The New American Adaptability Paradigm: Empire or Federation?

Guest Blogger

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

Rogers M. Smith 

Stephen Skowronek’s The Adaptability Paradox: Political Inclusion and Constitutional Resilience is grimly persuasive. The U.S. Constitution proclaimed that “We the People” would govern. But it won adoption only by also tacitly promising that the interests of the most powerful among the people, especially the propertied, land-hungry, often slaveholding white Christian men who led the American Revolution and designed its new political system, would not be disrupted, would more likely be protected and advanced. The original promise of popular self-governance has fueled pressures for changes in that system all through its history, and major changes have come--some through constitutional amendments, most notably those of Reconstruction, banning enslavement and racial disfranchisement, some through fundamental additions to the original institutional arrangements, most notably the modern administrative state, devoted to economic regulation, some redistribution, and civil rights. But those democratizing adaptations gained the limited success that they have had because they were accompanied by new protections for powerful interests. Jim Crow laws and practices sheltered the white landholders of the South up through the New Deal. Business corporations have benefited from their secure representation among the experts serving as administrative regulators up through the present day.

Now, with Americans across the spectrum angry at political, economic, and administrative elites, demands for democratization are testing the adaptability and resilience of the American constitutional system perhaps more than ever before—because now the demands are on behalf of diverse groups of Americans wide enough to encompass virtually the entire nation, making the threats to powerful interests, and the institutions that protect them, greater than ever. It is not clear that the kind of auxiliary institutional adjustments or even amendments that in the past sufficed for adaptations, bracketed by much continuity, can do the job this time. So, Skowronek concludes, “a fundamental reassessment of our basic governing arrangements might finally be in order.”

America’s troubled past and its alarming present highlight two different paradigms that might guide such a fundamental reassessment. A limitation of Skowronek’s analysis is that it overwhelmingly focuses on and illuminates developments within the American nation. If we embrace the transnational turn in much modern scholarship, one ugly reality is immediately apparent. The United States has repeatedly, indeed continuously, placated what Skowronek calls the “peculiar interests” of powerful groups within it through imperial governance of communities outside its geographic or its membership boundaries, along with the many internal protections for those interests that he details. The Constitution both authorized the new national government to regulate commerce with the Indigenous peoples it referred to as the “Indian Tribes” and gave it power to raise armies that all knew would aid settler western expansion and land acquisition, at those peoples’ expense. The Monroe Doctrine served to shield a long history of economic investment, and too often exploitation, by U.S. businesses in the lands to the nation’s south in the Western Hemisphere. The Spanish American War facilitated the acquisition of Puerto Rico, Hawaii, Guam, and the other insular territories, strengthening the nation’s capacities to exercise military power on behalf of its interests as well as providing businesses with further opportunities. Scholars can debate whether we should call “imperial” those policies that have treated involuntary African immigrants and their descendants, and later unauthorized immigrants, as labor resources denied access to full membership in the U.S. citizenry. Regardless, they represent forms of protection for peculiar interests that America’s governing institutions, including courts interpreting the Constitution, have historically mostly upheld.

That past and present reliance on imperial governance as a means of garnishing the support of the powerful for the U.S. constitutional system has renewed significance today. As a legion of democratic theorists and billions of other people are vividly aware, the United States, as the world’s largest economy and only true military superpower, routinely makes coercively enforced decisions with enormous consequences for the lives of people outside the U.S., who are effectively governed without their consent. Consequently, demands for democratization now increasingly extend to challenges from around the world to the entire highly unequal global system of putatively sovereign nation-states, with America standing proudly if unsteadily at its apex.

But those challenges have provoked resurgences in authoritarian nationalism in the United States and many other countries, with policies centered on curbing immigration and shattering international institutions and agreements. And in the first year of the second Trump administration, the MAGA version of authoritarian nationalism has openly embraced renewed imperialism, including threats to acquire Greenland and perhaps even Canada by force; the suitably hideously named “Donroe Doctrine” justifying attacking and incarcerating or assassinating Western Hemisphere leaders unless they serve American economic interests; and military actions in the Middle East tied to wild hopes of acquiring Iranian oil and turning Gaza into an American tourist resort. These developments make clear that one very live option for adaptation of the American constitutional system to current internal and external demands for further democratization is an imperial presidency, claiming both constitutional and popular authorization while ignoring or repressing all the voices and evidence proving that these claims are nonsensical lies, and pursuing imperialist policies overseas that serve enough peculiar American interests to sustain the authoritarians’ power.

