Is Our Constitution Learning?
By 
Stephen Taylor riffs on “The State of the Union is Grim” with a much better post, “Has the Constitution Failed?” He provides a much more thoughtful, but still downbeat, assessment of our possible trajectory and what, specifically, about our institutional design isn’t working. He lays out five possibilities:
1. Deeper fascism. Trump (more likely Miller, Vance, Vought, Homan, etc.) finds a way to truly move the country into a clearer dictatorial structure. This is the nightmare scenario, which I think is unlikely, but is real enough that I can’t discount it.
2. Competitive Authoritarianism. There are two versions of this in my head,
2a. Competitive Authoritarianism. There are two versions of this in my head,
2b. One-Party. Here, the GOP is able to manipulate the system in 2026 and 2028 in a way that looks like we are having competitive elections, but the playing field is tilted towards the GOP sufficiently that they win regardless of the actual popular preference. This is the US version of Hungary, at least in broad brushstrokes.
3. Two-Party. In this version, the Democrats are able to win back power, but the system is sufficiently broken that they will govern like Trump has: by fiat and with the Congress being basically a vestigial organ. This is a broken democracy at best.
4. Pluralist Democracy. This is going to require reforms and could only come about under current conditions if the Democrats win back power and do what they failed to do in 2021: use their majority to institute change. My post from August of 2020 provides a starting spot: Reforms: the Possible, the Improbable, and the Unpossible. I might change some of those recommendations if I rewrote the post, but the basic gist remains, I think, on point.
Quite frankly, since the early days of this term, most specifically because of what DOGE did (and as amplified by a string of shadow docket decisions by SCOTUS), I think that the most likely outcome of all of this is 2b: Two-party competitive authoritarianism, with every four to eight years one of the two parties comes to power and governing largely through executive action in a version of what Guillermo O’Donnell once called “delegative democracy” (which was a critique of the poor quality of Latin American democracy in the post-authoritarian period–something I have been meaning to write about). This would continue until one side was able to move us to 2a (or worse). It would look like the constitutional order was still functioning, but that would be an illusion.
You should go read the whole thing &c
