Did the Constitution doom American democracy?

In the spring of 2015, few outlets predicted that the US would soon face a democratic crisis. Barack Obama was the president, and the conventional wisdom was that he’d be succeeded by Hillary Clinton or Jeb Bush. Donald Trump wouldn’t announce his presidential bid until June, and most people in Washington treated it as a big joke when he did.

But that March, Vox co-founder Matt Yglesias published an essay with a darkly prescient title: “American democracy is doomed.” 

Presidential systems, the late political scientist Juan Linz found, had a tendency to break down, the strict separation of powers breeding irresolvable conflict between the executive and legislative branches that tended to end in coups, or something like them.

The United States was long seen as an exception to Linz’s rule, but Yglesias believed this was coming to an end. Polarization made the normal congressional lawmaking process basically unworkable, leading to more power being wielded unilaterally from the White House. Eventually, a president was going to push that power to its breaking point — and cause a full-blown constitution collapse.

Given that we are now in the middle of a crisis in which a president wields his office’s powers to attack the democratic system itself enabled largely by the partisan fealty of his party, I thought that his analysis had earned a second look. 

His warnings of the dangers of rising executive power paired with polarization felt prophetic. The basic Linzian framework, which positioned the very existence of a presidency as the root problem, felt a little off (albeit in an interesting and revealing way).

So, I asked Yglesias, who now writes the excellent Slow Boring newsletter, to chat about his essay: what it got right, what it got wrong, and what it tells us about where the United States is headed. A transcript of our conversation follows, edited for length and clarity (and you can listen to an audio version on The Gray Area podcast soon!)

To start with a basic question: 11 years ago, at a moment when few people were worried about the long-term prospects of American democracy, you decided to play Cassandra. Why?

I was thinking not about Donald Trump, or the particulars of his personality, or the particular nature of right-wing populism, but about the structural properties of the American political system. We have this Madisonian system of checks and balances, separate but overlapping political powers, that has been found around the world to be very unstable and prone to break down. 

I was elaborating on the work of the late Yale political scientist Juan Linz, who had this observation that presidential-type systems had always broken down every place they were tried, except for the United States. He wrote an essay in the early 1990s asking: Why is America the exception to this rule?

His take was that American political parties were unusually low-discipline and unusually non-ideological —these sort of catch-all, geographically dispersed parties. Clearly, if you look at the time between 1994 and 2014, that stops being true. America moves to a much more tight, ideologically organized party system.

So, I was saying, in advance of Trump, in advance of this mainstreaming of concern about democracy, that the Obama-era crises — the standoffs over the debt ceiling, the multiple government shutdowns, Obama exerting executive authority over immigration in unusual ways — these were signs of the United States moving in a Latin American-type direction, where the president and Congress are ultimately going to butt heads, and both are going to appeal to the people, the military, the bureaucracy to say, “my way or the highway.”

One thing I really liked about the essay is the focus on how everybody had been complaining about executive power for a long time, but from alternating directions. There were accusations that George W. Bush was a fascist, then Obama-era conservative complaints about executive overreach on immigration. At the time, that all felt like partisan hyperbole, but in hindsight, your essay’s claim that “everyone was right” held up really well.

And yet the current crisis isn’t the Linzian standoff between Congress and president that you envisioned; it’s an executive doing whatever he wants while Congress defers, because it’s controlled by his party.

I agree. People ask me about this article all the time, and I’m not constantly bringing it up, because what I was talking about is pretty different from what’s going on now.

That being said, if the midterms play out the way most people think, Democrats will take the House but not the Senate. And then, all the questions that were asked of Democrats by their base earlier this year in different government funding bills — how can you do X, how can you do Y — the needle was threaded by the fact that Democrats were in the minority in the House. They just all vote no, and the bill passes anyway. 

