Skowronek on American Democracy: Gridlock, Presidentialism, and Democratic Faith

Guest Blogger

For the Balkinization symposium on Stephen Skowronek, The Adaptability Paradox: Political Inclusion and Constitutional Resilience (University of Chicago Press, 2025).

Andrea Scoseria Katz

Having read several earlier versions of Stephen Skowronek’s The Adaptability Paradox, I was struck by the book’s preface, with this arresting new ending: 

This book is going into production just as a new administration is about to take charge. The elections of 2024 have brought our constitutional institutions into a highly charged partisan alignment, and detailed plans for a thoroughgoing shake-up are already in hand. [T]he following pages offer a view from the precipice. Next steps are ripe with hazard. The outlook is frightening. But we did not arrive here suddenly. The situation at hand did not arise out of the blue. The Adaptability Paradox is about how we reached this point. 

At the time those words were written, Donald Trump had already organized a failed electoral coup, twice been impeached, faced multiple criminal charges and numerous civil lawsuits—and been reelected to the nation’s highest office. Even this gave little sense of what lay ahead. Just one long and chaotic year into his second term, Trump has gone further than any other president in using his formal authority to cripple, politicize, and weaponize the power of the federal government. He has emptied out whole agencies, prosecuted political enemies, strongarmed universities and the legal profession into compliance with his agenda, set a federal police force against American citizens, started a unilateral war of choice, and bid to interfere with the upcoming midterm elections. 

How, as Skowronek asks, did we reach this point? The Adaptability Paradox has much to say about Trump’s causes, and his consequences.

In a book fond of paradoxes, the Rights Revolution of the 1960s and ‘70s is one more, the moment that American democracy both became complete and started to fall apart. With all comers admitted to the deliberative arena, no issue was off the table, shared premises dwindled, and constitutional politics became a series of existential clashes in which every side believed it could not afford to lose. “With full inclusion,” Skowronek writes, “security is in short supply, there is no discounting who is next in charge, and those same separations and checks have been weaponized to vent irreconcilable differences” (204).

It seems to me that Trump, a democratically elected president who threatens to destroy democracy, is symptomatic of the same paradox. Scholars have convincingly depicted his election as a rejection, by the masses, of the very values of tolerance and inclusivity that underpinned the Rights Revolution’s perfected democracy. Others have shown that his simplified Manichean narratives and overweening paternalism speaks to a broader fatigue among voters with democracy (whether democracy as it exists right now, or as a system itself).

For voters sick of the complexity of democracy, Trump is a president par excellence. Their grievances are real. The solution, however, is not.

Consider this account of our government: the president mandates, by the stroke of the pen, some policy change that is sold to the American people as transformative (“the Green New Deal” “Make America Great Again”). Inevitably, it fails to meet the moment. The White House changes hands in an election, the prior policy is disavowed and dismantled, and the cycle begins again. Trump typifies the pattern, but Skowronek, a longtime student of the presidency, has been drawing out this link for years. His work has shown that, over the span of American history, social movements, channeled by the president (Jacksonian democracy, Lincolnian nationalism, the New Deal, Reaganism) have remade the office and the face of government alike. Those cycles of revolution grew progressively more attenuated over the years as the hedge of institutions surrounding the office thickened, leading to the dismaying possibility that even the president—the only institution today that seems capable of decisive action—has lost its capacity for revolution.

In two strands of my recent work—on judicial usurpation of the constitutional order, and on the democratic mobilization that once pushed back against constitutional fetishism—I’ve criticized the shallowness of American democracy’s present form. Skowronek’s paradox suggests that these twin phenomena may derive from a lack of belief in democracy itself. (Skowronek sees too much inclusion as the problem; one might also blame gaping income inequality, the broken party system, technological change, and the rise of the modern conservative legal movement, with its deregulatory ambitions, racial retrenchment, and its phalanx of judges aiming squarely at Congress’s prerogatives to reorder the state). Either way, absent democratic faith—in Congress, elections, or the basic legitimacy of outcomes—the nation has resorted to quick fixes: presidential overpromising, judicial activism, the false of promise of extra-constitutional adaptability itself. These stopgaps have driven us into a corner.

Courts and the president, I believe, are not pure usurpers. They are, at least in part, filling the void left by our own ambivalence toward self-rule. As I argued in my work on the Progressive Era, it was not always so. The great progressive reform movements turned, not to executive power or judicial creativity, but to Article V, managing to push across four system-altering amendments between 1913 and 1920 in a broader era of “constitutional tinkering.” Many reforms proposals targeted the countermajoritarian features of the constitutional order itself: the Electoral College, lifetime judicial tenure, indirect Senate elections.

The Progressives, in other words, did what Skowronek implies is now impossible: they tried to adapt the Constitution through democratic mobilization rather than through extra-constitutional adaptation. And they had real, if incomplete, success.

Why could they do it? Partly, of course, by virtue of the ballast Skowronek describes: theirs was a dramatically exclusionary democracy, and that exclusion constrained and stabilized their mobilizations in ways they could not fully see. But partly, I think, because they trusted the democratic process enough to stake their reform agenda on it. They believed that a mobilized, informed citizenry could change its own Constitution.

This is where Skowronek leaves us at the most vertiginous edge. He suggests the current moment is genuinely unprecedented: prior generations stabilized constitutional change through exclusion, but that stabilizer is gone and cannot decently be restored. The question, as I read him, is whether we can do something no generation of Americans has ever done: sustain democratic self-governance on genuinely inclusive terms.

The answer has to lie, if it lies anywhere, in elections. Elections, to be sure, require trust. But the Progressives found themselves, too, penned in by a divided society and captured institutions. Their saving grace was a “fierce discontent” that forced a fractious and fractured society into a coalition that lasted long enough to force along the Constitution’s rusty Article V machinery. Today, Trump is unpopular, and huge problems—climate change, AI, security and the global order—remain unsolved. A fierce discontent is coming.

Skowronek asks whether we can adapt. The more precise question may be whether, when crisis comes, we can recover our trust in democracy, the Constitution, and ourselves.

Andrea Scoseria Katz is Associate Professor of Law at WashU; she can be reached at andrea.katz@washu.edu.