For about six years now I’ve been contemplating the perfect, comprehensive piece that would lay out how America’s institutions are ruining its politics and how a new set of institutions would save it. (Contemplating, mind you; not actually writing.) American citizens are currently focusing on zero-sum issues and forced to choose between suboptimal options, and surely all of that is the fault of how American politics is set up.
Looking back, this endeavour was driven by a sort of escapism—surely many problems can go away/be diminished if only we changed x and y—and by a mental desire for “cleanliness” and “order” that I convinced myself was socially useful. (This is something I do a lot.) And it was never all that intellectually consistent, as I flitted back and forth between “this is a feasible plan for de-escalating American polarization” and “this is a thought experiment, a contribution to the ideas space”.
A better federalism…
The cornerstone of this new, cleaner American politics I imagined that would focus on the right things was a renewed federalism. Politics has been far too much about regionally separate tribes jockeying for relative numerical power across state borders, each animated by grievance and fear of domination. Each side primarily focuses at the federal level to produce a grinding stalemate—but what if they didn’t? What use is the trench warfare by which each side pours millions of dollars and countless man-hours just to gain a few inches on the Senatorial battlefield? What use is the ridiculous spectacle of Democratic presidential candidates engaging in fiery debate over policy minutiae that they will never be able to implement? Instead, political effort should go where they can make likely make a difference: the state and regional levels. We should give up the zero-sum game where half of the country have to lose, and instead remember that the point of democracy is that people co-create the societies they live in.
And, to forestall the obvious counterpoint that this would constitute “abandoning” the downtrodden in red states, I would point out that depressurizing the national identity battle would probably help progressive policy in red states. Plenty of progressive measures have passed in deep-red states when presented as ballot measures; they just don’t help local Democrats because the Democratic Party is perceived to be a party of college-educated cosmopolitans (ie. People Like Me) who look down on People Like Them. Take People Like Me out of the equation and let locals take the lead in crafting progressive policy and messaging, and they would be more successful than they are at the present moment, when the cross-country screaming match entrenches people in their positions. Political change is more durable when they are organically brought about than when they are externally imposed.
The obvious question this would raise is that America is already a federal state, and we would have to change something concretely for the federal-first mindset to change. And here, I convinced myself is that the states were wrong: the way the borders were drawn (too small to maintain welfare states, or cutting across economic areas, or without any major media markets) made states impotent and under-covered by the media, with politics being far too nationalized as a result. Furthermore, some states were drawn in a way to replicate the tribal conflict within their own borders, such as New York, Illinois, or Oregon.
(I did realize to some extent that “the irrelevance of state politics” is a deeply New York-centric take; plenty of states, like Arizona and Georgia and Colorado, “make sense”: they possess strong state identities and are anchored by centrally-located primate cities that are the seat of government and possess robust economies, media institutions, and university ecosystems. I think I waved that away by saying that because New York and D.C. were uniquely cross-state metropolises, where state governments are distant and incapable of coordination, there is nationwide media culture of paying too much attention to the federal government.)
A nationalized political culture had become mismatched with political institutions that were essentially confederal—the Framers aimed not to build a single unitary state but something more like the European Union. But maybe a nationalized political culture isn’t the best match for such a differentiated country either. Around the Internet, ideas abound on how to fix the first problem (i.e. move the confederal institutions closer to those of a unitary state) but maybe a different sort of federalism was what’s necessary.
With a different set of borders that properly encompass each group, each group can focus on governing itself rather than protecting its interests against the encroachment of a different, antagonistic group. If states looked something like this map above (just plucked a map from Google; I don’t care to defend the precise categorizations), then each state would have the economic and fiscal scale to maintain whatever level of welfare state they desire, and the setup of the federal government might even some sense—you’d want “most Americans from most regions” to support something to become law, which is the principle roughly approximated by the House and Senate.
… and why that can’t work
It’d be a “National Truce”, a blueprint for coexistence rather than triumph and conquest, the latter being unhealthy desires when it comes to maintaining a democracy (though ones that I feel keenly). All it would require is that states maintain a substantively democratic government, since the whole point is to allow each region to actually be an expression of its values and preferences.
