Too Much or Too Little Adaptation?
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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