Madison and Health Care

By Scott Lemieux

One of our fellow political scientists over at The Monkey Cage discusses Thomas Friedman's diagnosis of why the American political system seems unable to address major problems (most notably global warming.)  He identifies five potential reasons:

1. “the wild excess of money in politics”
2. Gerrymandering of congressional districts
3. the 24 news cycle
4. a permanent presidential campaign
5. the emergence of a blogosphere that “at its best enriches our debates, adding new checks on the establishment, and at its worst coarsens our debates to a whole new level, giving a new power to anonymous slanderers to send lies around the world” (I’m going to assume he’s talking about The Monkey Cage in the former part of that quote).

Tucker has a good account of some of the work political scientists have done on these questions.   I, however, was struck by the omission of what strikes me as the most obvious explanatory variable: the structure of American political institutions.   For better or worse, the system was designed so that major legislation was going to be the exception rather than the rule, and this is exactly how it's worked in practice.     

Relatedly, Friedman refers to the saying that the American system was "designed by geniuses so it could be run by idiots."   This is essentially a restatement of Madison's famous argument in Federalist #51 that "[i]f angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary."   As the first version suggests, Madison's statement is sometimes interpreted to mean that he didn't see political leadership as being especially important, but this is a misreading.    More accurately, Madison wanted to structure the government that couldn't do too much damage if bad leaders where at the helm, and his structure was an ingenious means to that end.   But it's the other implication of these structures that creates the dilemma that concerns Friedman: structures that make it hard for bad people to enact policies also make it hard for all political leaders to enact major reform policies, even if there's something like a consensus that the status quo is unacceptable.

Whether this is a good or a bad thing, of course, depends on your political values.   But it's not surprising that the American government has been slower to respond to problems like global warming than other comparable democracies.