"That the United States faces a " crisis of democracy " is widely acknowledged. It began in the early twenty-first century and accelerated after the global financial meltdown of 2007/08. Americans are deeply polarized about what has gone wrong with the system and how to fix it. There is a red-state view and a blue-state view. The struggle in Washington has become brutal, as each camp seeks to execute its own vision of a new national strategy and obstruct execution of the alternative vision."
"My own diagnosis of the current moment differs somewhat from both red and blue views. The American system as a whole is not in crisis. There are tens of thousands of governments (state, regional, local) in the US, and the overwhelming majority are working as they always have. This is largely a crisis of central institutions, which have proven incapable of managing polarization and are probably making it worse."
The United States faces a crisis of democracy that began in the early twenty-first century and accelerated after the 2007/08 global financial meltdown. Americans are deeply polarized about causes and remedies, splitting into red-state and blue-state visions that clash brutally in Washington. The crisis centers on national institutions rather than local governments; tens of thousands of state and local governments continue to function normally. Decades of bipartisan centralizing reforms have expanded Washington's power and strengthened the presidency. That centralization rested on an assumption of ideological homogenization that no longer holds. Failure of central institutions to manage polarization is exacerbating national dysfunction and producing cross-border implications for Canada.
Read at The Walrus
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