* Why We're Polarized - Ezra Klein
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** Even under a presidential system, the US would fare much better if the two parties are split in half each: a populist social democratic party, a liberal party, a conservative party, and a populist right-wing party. The two centrist parties would find themselves in a situation where they need to work together to avoid a populist show-stopper from either side, and as demographics keep changing, that populist threat is increasingly progressive instead of the current regressive threat. MAGA, as I said elsewhere, is the last wave of Reganism.
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America’s unstable form of government

The most powerful critique of America’s political system was published in 1990 by a Spanish political sociologist named Juan Linz.

 Linz was an outsider to American politics and, more important, to its self-serving mythologies. Born in the Weimar Republic in 1927 and raised in Spain under the Francoist dictatorship, Linz both lived through and studied the circumstances in which political systems fail. The causes of collapse were often encoded in the architecture of the government: he showed that systems based around an independent president tended to dissolve, as conflicts between the executive and the legislature were often irresolvable, and irresolvable conflicts end in crisis and collapse.

But America’s political system posed a puzzle for Linz. As an outside observer, he was free from the quasi-religious reverence we afford our founding documents. He knew that the American political system had failed wherever else it had been tried. He knew that America itself was loath to impose its system on other nations—for all our nation-building adventurism, we never give any country developing into a democracy a system that works like ours. But he also knew that in America, the American political system had worked.

In 1990, in a paper entitled “The Perils of Presidentialism,” Linz explained why. The “vast majority of the stable democracies” in the world were parliamentary regimes, where whoever wins legislative power also wins executive power.9 America, however, was a presidential democracy: the president is elected separately from the Congress and can often be at odds with it. This system had been tried before. America, worryingly, was the only place where it had survived.

The problem is straightforward. In parliamentary systems, the prime minister is the leader of the coalition that controls the legislature. If that coalition loses an election, it loses power. But at any given moment, only one party or coalition holds power. In presidential systems, by contrast, one party can control the legislature and another can control the presidency. Both parties, then, have a claim to democratic legitimacy. “Under such circumstances,” asked Linz, “who has the stronger claim to speak on behalf of the people: the president or the legislative majority that opposes his policies?”

It gets worse. What happens when the majorities that the president and the Congress represent are different majorities, who voted at different times and through different methods? Linz noted that presidents tend to be elected by voters but legislatures tend to reflect geography, with small towns and rural areas given outsized power. It’s hard enough resolving a democratic disagreement that plays out among a single electorate. What do you do when you’re facing a disagreement that reflects different kinds of electorates?

It’s a question with no answer. In general, we assume a system like this encourages compromise, and that’s true, when the competing political coalitions are open to compromise. But a system like this can also encourage crisis—crises where, in other countries, “the armed forces were often tempted to intervene as a mediating power.”10

This is why there are no long-standing presidential democracies save for the United States. And it’s why America doesn’t impose its specific form of government on others. “Think about Germany, Japan, Italy, and Austria,” wrote Vox’s Matt Yglesias.

 These are countries that were defeated by American military forces during the Second World War and given constitutions written by local leaders operating in close collaboration with occupation authorities. It’s striking that even though the US Constitution is treated as a sacred text in America’s political culture, we did not push any of these countries to adopt our basic framework of government.11

 Linz admitted that he couldn’t fully answer the question of why America was different. He suspected that “the uniquely diffuse character of American political parties—which, ironically, exasperates many American political scientists and leads them to call for responsible, ideologically disciplined parties—has something to do with it.” Whatever the explanation, Linz continued, “the American case seems to be an exception; the development of modern political parties, particularly in socially and ideologically polarized countries, generally exacerbates, rather than moderates, conflicts between the legislative and the executive.”12

Linz was writing in 1990, when America’s political parties were far more exceptional, far more mixed and moderated, than they are today. But what read in 1990 like an explanation of what made America’s political system different now reads like an analysis of why America’s system is in crisis. The Garland affair is a perfect example. For all the fury over McConnell’s behavior, what, exactly, did he do wrong?

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