This month’s issue of The Atlantic contains an article by Jonathan Rauch about American politics that has generated some buzz. The gist of the article is that the system has gone “insane” as a result of systemic changes over the years which have weakened the power of middlemen who enforce discipline over both politicians and the electorate.
There is some merit to the article, but mostly I disagree with it. The federal government made plenty of horrible choices during the Bush Administration, but its operations were not erratic or dysfunctional. The first two years of the Obama Administration were marked by serious and productive lawmaking. The Republican nominees in 2008 and 2012 were unquestionably mainstream politicians. And the systemic changes that Rauch describes in the article took place over decades, so you can’t use them to explain why Congress has been dysfunctional since 2010, or why Trump became the GOP nominee in 2016.
The beginning of the dysfunction occurred when the GOP won the 2010 election and started threatening to shut down the government and default on the debt. The problems with our system, therefore, revolve around the radicalization of the GOP. The reasons for that were described in a series of posts during GOP Radicalization Week several months ago.