So thinking tonight about the failure of the American system.
I think I started talking about the ongoing constitutional crisis back in like 2014 or so -- as it became clear that the Republicans in Congress were simply unwilling to act appropriately when it came to governance, and thus that basic government work wasn't getting done, more and more power got de facto ceded to Obama, and thus to the White House. A good example is the time they passed a bill that let Obama raise the debt ceiling on his own a few times but allowed Congress to vote against it without actually stopping him. Ironically, this was actually an improvement over the current policy -- but mainly because Congress knew that they had to raise the debt ceiling but were unwilling to face the political consequences of taking the vote.
My concern at the time was that it's probably not good for the country if legislative power just wanes at the expense of executive power, because eventually a less competent executive might get in. This turned out to be apt...but also exactly wrong,
In practice, Trump is providing great evidence for the Neustadt model of the presidency, in which the president is basically just a project manager and must persuade people to come together on policies since he has more or less no power to compel. It's worth really considering the fact that Trump issued an order banning transgender people from the American armed forces and it was completely ignored. The president pretty clearly has the constitutional power to do this thing! But because his order was unpopular policy, serving no clear American interest, and he himself was extremely unpopular and untrusted, the armed forces more or less just pretended it didn't happen and even explicitly pushed back against it. It may still take place in the future, but given that the Secretary of Defense himself doesn't want to do it, it seems most likely that this order will simply be forgotten. This should serve as a clear sign of just how little presidential power Trump wields right now.*
So my fear was somewhat wrong -- when the executive became less competent than the legislature, the pendulum just swung back, disempowering the executive. But it's still really bad for either to be weak and incapable of governing, and right now they both are, and there's a lot of governing power that in practice is being wielded by nobody. Even apart from the whole being a Nazi thing, this is paralyzing for American power.
It's also clear that I failed to reckon with the depth and importance of the rot facing the Republicans. Josh Barro wrote an excellent article today on the collapse of the Republican Party -- basically, it's W's fault. He implemented all the ideas of the Republican Party, they were all basically terrible, but the GOP never managed to come up with any new ideas or come to terms with W's failure at all, and it left a vacuum that was filled with Nazis.**
Of course, we've been discussing the internal collapse of the Republican Party for a while -- since 2012, at least. But what I didn't quite grasp at the time was that, in our two-party democracy, both parties are actually structural components of the governing structure, because both parties retain strong potential access to the levers of power, so if the Republican Party is rotten, the American government is too. Essentially, a party's ability to get elected in America is significantly independent from its ability to manage itself and promote competent candidates.
That's kind of an unbelievable sentence, but I think it's basically true. Unfortunately, it's also kind of a vast indictment of the American system! Our democracy pretty much just doesn't work any more. We have a decent chance every year of electing a total incompetent, and it won't ever stop until we get a functional opposition party. And I don't want the one we have to become functional again because it's full of Nazis now and needs to be thrown out. And even if we do get one, we clearly have no way to guarantee it stays that way. The two-party system is much, much worse -- for America and for the world -- than I had ever previously understood.
*
https://www.bloomberg.com/view/arti...960-book-that-explains-why-trump-is-a-failure
**
http://www.businessinsider.com/repu...thical-obligation-to-quit-trumps-party-2017-8
