Catastrophic System Reset?
How would it be possible to make deep changes to the American political system without a violent meltdown?
We love America, we love Americans. But it is a very sick place right now. And it is really hard to see how it is going to be able to begin to fix its problems without some kind of catastrophic system reset. We are not hoping for one (because we think it would have to be really catastrophic).
Around a month ago, on May 27, Canadian journalists Jen Gerson and Matt Gurney wrote in The Line here on Substack that one of the challenges that Canada faces in the next few years is dealing with the prospect of a “catastrophic system reset” in American politics. The phrase is intriguing, given that it comes from computer science, and refers something on the order of the “blue screen of death” in Windows indicating such a thorough error across the operating system that the hard drive needs to be reformatted and the operating system reinstalled from that CD that came with your computer (and no, I don’t know where mine is, either). The imagery of a system crash is helpful because over the past decade, perhaps much further back, the American system has been headed for a breakdown that is far deeper than the Washington gridlock that we already spoke of when I was an undergraduate political science major.
But what is a “system reset” within a political system? And does it have to be catastrophic? We already have an example of a catastrophic reset of the American political system, of course, in the American Civil War of the 1860s. Over the four decades preceding the 1860 presidential election, but especially after the end of the Mexican War in 1848, the political system created by the United States Constitution in 1787 failed in its essential task of ensuring the coexistence of a free North and a slaveholding South. Abraham Lincoln said that the country could not not continue to exist “half slave and half free,” but the Constitution, as it existed before the Civil War, did not provide a path to resolve this. The system reset involved going outside the Constitution in the form of eleven southern states seceding and attempting to form the Confederacy. The reset became catastrophic as more than 600,000 Americans perished on both sides. Yet the South’s temporary withdrawal from American politics plus its military defeat broke the logjam in the political system and permitted the end of slavery and the passage of the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments giving the freed slaves U.S. citizenship and the right to vote, something the South in the ordinary course of pre-war politics would have vetoed, and that Southerners have in a number of ways tried to walk back ever since.
This brings us to the question of what a system reset will look like in the 2020’s United States. As was the case during the Civil War, the core issue is the U.S. Constitution itself. The document is old, and while Americans typically take pride in a document that is over 230 years old, it is the product of a very different era, not just one in which the United States had 4 million people who were mostly farmers, It was also a world in which absolute monarchies still dominated, in particular, the British monarchy, not yet converted into the constitutional monarchy in which the King of Queen reigns as a figurehead while the cabinet, drawn from the elected House of commons, sets policy. The U.S. Constitution starts with the absolute monarch–not a modern executive–as its model, replaces it with a presidency, then attempts to constrain that presidency with an elaborate system of checks and balances. In the eyes of the Framers, political actors would not be driven by party affiliations, but by the interests of their states and the institutions in which they set (“ambition must be made to counteract ambition,” per Federalist 51). The presidential-congressional system with the separation has always been Rube Goldbergish, and may not have existed had parliamentary responsibility government (cabinet holds office as long as it maintains confidence) been more developed by the 1780s. The United States has been the only country to make the model work, and has needed system resets to keep it functioning. In Latin American countries that adopted the American model wholesale, there has been repeated system breakdown with regular military coups.
Since the 1960s or so, the American political system has experienced trouble addressing its deepest problems. It has not dealt with things like declines in national productivity, the unaffordability of higher education and the need to reform the student loan system, the need for tax reform, the long-term sustainability of entitlement programs, and the bloated health care system. Polarization between the two dominant political parties had led to budgeting by continuing resolution and regular shutdowns when funding expires. Positions requiring Senate confirmation of a presidential appointee go vacant for months (including not just ambassadors but even Supreme Court judges). Partisan gridlock often means that political issues will be decided by the courts, and the last week has reminded us that control of the Supreme Court can be just as important as control of the other branches.
The Congress, whenever two thirds of both Houses shall deem it necessary, shall propose Amendments to this Constitution, or, on the Application of the Legislatures of two thirds of the several States, shall call a Convention for proposing Amendments, which, in either Case, shall be valid to all Intents and Purposes, as Part of this Constitution, when ratified by the Legislatures of three fourths of the several States, or by Conventions in three fourths thereof, as the one or the other Mode of Ratification may be proposed by the Congress. (Article 5, United States Constitution)
So how to reset the system? Constitutional reform would be the most straightforward way, but the reforms would need to be extensive, addressing the composition and powers of the Supreme Court, the structure of representation in the Senate, the future of the Electoral College used in presidential elections, the nature of “advice and consent,” the interstate commerce clause, clarifying the meaning of several amendments in the Bill of Rights, particularly the Second, codifying the right to privacy, the exclusion of naturalized citizens from the presidency, and perhaps the restrictive amending formula itself. Even the Civil War did not lead to changes in the institutions of the three branches. These changes might be easiest to introduce via a new constitution altogether.
These wholesale changes, given the amending formula requiring support of two-thirds of each house of Congress and three-quarters of the states, could only happen on the basis of an overwhelming bipartisan consensus or unprecedented dominance by one of the political parties. In either case, these developments would sweep the issue of political polarization away and prevent the system reset from becoming catastrophic. If the system remains as polarized as it is, political scientists suggest a short list of possibilities of what a “catastrophic system reset” will look like. As legal scholar Sanford Levinson told the Financial Times’ Edward Luce, the three most likely outcomes would be the breakup of the United States into two or more smaller sovereign states, a civil war, either one among well-defined “red” and “blue” blocs, or perhaps decades of violence similar to The Troubles in Northern Ireland, or the descent of the United States into dysfunction and stagnation that no one tries to stop.
In other words, the most catastrophic system reset may turn out to be the system that cannot be reset at all, like the poor person who cannot find the CD that reinstalls the operating system on the dead computer.
https://www.ft.com/content/b159bce5-83e7-4f8e-ab0d-4123660ab539
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/jun/26/second-civil-war-us-abortion
https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Why-Were-Polarized/Ezra-Klein/9781476700366
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/306345/american-nations-by-colin-woodard/
https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Next-Civil-War/Stephen-Marche/9781982123215
https://global.oup.com/academic/product/how-the-south-won-the-civil-war-9780190900908?cc=us&lang=en&
https://global.oup.com/academic/product/our-undemocratic-constitution-9780195365573?cc=us&lang=en&
