Balkinization: Is America Governable? (II)

Is America Governable? (II)

Sandy Levinson

I note two quotes from today's story in the NYTimes on continuing gridlock in Washington. The first is from Peter Wehner, described as a "former top White House aide to President George W. Bush." “The stars are all aligning the wrong way in terms of working together. Right now, the political system is not up to the moment and the challenges that we face.” The second involves Tom Daschle, the former Democratic majority leader in the Senate, who is described as fearing that "Washington would remain paralyzed on taxes and other issues until the country truly faces a crisis. 'I worry that it’s going to take that kind of a condition to bring people to the reality that they can’t mess around here anymore,” Mr. Daschle said."

Both are telling--and ominous. We don't know, of course, what Mr. Wenher means by "the political system" that is inadequate to our challenges. Perhaps he means "only" the crazed Right Wing in the House who despise his old boss (for all of the wrong reasons) and whatever failures he wishes to assign to President Obama or the Senate Democrats. I, of course, have my own definition of "political system" that links it to the Constitution, and I won't repeat those arguments. Mr. Daschle may be aware that most defective constitutional orders change only after a "true crisis" (or, at the least, the perception of being faced with such a crisis, as was the case in 1787 and explains the calling of the Philadelphia Convention).

Alexander Hamilton wrote memorably in Federalist 1 that the true challenge/model posed to and by Americans was whether we, or any political order, was capable of engaging in "reflection and choice" about the most basic political propositions. My new "project" is to write 85 short essays on each of the Federalist essays, and the them of the first one is to ask whether "reflection and choice" was a one-time event, that we are incapable of repeating either because (pick one): a) we lack a Washington; b) we lack Madison and Hamilton, and we couldn't safely exile Jefferson- and Adams-like figures to places far away where they couldn't participate in the deliberations; c) we were blessed by elite governance in 1787-88 and today, alas, we are governed by the democratic mob in whom we have no faith; or d) we are just too large and diverse to engage in meaningful self-governance, so better to stick with the devil we know than to embark on a dangerous national project of "reflection and choice" that would almost certainly fail and leave things even worse than they are now.

Posted 12:59 PM by Sandy Levinson [link]