No, The System Isn’t Working

Charles Krauthammer and Yuval Levin both have profoundly dopey articles out today pushing back against people who are saying that the American political system is behaving dysfunctionally. Krauthammer deploys a classic tactic of sophistry, noting on the one hand that the Madisonian system is supposed to respond to shifts in public opinion, but also noting on the other hand that the Madisonian system is supposed to be somewhat resistant to shifts in public opinion. Therefore, any possible outcome represents the system “working as designed” which is apparently the same as saying it’s working well. Levin’s argument, which is sillier, is simply to say that over the past 12 months the trajectory of public policy has shifted in a direction he approves of.

Since neither of them consider a comparative perspective, it’s not actually possible to assess what they’re trying to say. Compared to a lot of other ideas, the American political system is pretty great. This beats the pants off, say, Stalin’s Russia or the absolutism of Louis XIV. But how about compared to other forms of representative democracy? A more productive way of looking at this is suggested by George Tsebelis’ work in Veto Players: How Political Institutions Work:

The U.S. government contains a lot of “veto players” — bicameralism, plus the committee system and party cartel dynamics, plus the strong president, plus a lot of judicial authority, plus a lot of devolution of power to state government. The veto players are also quite “distant” now that we have ideologically polarized parties. Tsebelis’ research suggests that this kind of arrangement may be helpful in increasing capital formation and long-term economic growth. And, indeed, over the long-term the United States has been very successful. But by the same token, a government like ours has a great deal of trouble moving to reduce budget deficits, reforming its tax code, or responding to adverse macroeconomic shocks. And right now, people are spending a lot of time worried about deficits, tax reform, and adverse shocks. These are exactly the things our indecisive political system copes with poorly. The even-more-cumbersome decision-making process of the European Union is struggling even worse with these issues. Sweden and Canada are doing fine.