The Looming Paroxysm

A quick point following up on my previous post.  As any grade school student can tell you, the U.S. Constitution is designed to protect citizens against their government by imposing checks and balances.  But it's worth asking whether the Constitution goes too far and creates the real possibility of elevating a tyrant.  By analogy, imagine that workers at a company are required to log in to their computers using a password.  The company decides to heighten security by requiring workers to change their passwords every two weeks.  Most workers respond by writing their passwords on sticky notes and sticking them to their monitors.

How does this play out today?  The Constitution enables an obstructionist party to frustrate all attempts to legislate.  You would expect this to hurt the party's reputation and cause it to lose seats, but again the Constitution steps in to ensure that certain people and places are structurally over-represented in Congress.  Also, the President inevitably carries much of the blame for government dysfunction, regardless of his/her role in it.  So obstructionism can be a stable, winning strategy.

But obstructionism (like an annoying password policy) invites a response.  Specifically, as I outlined in my last post, it might encourage extremism and disdain for the ordinary business of governing.  And it can also foster campaigns like Donald Trump's.  I have enough faith in our Constitution that I think he would be unable to carry out his domestic agenda in full (though certain grotesque elements of it, like mass deportation, are certainly possible).  But that would leave foreign/military policy in the hands of a dangerous narcissist.  It's also important to remember that our constitutional order doesn't consist solely of the Constitution, and Trump's disdain for basic norms of legality and limited government make him dangerous even if he is formally constrained.

So in other words, the checks and balances that theoretically constrain our government might bottle up our impulses until they become dangerous.  The closest historical precedent that I can think of is the demise of the Fourth Republic at the hands of De Gaulle.  I'm not knowledgeable enough about France to say whether the Fifth Republic has been an improvement, but it seems to have been what was required to end the bleeding in Algeria.

But Trump is no de Gaulle.  ("All my life I have had a certain idea of France, and let me tell you, it's going to be the greatest, the best, the most spectacular France you've ever seen.  And believe me, we're going to win...  a lot.")  I have a fairly high degree of confidence that our political system can keep him from power.  But it's better not to test these things, and anyway it's not as though perpetual obstructionism (or if you prefer, punctuated equilibrium) would be a satisfactory state of affairs even in the absence of the threat of tyranny.  We should adjust our constitutional order before it is adjusted for us.