Emboldened liberal activists who have been pushing for a raft of transformational changes to the United States are bound to be disappointed no matter the outcome of the next presidential election.
Whether the next occupant of the White House is a triumphantly reelected President Trump, an elderly Joe Biden, or even a representative of the resurgent left wing such as Sen. Elizabeth Warren, one reality will be the same. The U.S. is not going to enact free college, socialized health insurance, a Green New Deal, a job guarantee, universal free child care, or anything close to these sweeping liberal fantasies.
The reality is that the political system won’t allow it. Even if Democrats gain power in 2020, any Senate majority they have is going to be razor-thin. Republicans will be able to filibuster nearly any major policy initiative. Furthermore, because control of the Senate would be contingent upon winning in states such as Iowa, North Carolina, Arizona, and Georgia, Democrats are not going to be able to cobble together a majority for anything close to what the Sen. Bernie Sanders wing of the party wants, and probably not even whatever “middle ground” Biden conjures up.
Over the past two years, Republicans have experienced a taste of this frustration themselves. Sure, Trump has been able to unravel some of President Barack Obama’s policies such as the Iran deal and Paris climate agreement and appoint a lot of judges. That’s not nothing. But Trump’s legislative accomplishments have been negligible.
Trump, who enjoyed unified party control of Washington for two years, signed a major tax cut into law, but failed to repeal and replace Obamacare, failed to overhaul the immigration system, and even failed to get the relatively modest amount of funding he was seeking to fulfill his signature campaign promise of building the border wall. Like Obama for much of his last six years in office, Trump has been left to pursue policy goals through executive orders and then fight it out in court.
The difficulty of passing major legislation is to a large extent baked into the American system of government, and from a conservative perspective, it has generally been a positive thing to have significant institutional barriers preventing rapid changes. But two things are different about the current moment in American history.
One is that unlike in past eras, when there may have been some hope of persuading some members of the other party and winning bipartisan victories, fundamental shifts in American politics have obliterated this possibility. Whoever one chooses to blame, the undeniable reality is that in the current political system, there is nothing but upside for the opposition party to obstruct every major policy initiative of the party in power, even if the policy in question is popular, and even if there is some underlying agreement on the merits of an idea.
The second thing that is different is that large numbers of Americans believe that there are substantial, even existential threats to the U.S. that are not being addressed. Whether their major fear is a debt crisis, a climate crisis, a border crisis, a child care crisis, a student loan crisis, an income inequality crisis, a gun violence crisis — the point is not to get into each of these subjects in one column. The point is that many Americans fear that their livelihood, and even the nation itself, is under threat as a result of a substantial problem and somebody or some institution is standing in the way of doing anything about it.
The question is, how sustainable is a status quo in which policy demands keep getting more grandiose while the ability of parties in power to implement their agenda keeps shrinking? How wide can that gap get before it becomes a significant threat to our system of government?
Liberals, and some elected Democrats, are already floating ideas such as eliminating the filibuster, packing the Supreme Court, and ending the Electoral College. Hostility toward the Senate, already rising on the Left, is only likely to become more widespread as the population gets more concentrated in urban areas and less-populated states with equal representation stand in the way of liberal policy goals.
Many conservatives who were critical of Obama’s dependence on executive action have been cheerleaders for Trump’s moves to implement aspects of his agenda, such as building the border wall, after being stymied by Congress.
Where does this lead? If not Trump, does a future president, frustrated by congressional intransigence, start ignoring court orders to implement his or her policies via executive action? If that happens, can we have any confidence that partisans would resist supporting a move whose outcome they like over concerns about process?
What’s more, how does the political system respond if the most dire predictions come true in the coming decades and the nation faces a crippling fiscal crisis, or devastating weather events, or some combination of both?
One may take comfort in the fact that comparatively speaking, the U.S. has been remarkably stable over the past 230 years, and has navigated many economic and political shocks, and even a Civil War. On the other hand, no system of government has lasted forever, and there are powerful undercurrents in America that in the past have been associated with revolutions.
