the ideas that they agree on are more than disturbing, and were quite Project 2025 before Project 2025 was a thing.
Yeah. We should have a second constitutional convention but only after our right wing is gone, or they have to be completely cut out of the process…Tbh a lot of the left is pretty unserious too…in fact we should just get Matt to write a new constitution.
Just looking at the final paragraph in the Tushnet paper: that hardball will continue until Republicans take over all branches or realize they cannot do so. Now, they have done so. I wonder if Matt or someone would pick up where Tushnet drops off...what is the next paragraph....
Does Tushnet conclude that once Republicans control all branches the need for hardball is moot and a constitutional moment will occur - still within the basic boundaries?
Would Tushnet find what is happening now a constitutional moment within the basic structure, or a constitutional crisis?
Well, I got tired of waiting for hypotheticals and decided to go to the source. I asked Professor Tushnet via email and he replied.
"You pose a really interesting question. Here's a stab: In 2024 an ideologically unified Republican Party gained unified control of the national government and started to play what we might call Extreme Hardball. Yet, their control of the government was not fully consolidated. Narrow margins in the House and Senate in particular posed a threat that the need to enact statutes (tax and spending, in particular) and external events (inflation, for example) might lead to the unraveling of a consistent governing majority. Republicans acted as if they had already moved through a constitutional moment to a new regime--and time might prove them correct. As of the first quarter of 2024, though, that remains and open question." ~ Mark Tushnet
From the Vox article: "In a parliamentary system, deadlocks get resolved. A prime minister who lacks the backing of a parliamentary majority is replaced by a new one who has it. If no such majority can be found, a new election is held and the new parliament picks a leader. It can get a little messy for a period of weeks, but there’s simply no possibility of a years-long spell in which the legislative and executive branches glare at each other unproductively."
If the counter for Linz's views historically has been the United States of America, than the counter for the view above in recent years has been Belgium. The problems may run deeper than constitutional forms, or the combination of aggressive Russian and Chinese disinformation campaigns supercharged by unregulated (in the West) social media, or we all may just be randomly going through a particularly bad time. It could be all of the above -- but if I had to bet, my money would be on the disinformation.
I propose that in the future, presidents be elected as follows:
Thirty members of the House of Representatives, chosen by lot, shall choose nine state governors. The nine governors shall choose forty senators, who shall in turn choose twelve of themselves by lot. The twelve senators shall choose twenty-five mayors, who shall in turn choose nine county executives. The nine county executives shall choose forty-five adult citizens, who shall in turn choose eleven tenured and tenure-track members of the Yale University Department of Mathematics, who shall then choose the President.
Plot twist: there are only 11 tenure track faculty in the Yale math department
ShockedPikachu dot jpeg
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 refuse to call this holiday anything other than "Washington's Birthday".
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.
He’s still banned from being on the board of a non-profit in New York State
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.
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!
Despite the problems with Presidential systems, we've had a remarkable run - surviving a civil war and several previous imperial presidencies. For all the flaws of our system, it's been remarkably resilient. That's one reason I'm not a doomer about Trump. Chances are the Democrats, in spite of themselves, will do well in the mid-terms, and then in four years, the Trump era will be over.
And the democrats will build the 21st century bureaucracy that we all deserve!
I felt that way during Trump 1.0, but judging from the damage that he'd done during just the first month and the team from Project 2025 that he has around him, I'm not nearly so optimistic. I hope that you're right and I'm wrong.
(1) I have seen parliamentary systems criticized as having a weak executive, although strong prime ministers like Tony Blair and Angela Merkel seem to be counterexamples. Do you have a comment? (2) What about the French system that involves both a president and a prime minister?
We have a president and a prime minister (Speaker of the House).
Residents of parliamentary systems, many of which have drifted to a more presidential expression, should also heed this piece as a warning.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/287075424_Canada_Executive_Dominance_Canada_Executive_Dominance_and_Presidentialization
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.
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.
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.
Matt, Your Vox article is unbelievably brilliant and prophetic. And so many of the comments here are very insightful and helpful in processing what you've posted today and in the Vox article. Seems to me that you have provided a focus now that our best minds need to get to work on to figure out how to bring us through this crisis.
Any critique of the our presidential system or American democracy in general (and I've got plenty) has to grapple with the fact that we are currently shockingly wealthy and powerful on a global scale. Our nearest friendly competitors are not even particularly close, and the dark empires that arose to explicitly challenge us were left in rubble, sometimes glowing. We had advantages, surely, but nearly every place does. Remember that whatever governance problems we have and whatever technocratic fixes you wish to apply have a high bar to clear.