The Presidency Is America's Constitutional Crisis

 I read a book while in prison criticizing our presidential system as inherently unstable. Therefore, I was prepared for the critique in Alasdair Roberts' The Crisis That Made Trump Possible Didn’t Start with Trump (The Walrus). Trump has only shown us how the United States President is a problem after the fall of Communism. When we had an active external danger (discounting how much the danger of the Soviet Union was a fever dream for political opportunists) facing the country, we could paper over the problems of increasing executive power. No external danger, means we have to face the monster created. The Constitution needs to change. Before that, the American public have to understand the dangers of authoritarianism; that their desire for a strong leader will not actually benefit them.

The article also makes a point on a subject that has been in my mind - our state political organizations:

Mid-century liberals wanted to change party politics as well as government. Political parties, they complained, were flimsy assemblages of state and local organizations. In a world where Washington played the leading role, parties lacked a national outlook and a coherent platform. Reformers argued that parties should be more Washington focused and ideologically disciplined.

Political parties are extra-constitutional entities. Treating American political parties as coalitions orbiting around a hazy ideological center seemed to be our modus operandi. A two-party system that becomes ideological is ripe for civil war; especially when politics fuses with a religious mindset. Instead of sorting out local ideology to reach a national consensus, our parties begin to impose a national ideology on the states. Trump is also the avatar of this movement.

Two solutions come to mind, which I do not see as mutually exclusive.

 First, let the state parties be state parties, not a merely a subset of the national parties. In Indiana, the old division between Democrats and Republicans was unions; an even older division was between nativist Republicans and immigrant Democrats; and before that it was between the centralizing Republicans and the decentralizing Democrats. 

Second, reform our voting practices to allow for representation of minority voices. There are plenty enough of these proposals floating about: proportional representation to weighted voting to open primaries.

sch 1:51 AM