“After Trump”

“In what ways can we further immunize our governing institutions from the political malaise of today and tomorrow?”

The framers of our constitutional system were under no illusions about the reality of our imperfect human nature. As a matter of justice and in the interest of ensuring human flourishing, humans were entitled to self-government, but that first principle had to be coupled with caution in light of our susceptibility to passion and our penchant for self-interested acting. Given the inescapable reality of human imperfection, all members of the constitutional republic—governors and governed alike—had to be constrained in various ways. Yuval Levin puts it best in a recent piece for National Review: “Our system does not trust leaders, but it also does not trust the public. It looks to each to restrain and direct the other.”

Granted, the framers themselves dismissed the notion that they harbored too low an opinion of mankind. As James Madison wrote in Federalist No. 55, “As there is a degree of depravity in mankind which requires a certain degree of circumspection and distrust, so there are other qualities in human nature which justify a certain portion of esteem and confidence. Republican government presupposes the existence of these qualities in a higher degree than any other form.” The democratic republicanism of our constitutional system couples “esteem and confidence” in human nature with a healthy dose of “circumspection and distrust,” as manifested in constitutional constraining mechanisms like checks and balances and the dispersal of powers across different levels and branches of government.

One might wonder at times, as I admittedly have, whether those various constraints, checks and balances—those guardrails that protect against the most depraved aspects of our humanity from carrying the day—create a sort of permission structure for the debased politics of today. That is, if the constitutional system is immunized from the would-be destructive effects of inane and destructive politics, does it open the door to such politics? If the Madisonian system softens the immediate blows to the health and well-being of our polity from our various political maladies like pandering to the base, lying, and refusing compromise, does it in some sense help give rise to such practices and sustain them? Is the genius of American constitutionalism—the capacity of our system to allow for self-government without the worst aspects of the human self ruling the roost—part of the problem?

These are fair questions, but they evince a profound lack of gratitude for our constitutional system. Even if this line of inquiry is correct as a descriptive matter—that the Madisonian constitutional order is partially to blame for the destructive and pervasive bad-faith politicking of today—the normative upshot is rather unclear. What are we to do? Open the flood gates? Remove the institutional restraints, empower the office holders and majorities of the moment, and place undue faith in the reason and virtue of those in the driver’s seat? Doing so would raise the stakes of politics; it would make the immediate negative effects of poor political behavior known. Whether our political behavior would improve in the face of those raised stakes is an open question, but it is not one that I am especially eager to test.