The American Political Crisis Deepens

I understand the frustration at how our system provides a structural advantage for low-density states — but I see that as a feature of American constitutional balance, rather than an anti-democratic bug. But put aside short-term justifications for any one of these measures, and take all these maneuvers together, and you can see how any temporarily losing ruling party in an eroding democracy tries to shift constitutional norms to entrench power as permanently as possible — and not simply by winning elections in the existing system.

Maybe it’s all those books I absorbed on the collapse of the Roman republic, or the coincidence that I’m finally watching the astonishingly good German Netflix series, Babylon Berlin, set in the late 1920s. But these partisan maneuvers are red lights — a sign that even the attempt for parties to craft compromise, or willingness to share power in the future, is becoming an anachronism. And the gathering illiberalism in the broader culture adds an ominous backdrop to it all.

And the social and cultural forces behind liberal democracy’s unraveling are gaining strength.

We will stagger on, as Rome and Weimar did. In democracies which are slowly being undone, things carry on, until they suddenly don’t.