Independence Day 2016, The Death Spiral Of The Republic, "The Chaos Caused Trump"

The close of the Constitutional Convention of 1787 :

A lady [one Mrs. Powel of Philadelphia] asked Dr. Franklin Well Doctor what have we got a republic or a monarchy — A republic replied the Doctor if you can keep it.

The Founders of what was to become the United States of America utterly repudiated democracy. As James D. Best summarized the sentiments of the Founders:

The Founders’ intent at the national level was a representative republic. The word democracy is not mentioned in the Constitution. Most of the Founders distrusted pure democracy. …

John Adams wrote that “There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide,” and James Madison wrote in Federalist 10 that “Democracies have, in general, been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths.”

And here we are, in 2016, now on the precipice of ... democracy. Uh oh.

The nature of this Constitutional crisis has never been better put forth than by Jonathan Rauch, a contributing editor at The Atlantic and National Journal, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a personal friend. He writes in the current cover story of The Atlantic: How American Politics Went Insane: It happened gradually—and until the U.S. figures out how to treat the problem it will only get worse .

It may be, by far, the most important article yet written about the utterly baffling 2016 presidential election cycle.

Astonishingly, the 2016 Republican presidential race has been dominated by a candidate who is not, in any meaningful sense, a Republican. According to registration records, since 1987 Donald Trump has been a Republican, then an independent, then a Democrat, then a Republican, then “I do not wish to enroll in a party,” then a Republican; he has donated to both parties; he has shown loyalty to and affinity for neither. …

The Republicans’ noisy breakdown has been echoed eerily, albeit less loudly, on the Democratic side, where, after the early primaries, one of the two remaining contestants for the nomination was not, in any meaningful sense, a Democrat. Senator Bernie Sanders was an independent who switched to nominal Democratic affiliation on the day he filed for the New Hampshire primary, only three months before that election. He surged into second place by winning independents while losing Democrats. If it had been up to Democrats to choose their party’s nominee, Sanders’s bid would have collapsed after Super Tuesday. … The political parties no longer have either intelligible boundaries or enforceable norms, and, as a result, renegade political behavior pays.

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Trump…didn’t cause the chaos. The chaos caused Trump. What we are seeing is not a temporary spasm of chaos but a chaos syndrome.

Chaos syndrome is a chronic decline in the political system’s capacity for self-organization. It begins with the weakening of the institutions and brokers—political parties, career politicians, and congressional leaders and committees—that have historically held politicians accountable to one another and prevented everyone in the system from pursuing naked self-interest all the time. As these intermediaries’ influence fades, politicians, activists, and voters all become more individualistic and unaccountable. The system atomizes. Chaos becomes the new normal—both in campaigns and in the government itself.

Our intricate, informal system of political intermediation, which took many decades to build, did not commit suicide or die of old age; we reformed it to death. For decades, well-meaning political reformers have attacked intermediaries as corrupt, undemocratic, unnecessary, or (usually) all of the above. Americans have been busy demonizing and disempowering political professionals and parties, which is like spending decades abusing and attacking your own immune system. Eventually, you will get sick.

Rauch then goes on to meticulously document the (always well intended) “reforms” that destroyed the infrastructure of the republican system of governance. Our crumbling infrastructure of roads and bridges is merely an echo of the eroded republican governance infrastructure.

Rauch’s litany did not endear him to rabid anti-republican democrats. He was promptly indicted by one of my favorite Jacobin polemicists, Mat Taibbi, of Rolling Stone, In Response to Trump, Another Dangerous Movement Appears :

In “ How American Politics Went Insane ,” Brookings Institute Fellow Jonathan Rauch spends many thousands of words arguing for the reinvigoration of political machines, as a means of keeping the ape-citizen further from power.

He portrays the public as a gang of nihilistic loonies determined to play mailbox baseball with the gears of state.

“Neurotic hatred of the political class is the country’s last universally acceptable form of bigotry,” he writes, before concluding:

“Our most pressing political problem today is that the country abandoned the establishment, not the other way around.”

Rauch’s audacious piece, much like Andrew Sullivan’s clarion call for a less-democratic future in New York magazine (“ Democracies end when they are too democratic “), is not merely a warning about the threat posed to civilization by demagogues like Donald Trump.

It’s a sweeping argument against a whole host of democratic initiatives, from increased transparency to reducing money in politics to the phasing out of bagmen and ward-heelers at the local level. These things have all destabilized America, Rauch insists.

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These self-congratulating cognoscenti could have looked at the events of the last year and wondered why people were so angry with them, and what they could do to make government work better for the population.

Instead, their first instinct is to dismiss voter concerns as baseless, neurotic bigotry and to assume that the solution is to give Washington bureaucrats even more leeway to blow off the public. In the absurdist comedy that is American political life, this is the ultimate anti-solution to the unrest of the last year, the mathematically perfect wrong ending.

Taibbi is one of Trump’s most accomplished rivals in the use of baseless slurs. A neutral reading of Rauch — who along with Andrew Sullivan was one of the three prime movers of the gay marriage cultural revolution — shows him to be anything but a “self-congratulating cognoscenti.”

So let’s take a peek at where the flight from republicanism is fast heading.

Late last year, Robert Foa and Yascha Mounk wrote a disturbing piece for the center-left Vox, Are Americans losing faith in democracy?

In our research we have found that citizens give less and less importance to living in a democracy. They have increasingly negative views about key democratic institutions. Most worryingly of all, they are more and more open to illiberal alternatives. Americans aren’t just souring on particular institutions or particular politicians. To a surprising degree, they have begun to sour on liberal democracy itself.

Among many other troubling findings:

Among millennials — those born since the 1980s — fewer than 30 percent say that living in a democracy is essential.

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The number of people who think that “having a democratic political system” is a “bad” or “very bad” way to run America is also going up. This trend is especially clear among young Americans.

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One of the most striking shifts we have seen concerns the number of Americans who think it would be a “good” or “very good” thing to “have the army rule.” Twenty years ago, when the World Values Survey first asked this question, one in 15 Americans agreed with this sentiment. Today it’s one in six.

This would not have surprised the Founders. Those who wrote the Constitution believed that republicanism trends liberal, democracy illiberal. Anti-republicanism, residing between naïveté and nihilism, is virulent. It may be approaching plague proportions. In The Daily Beast no less, Chrisopher Ketcham writes Anarchists for Donald Trump—Let the Empire Burn :

What’s needed now in American politics is consternation, confusion, dissension, disorder, chaos — and crisis, with possible resolution — and a Trump presidency is the best chance for this true progress. This is a politics of arson. I’d rather see the empire burn to the ground under Trump, opening up at least the possibility of radical change, than cruise on autopilot under Clinton.

But it’s not about empire, Mr. Ketcham. Progressives have crucified, and are continuing to crucify, classical liberal republicanism — that great foe of imperialism — upon a cross of democracy. They do so under the noble-sounding word “reform.”

Former Federal Reserve Governor Henry Wallich once said “Experience is the name we give to our past mistakes, reform that which we give to future ones.” Radical change is far more likely to be for the worse than for the better.

What we confront, in the 2016 presidential election cycle, is the very real possibility of the implosion of classical liberal republicanism. Memo to Matt Taibbi, mind Yeats’s prophecy :

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned….

Jonathan Rauch: “Trump … didn’t cause the chaos. The chaos caused Trump.”

John Adams: “There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.”

James Madison: “Democracies have, in general, been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths.”

Ben Franklin: “A republic if you can keep it.”

Bravo to The Atlantic Monthly for giving its cover to Jonathan Rauch’s calling the existential question: How American Politics Went Insane .

Will we keep our republic?