Americas Form of Government No Longer Works — a Perceptive Essay from Matthew Yglesias — about Political Scientist Juan Linz’s Idea — regarding the Functional Superiority of Parliamentary over Presidential Government

© 2013 Peter Free

 

02 October 2013

 

 

When crazy people are running things — it is best that democratic governing institutions subject their suicidal lemming urges to a comparatively immediate national vote

 

In this vein, Matthew Yglesias recently observed of the October 2013 United States government shutdown:

 

 

Juan Linz [see here], the distinguished Yale political scientist, died on Tuesday morning . . . at the age of 86.

 

In Linz’s telling, successful democracies are governed by prime ministers who have the support of a majority coalition in parliament.

 

[G]overning authority vests in a prime minister and a cabinet whose authority derives directly from majority support in parliament.

 

When such a prime minister loses his parliamentary majority, a crisis ensues. Either the parties in parliament must negotiate a new governing coalition and a new cabinet, or else a new election is held.

 

In a presidential system, by contrast, the president and the congress are elected separately and yet must govern concurrently. If they disagree, they simply disagree.

 

They can point fingers and wave poll results and stomp their feet and talk about “mandates,” but the fact remains that both parties to the dispute won office fair and square.

 

In a world with well-sorted parties and little ticket-splitting, the geography-driven differences in voting results for the House, Senate, and president are going to lead to persistent conflicts, in which both sides feel they have an electoral mandate to stand firm and there’s no systematic way to resolve the issue.

 

That’s very bad news for America, and nobody knows how to stop it.

 

© 2013 Matthew Yglesias, Juan Linz’s Bad News for America, Slate (02 October 2013) (paragraphs split)

 

 

“But Pete, what’s different now that wasn’t the case fifty or more years ago?”

 

In the past, both American political parties had some allegiance to the Idea of a Successful America.  They recognized that ideologically uncharacterizable compromises were usually functionally more workable than committing ritual suicide on the White Mat of Unsullied Purity.

 

Now that “work it out” thinking has morphed into theologically shouting splinter groups — led by bombastic narcissists — America has become like parliamentary systems in substance, but without the “here and now” election apparatus that keeps those afloat.

 

 

The moral? — The United States has institutionalized an unresponsive system that cannot work to overcome the routine problems that effective governance has to confront

 

Our presidential system sets our usually hare-brained disputes into four-year blocks of concrete — for which the one and only political tactic is to see which ranting group can most successfully make the public forget what we were mad or happy about.

 

That, for example, was Senator Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s publically stated strategy in regard to obstructing President Obama in December 2010:

 

 

Our top political priority over the next two years should be to deny President Obama a second term.

 

PoliticalHay, Mitch McConnell: Top Priority, Make Obama a One Term President, YouTube (07 December 2010)

 

As a result of this “nation be damned” perpetual game-playing, obstruction and stupidity in governance are never forced to confront Reality’s immediacy.

 

Given that most of us seem not to remember anything of arguable substance for more than a few minutes — America’s “sewercidal” downward spin is, literally systemically, guaranteed to end in the sludge-settling pond.  The output of which, I suppose, other nations will eventually use to manure the gardens of their successes.

 

That said, I never thought that the best we Americans could hope for was to become the field slop that other people use as an example of what not to do with democracy:

 

 

[Juan Linz’s] life’s work tells us that American democracy is doomed.

 

© 2013 Matthew Yglesias, Juan Linz’s Bad News for America, Slate (02 October 2013)

 

Perhaps a parliamentary system would have saved us, by forcing slightly more congruence between ideological pontificating and effectively managing real problems.