Balkinization: Too Much or Too Little Adaptation?

Too Much or Too Little Adaptation?

Guest Blogger

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

Emily Zackin

The Adaptability Paradox is a sweeping and novel account of America’s current political predicament and its causes. The book teems with the synthetic insights we have come to expect from Stephen Skowronek, a genuinely foundational scholar of the American state and its development. It offers a challenging and counterintuitive thesis, worthy of careful interrogation.

The Adaptability Paradox argues that over the course of U.S. history, the Constitution has weathered recurrent democratic challenges by repeatedly adapting to them. Now, however, the Constitution has adapted so much that it can no longer serve constitutional purposes; it has come “unbound.”

A similar-sounding critique often stems from concerns about the proper method of constitutional interpretation and is typically coupled with the complaint that new readings of the Constitution are so wholly untethered from its text and history that the document is now unable to constrain its interpreters. Such diagnoses of our unbounded constitution typically describe the judicial abandonment of textualism and an embrace of unenumerated rights as either causes or symptoms of this disfunction. But this book does not retread that familiar ground. In fact, The Adaptability Paradox is not very interested in our relationship to text or the ways it might constrain us.

The problem that The Adaptability Paradox describes is even bigger and possibly even scarier than the Constitution’s inability to constrain its interpreters. Its view of the Constitution is not as the legal document that courts interpret, but as the set of institutional arrangements through which we channel political conflicts to make governing decisions. In this context, “unboundedness” conveys not a departure from text-bound readings, but the absence of any outer limits to our politics. The consequence, it contends, has been a fundamental inability to govern ourselves using the institutions we’ve got. In other words, the existing procedures for contestation can no longer channel or even temporarily resolve our political struggles, so that we are now turning in a widening gyre, in grave danger of falling apart. The analytical meat of the book is its argument about why the center of American politics will no longer hold.

The Adaptability Paradox argues that the “full inclusion” of previously excluded groups was the decisive adaptation that rendered the constitutional system unworkable. The success of the Civil Rights Movement, it claims, unleashed a politics that our system of government could not contain. This is an extraordinarily provocative thesis, one which we must be careful not to misread. It is not an argument that we should return to exclusion nor that oppressive status hierarchies are or were morally defensible. As I read The Adaptability Paradox, it stipulates that exclusion was a normative failure, but notes that, as an empirical matter, it was also an instrumentally important feature of our constitutional development. But why would that be?

Why would exclusion have been so essential to the ongoing functioning of the Constitutional system? The book describes the importance of exclusionary hierarchy through the metaphor of “ballast.” I take it to mean that the people who stood to lose from adaptations to the constitutional system were willing to accept those changes as long as they could be assured of their continued status atop the oppressive hierarchies they maintained. Potential spoilers could, in other words, be consistently bought off with the promise that, whatever other compromises were required of them, the loss of oppressive status hierarchies would not be among them. The New Deal Coalition, for example, was only maintained by the blind eye that the Democratic Party turned to Jim Crow segregation. Before that, Whigs and Democrats developed a national party system and governing apparatus that, for a time, prevented slavery from dividing either party along sectional lines. Racial oppression was, time and again, a boundary for white political leaders hoping to garner support across sectional divides.

This analysis is consonant with a larger literature on constitutional survival, one that argues successful constitutions must be self-enforcing. The logic here is that no external authority stands outside a constitution, able to punish violations. Therefore, if powerful actors think it is in their interests to simply ignore a constitution, they can and will. Thus, constitutional survival depends on these actors’ continual determinations that it is more beneficial for them to support the system than to subvert it. Constitutional federalism is often described in similar terms, as a mechanism to ensure a constitution’s survival by bracketing off the issues that might threaten it. By allowing subnational polities (or perhaps elites) to maintain authority over the kinds of decisions that would cause them to blow up the system if they lost, federalism serves as a constitutional safety valve. In the United States, this often meant that white citizens were promised the governing autonomy to continue to exclude Black citizens. Indeed, The Adaptability Paradox highlights the loss of subnational autonomy over questions of racial equality as one of the key developments that led to constitutional failure.