This is where the problems start. To properly work, the truce should include that states can’t engage in voter suppression, and gerrymandering for legislative districts should be banned, to prohibit the Wisconsin situation where the elected government is essentially immune to shifts in public opinion. The truce should include something that codifies the gains of the Civil Rights Movement, preventing Southern states from reimplementing Jim Crow-like measures. (There are idealist ideas to make these protections stronger—states could use proportional representation to make redistricting unnecessary and limit “tyranny of the majority”; Southern states could include mandatory racial power-sharing like in Northern Ireland, or perhaps the Black Belt could even be made into its own, Black-majority state.) Ignore these protections, and this blueprint ends up resembling the historical invocation of “states’ rights”, i.e. the feds should let undemocratic fiefdoms proliferate with no oversight.
But that would be saying that this “truce”—meant to be a de-escalation of the macro-ideological conflict—requires Republicans to give way on some pretty key ideological questions. And this defeats the purpose of this thought exercise. After an immense detour through federalism and the states, it ends up arriving at the same conclusion as the Democratic mainstream: that partisan conflict is structured around the shape of American democracy itself, and Democrats need to prevail.
Legislative supremacy: potential and peril
A second implication of this thought experiment is that any “truce” would need to agree to neuter the Supreme Court somehow—otherwise, there would continue to be an incentive for states to play hardball to stack the Presidency and Senate in their favour (eg. through voting restrictions and Electoral College shenanigans).
Having seen what I’ve seen, it’s my personal take that it’s naïve to rely on the courts to protect individual rights in perpetuity, and that the current era’s reactionary assault against the Supreme Court’s independence and its transformation into just another partisan arena was a sadly inevitable backlash. (It’s a backlash that can be seen in other democracies as well.) Now, having gone through this backlash, our deference to the judiciary can be regarded as having been a net negative. The current reactionary Court will not only not protect individual liberties (i.e. this supposed benefit of judicial supremacy is gone), it can no longer be trusted to make decisions based on legal coherence rather than partisanship. And this version of the Court can and will go after and nullify blue-state laws at a whim: this past year, the Supreme Court struck down a New York gun-control law (that dates back to 1913!), something for which New Yorkers now have no democratic recourse.
Relying on judicial activism, in addition to being a bad way of practicing democracy (reducing citizens to mere spectators of arbitrary decisions), also cannot reliably protect our rights. My conclusion from all of this is that neutering the Supreme Court would be fine, if not outright desirable. But it’s also unavoidably true that the period of the liberal Warren Court (aberration in Supreme Court history though it may be) provided meaningful protection to countless Americans, and those Americans are reasonably wary of eliminating its power.
For what it’s worth, here I don’t believe that the Democratic mainstream has a better path forward: packing the Court will only lead to predictable retaliation the next time around. It’s plausible to imagine that, with every change in the Presidency and Senate majority, the Supreme Court would have a different membership, with a different ideological profile, and overturn all its previous decisions that it now disagrees with—not ultimately all that different from an outright neutering, but with a lot more broken norms and constitutional hardball along the way. Here is where the benefits of immediate mutual disengagement (vs. aiming for triumph) are strongest.
The actual path forward
The ideal of turning America’s institutions into those of Canada or Germany—a federal state of parliamentary units—has been a nice mental refuge. But it’s far more useful to reflect on what the best use of reformist energy is.
Much has been made of “Final Four/Five” voting, where there is one general primary producing five candidates that move onto the general election. In partisan primaries, ideological partisans wield disproportionate influence, resulting in representatives who maintain rejectionist stances for fear of being primaried. No longer would the Republicans be structurally in thrall to its extremist, anti-democratic wing. In Alaska, which uses Top Four voting, Sen. Lisa Murkowski has been able to maintain her independence; interestingly, all three of the state’s federal office-holders (all Republicans!) voted for the Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill, although it’s naturally impossible to pin this on the electoral system.
For the House and for state legislatures, it’s still worth going further to proportional representation, which has the benefit of essentially neutering gerrymandering, partisan and racial. This is in addition to the usual list of benefits to PR, like the greater breadth of options, and the end of one-party “safe seats” where the winner is known in advance. These reforms—top-four voting for single-winner elections, proportional representation for multi-winner elections—would help lower the stakes of everything.
The questions of the Senate and Supreme Court continue to loom large over everything else. The Senate problem will be getting worse—by 2040, about 70% of the population will live in 16 states, leaving the other 30% to control two-thirds of the Senate—in turn affecting what sort of people make it to the Supreme Court. But no proper solution to either problem will be forthcoming. This plan essentially hopes that getting rid of the partisan primary and turning incumbents’ attention to the median voter will keep them anchored in reasonableness. This will have to be enough—those hoping for some grand moment of resolution can only be disappointed.
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