When it’s Hakeem Jeffries, and you don’t have the curious math of the filibuster, there’s going to be a lot of pressure to say, “you can’t give the king his ship money if this is how he’s conducting himself.” And I don’t think Trump is going to sign a bill that says you’ve got to stop sending ICE into cities [or] you’ve got to stop being corrupt. 

My more mature self would admit to more uncertainty about everything, but I do think the basic structural question that piece raises can get a little underrated these days relative to things that are idiosyncratic to Trump, because he’s such a spectacular figure.

I’m skeptical of the focus on presidentialism as the root problem; I think it confuses the symptom with the disease. Parliamentary systems face institutional crises, too. Hungarian democracy was overtaken over by an authoritarian who won a two-thirds majority and rewrote the constitution. Israel is mired in a legitimacy crisis between the legislature and the Supreme Court.

The root problem in each case isn’t constitutional design; it’s that voters elevated an authoritarian party to power, which then worked to undermine the system from within.

Yes and no. 

Hungary is interesting, because what’s played out there is very much what the framers of our Constitution were trying to avoid: a charismatic demagogue that does really well in one election then wields democratically obtained power to undermine liberalism and competitive elections.

Israel I see as a pretty bullish case for good institutional design. Netanyahu has lost power multiple times in free and fair elections. Opposition parties have been able to collaborate in a big-tent way while maintaining their distinctiveness. The multiparty system elides that very nicely.

The Linzian critique is that it can break down over fairly non-existential controversies. You just have a disagreement between Barack Obama and Paul Ryan about the trajectory of the welfare state — boring stuff — and, yet, you couldn’t meet in the middle or pass a bill and resolve it at the next election. The country almost defaulted [in 2011]. 

On some level, it doesn’t matter, because the United States is not going to radically revise its basic constitutional system. 

But, I do think what’s relevant is remembering that there are structural issues in play, that the United States is working with a constitutional mechanism that is known to be failure prone. When we think about what kinds of tactics are deployed against Trump in the years to come, I think you want to be careful about creating self-fulfilling crisis dynamics.

The specter of January 6th happening, Trump making his political comeback, doing all those pardons and basically getting away with it, has put us in an incredibly dangerous situation that I feel is frequently discussed by people on the left but in certain respects not taken as seriously as it ought to be. We have to think about what it would mean, if things go well politically over the next two or three cycles, to move forward in a constructive way instead of ping-ponging.

Relatedly: I think if you want to defend democracy, you have to actually talk about democracy — you can’t just dance around the substantive questions. There are executive agencies at present that act as if they’re dedicated to undermining civil liberties protections essential to democracy, and stopping this kind of abuse requires confronting it directly.

In other countries, an open focus on democracy has proven to be a powerful coalition-building tool. When there’s a widely shared perception that democracy is on the line, it can unite previously fractious opposition groups — as it did in Poland, and as it may now in Hungary, where a center-right candidate has unified the opposition and could actually overcome an authoritarian electoral infrastructure.

What I think would be correct is to put democracy at the heart of what Democrats are doing, actually. The reason centering democracy was meaningful for the Polish opposition or potentially for Péter Magyar in Hungary is that it’s leading to actions — formation of coalitions and adoption of strategies — that would not make sense in the absence of those kinds of threats.

Magyar is saying to center-right voters, “Orbán is really bad, and just because you have broadly center-right values doesn’t mean you should default to voting for him.” And he’s saying to left-of-center Hungarians, “We disagree about a lot, but we should bandwagon together and address the abusive quality of this regime rather than having a super detailed argument about tax policy.”That’s democracy as a theme, not a talking point.

In part because the institutional structure is different, but in part because of choices that have been made, democracy has been invoked in anti-Trump politics in fairly superficial ways. There’s a world in which Biden has several prominent Republicans in his cabinet and says, “I’m going to be a one-term president. The mission of this presidency is to secure accountability for the perpetrators of January 6th, get the country out of COVID.” But at the end of the day, the Democratic Party base and the Democratic Party elite — the policy demanders — did not want that. 