The idea seems to be that the Constitution got stretched one too many times, like an elastic waistband that eventually lost its ability to hold anything in place. We might imagine, though, that the system is not suffering from a kind of structural or mechanical failure, but from a lack of democratic competence on the part of some of its citizens. In another work on the anxieties of American democracy, Talking to Strangers, Danielle Allen identifies a different paradox as crucial to the politics that followed the Civil Rights Movement. The central paradox for Allen is not that too much adaptation has rendered the Constitution unadaptable, but that democratic citizens are collectively promised sovereignty yet individually required to accept repeated losses at the hands of their fellow citizens. In Black Grief/White Grievance, Juliet Hooker presses this insight further, arguing not only that the ability to accept political loss is an essential attribute of democratic citizenship, but also that white grievance about a loss of status has proven a potent anti-democratic force. Rather than exhibiting the capacity to tolerate the experience of loss, aggrieved white citizens have viewed movements toward equality as unacceptable forms of defeat. This account seems similar to the one that The Adaptability Paradox offers us—once racial hierarchy was less available to soften other political losses or incentivize participation in the broader political system, those who felt hierarchies dissolving beneath them turned their sights on the system itself.

If this reading of the book’s central argument is correct, I wonder about the emphasis it places on adaptation as the source of constitutional failure. We might argue that, by definition, a constitutional system has failed when its participants choose to blow it up. But when that choice is a response to the system becoming more just, it is surely more consonant with our moral intuitions to lay the blame at the feet of those who would destroy the system in order to resist movements toward equality and inclusion rather than blame inclusion for its destruction.

Of course, The Adaptability Paradox argues that it is not just aggrieved white racists who were radicalized by inclusion, but also those on the left, who lost faith in the capacity of the administrative state to solve social problems or to treat people in respectful and egalitarian ways. I think the argument here is that after inclusion, different people began to ask radically different things of the constitutional system—some wanted continued exclusion, others the advancement of egalitarian ends through egalitarian means. Faced with a plethora of mutually exclusive demands, Congress could not function well, so that people began to pursue their policy goals through other institutions. Courts, for example, became ever more important to the policymaking process and Presidents increasingly tried to govern without the Legislature. The fundamental engine of these changes, though, was inclusion. After inclusion, Skowronek tells us, people began to make such incompatible demands on the state that no one ever received enough from it to satisfy them.

This account left me wondering not only about the book’s emphasis on inclusion rather than racist resistance, but also about the other sources of constitutional breakdown. I suspect there are other forces at work that also deserve a central place in this narrative of democratic dissatisfaction and decline. Chief among them might be economic change and dislocation. Perhaps the problem was not simply that hierarchies used to reassure people about the value of and limits on the state, but that the world changed around the state in ways that rendered its solutions and procedures less satisfying. The Adaptability Paradox reports that, “Once everyone was included, no one felt safe. Anxiety was universalized” (117). But maybe we can attribute this anxiety at least in part to the sensation that access to material security and dignified work had been rendered scarce or precarious.

The book’s concern about the risks of dissolving hierarchies seems almost entirely to emphasize social hierarchies, like race and gender. Through this lens, the important change that occurred over the past half century was that hierarchies were put under pressure, so that they began to break down. But there is at least an argument to be made that, over this same period, class hierarchies were not dissolving but reasserting themselves. It witnessed rising wealth inequality and declining economic mobility. Labor’s political power eroded. I do not mean to suggest that we should choose either race or class as the central problem of American politics; they are inextricably intertwined. I do suspect, however, that “full inclusion” is an insufficient explanation for the sensation of insecurity and existential stakes that The Adaptability Paradox seeks to diagnose.

In fact, I think the book’s conclusion points in this direction. It is critical of the left-leaning reformers of the late twentieth century who pursued egalitarian policies without thinking more deeply about the adequacy of state structures. Unlike the Progressives of the early twentieth century, liberals of the late twentieth century did not seek to reshape the national state. Skowronek suggests that we need a constitutional reinvention as dramatic as those that he chronicles in his earlier studies of the American state. This claim gestures toward a different analysis than that inclusion simply broke the system. The problem, we might think, was not one too many adaptations or full inclusion, but an incomplete adaptation and a failure of inclusion. A state and party system with an old form (developed to meet the challenges of national industrialization) was being asked to do very new kinds of work (to meet the challenges, for instance, of globalization, de-industrialization, and multi-racial democracy) without the structural changes to either state or party system that could facilitate a democratically satisfying response.

This account seems to offer a more meaningful chance of redemption than the inclusion-only story. If the problem we face is the need to create a constitution that can meet both the expectation of full inclusion and the demands for exclusionary hierarchy, it is hard to see how any constitution could reassure everyone that the system will serve them. It seems at least possible, however, to imagine that a new constitutional arrangement might better meet the widely shared economic anxieties of this era.

Emily Zackin is Associate Professor of Political Science at Johns Hopkins University. You can reach her by e-mail at ezackin1@jhu.edu.

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