But most Americans do not support the adaptation of their system in that direction. While the possibility of mounting destructive divisions is therefore all too great, there is another more constructive paradigm they may seek to develop. As Skowronek explains, one of the fundamental ways that the United States has coped with conflicts and diversity within its ranks is federalism—a response embodied in the nation’s very name. When the Constitution worked more than it does at present, federalism was, Skowronek observes, “the cornerstone of the constitutional structure” and “the foundation of national comity,” a “safety valve for diffusing social antagonisms and keeping support for national power anchored in common ground.” It did so, however, by fencing off many forms of local hierarchy and domination from democratizing reforms. The nation’s history of constitutional adaptations has involved major shifts of power to the national level in part to better secure democratic rights, broadly defined, for all, against state and local violations. So while Skowronek recognizes a “reharness” of federalism as one of the progressive ideas for a suitable constitutional adaptation floating around today, he lists it as only one of many “hints” that falls short of “a more comprehensive reconceptualization” of America’s political project.

That judgment is probably right if we think of federalism only as shifting power between the state and national governments in America today. But federalism conceived as instrument of democratization that extends beyond those units, and indeed beyond the current formal political boundaries of the United States, could be central to a much more far-reaching adaptation of the constitutional system. Instead of perpetuating what remains fundamentally imperial governance over Indigenous communities and the insular territories, and instead of intensifying unilateral domination and sometimes engaging in direct annexation over peoples and lands outside the nation’s borders, the U.S. might commit more fully to trends already visible in the wake of the “rights revolution” of the post-World War II era. It might make fully equal states of those territories that wish that status. It might recognize for tribal communities and other territories greater powers of self-governance, while finding new and better ways to partner with them in cooperative governing arrangements, as Oklahoma and tribal leaders have struggled to do in the wake of the Supreme Court’s ruling in McGirt v. Oklahoma. It could similarly seek to strengthen, not eviscerate, partnerships in governance with Canada, Greenland, Mexico, and other regional political communities. Still more ambitiously, it could join in global efforts to revise the international political, economic, and legal institutions crafted after World War II so that they become more genuinely capable of responding to democratic choices of the world’s peoples, in ways that might more effectively address the many problems of economic development, climate change, immigration flows, energy production, and military security that transcend national boundaries and are often worsened by them.

To even conceive of what such expansive forms of federalism might look like, much less to build political support for them, will probably require accepting two related conceptual adaptations that will be hard to swallow. First, it will be necessary to cease thinking of the sovereignty of political communities as an absolute right to have final say over what the community does. Instead, as in some Indigenous traditions, sovereignty must be thought of as carrying with it an obligation to find ways of cooperating with other federated communities, embracing collaborations in governance and constructive compromises in pursuit of the communities’ goals to the greatest degree possible. Second, it will be necessary to accept wider diversity in the local languages, institutions, customs, and practices of federation member communities than many proponents of sovereign national power, both conservative and progressive, find bearable. In particular, the well-founded progressive fear that federalism might once again become a powerful instrument to safeguard local systems of domination, exploitation and oppression will need to be balanced by sober, empirically-formed assessments of whether accepting certain kinds of diversity in local institutions and practices within a stable though evolving super-federation works on balance to expand opportunities for democratic self-governance and human flourishing.

Even if those conceptual adaptations gain widespread assent, it will be enormously challenging to work out, programmatically and politically, how to adapt America’s constitutional system, and those of communities with which it will become more thoroughly aligned, in ways that can reassure enough powerful interests to make such expanded federated democratization possible. The path instead toward a paradigm of adaptation that champions presidential and national imperialism is sadly far clearer, and the United States is already on it. But as a sage even wiser than Professor Skowronek once said, “change is good,” even if the answer remains, “yeah, but it’s not easy.”

Rogers Smith is the Christopher H. Browne Distinguished Emeritus Professor of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania. He can be reached at rogerss@sas.upenn.edu.