Democrats are very much of two minds about Trump. They really, sincerely — and I think accurately — think that he is dangerous. But they do not really take the kinds of actions you have seen from opposition movements in Czechia, Israel, Hungary, [and] Poland, where you change up what you’re doing to shore up democratic institutions and defeat this kind of menace.

This is where I’m really sympathetic to the institutionalist argument. The two-party system makes it a lot harder. I just got back from Brazil, where I’d been doing field reporting on this. Brazil is a presidential system, but they also have a multiparty system. That made a huge difference when Jair Bolsonaro was president. He wanted to act a lot like Trump, but their Congress and Supreme Court were much more resistant.

I tried to resist this conclusion because it wasn’t my prior, but it turns out a major part of the answer is the multiparty system. Brazil has something like 20 parties currently registered in its Congress. That made it incredibly difficult for Bolsonaro to jam through legislation, because the Brazilian system works on pork-barrel trading. It also made it really hard for him to get pure partisan Supreme Court justices through.

There are institutional constraints from the two-party system that mess with the way the party makes decisions and make it a lot more difficult to adopt a popular-front, pro-democracy movement than what you’ve seen in other backsliding democracies.

I completely agree. 

If you look at what happened in the Biden years, it was as if none of this Trump stuff had ever happened. [It was] the most normal thing in the world: You come in with a new trifecta, it’s really narrow, but you brush off the fact that it’s narrow, take your coalition’s entire agenda, copy-paste it in, the most moderate members pare it down, some of it goes through, then there’s backlash, and you lose ground in the midterms. That’s just like every American presidency. It’s weird, in what I would say, and Joe Biden would say, are extraordinary times for American democracy, to just operate on autopilot. But that’s because the logic of these political institutions is very powerful.

In a multiparty Congress, you can’t do that. There’s always some centrally positioned party whose job is to say, “No, you can’t do your agenda, we’ve got to do some horse trading.”

I’m more persuaded after going to Brazil that a multiparty coalition presidential system could work in the United States. But the big problem remains: These reforms are fundamentally precluded by the incentives of the two existing parties. It seems like the only thing that could break the logjam would be a true constitutional crisis. Grimly, the worse things get, the greater the possibility for radical structural reform.

That was fundamentally the point of my piece: I did not think it was very likely that we would avert a crisis fully, but if we understood the institutional drivers, there was a better chance that, when a crisis arose, we would try to adapt in a useful way. We have a tradition in Latin American history of backsliding and resliding. What you want is what Brazil had: They came out of their last period of military rule with a different constitutional system that some people say is now more robust than the one they had before.

I was not envisioning an actual military dictatorship, so much as some kind of asterisk on the system in which a president aligned with the courts is just disregarding Congress for some period of time. Is that what’s going to be happening a year from now? I don’t know, but you could easily see it. Democrats win the midterms, but Trump still has the Senate. He keeps appointing MAGA judges. This administration so far, for all its many sins, has mostly followed the law as instantiated by federal judges. But what court orders are is a moving target. Bush judges, Trump-one judges are getting replaced by more MAGA judges. Bukele would tell you he follows all Supreme Court orders, because, once he purges the Supreme Court, there’s no problem following the orders.

Congress is the first article in the Constitution, but the president has command-and-control authority over all these people, people with guns. It’s always out there as a possibility that orders are given and orders are followed. And if there’s some legal stamp on it, why wouldn’t they be followed?

Notably, one of the first things Trump did was, in a legal but highly irregular way, change up the senior military command. There is no doubt the president is within his rights to relieve the chairman of the Joint Chiefs and replace him. That is an unquestioned legitimate presidential power. But it is so much more eyebrow-raising than issuing an executive order about some regulatory agency and the courts saying no.

This story was supported by a grant from Protect Democracy. Vox had full discretion over the content of this reporting.