The Growing Divide

Probably not too enlightening, but an interesting read.

There's a lot of disgust in America with politicians' inability to get things done. In the race to win the Republican presidential nomination, that disgust has so far benefited outsider candidates. Non-career politicians Donald Trump, Carly Fiorina and Ben Carson have all promised to ride in and fix Washington.

But new research by Nolan McCarty, a professor at Princeton University, and other political scientists suggests this disgust — and America's political dysfunction — won't be that easy to fix. Working with political scientist Boris Shor and economist John Voorheis, McCarty has released a new studythat shows that the growing ideological gap between the Republican and Democratic parties — a common obstacle to getting anything done in Washington — is not just due to politicians' incompetence or their unwillingness to work together. It's due, at least in part, to a deeper, structural problem: the widening gap between the rich and poor.

LOST

Oct 8, 2015 at 8:01am

The extreme Right of the Republican Party as manifested in the House "Freedom Caucus" doesn't want the Government to "get things done".

ParticleMan

Oct 8, 2015 at 8:14am

I thought this was an interesting morsel:

"First, the researchers find that Democrats as a whole have shifted farther to the left than the Republicans have to the right, with very liberal Democrats becoming even more liberal."

bramzzoinks

Oct 8, 2015 at 8:25am

I found this article from the Atlantic to be interesting and thought provoking:

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/10/our-fragile-constitution/403237/

America’s Fragile Constitution
The Founders misread history and established a dysfunctional system of government. A case for a little less reverence.

"In this telling, the Constitution created not a radical democracy, but a very traditional mixed monarchy. At its head stood a king—an uncrowned one called a president—with sweeping powers, whose steadying hand would hopefully check the factionalism of the Congress. The two houses of the legislature, elected by the people, would make laws, but the president—whom the Founders regarded as a third branch of the legislature—could veto them. He could also appoint his own Cabinet, command the Army, and make treaties.

The Convention placed limits on the president’s powers, to be sure: Some of his actions would be contingent on approval by the Senate, or subject to overrides. But these hedges on presidential authority did not make the office a creature of Congress. Having defeated the armies of George III, the Framers seized upon a most unlikely model for their nascent democracy—the very Stuart monarchy whose catastrophic failure had produced the parliamentary system—and proceeded to install an executive whose authority King George could only envy...."

"Since the american Revolution, many new democracies have taken inspiration from the U.S. Constitution. Around much of the world, parliamentary systems became prevalent, but some countries, particularly in Latin America, adopted the presidential model, splitting power between an executive and a legislative branch.

When, in 1985, a Yale political scientist named Juan Linz compared the records of presidential and parliamentary democracies, the results were decisive. Not every parliamentary system endured, but hardly any presidential ones proved stable. “The only presidential democracy with a long history of constitutional continuity is the United States,” Linz wrote in 1990. This is quite an uncomfortable form of American exceptionalism.

Linz’s findings suggest that presidential systems suffer from a large, potentially fatal flaw. In parliamentary systems, governmental deadlock is relatively rare; when prime ministers can no longer command legislative support, the impasse is generally resolved by new elections. In presidential systems, however, contending parties must eventually strike a deal. Except sometimes, they don’t. Latin America’s presidential democracies have tended to oscillate between authoritarianism and dysfunction..."

"Even if we discount the failures of other presidential democracies, though, we should not dismiss the fact that the U.S. Constitution was modeled on a system that collapsed into civil war, and that it is inherently fragile. “This is a system that requires a particular set of political norms,” Eric Nelson told me, “and it can be very dangerous and dysfunctional where those norms are not present.” Once those norms have been discarded, the president or either house of Congress can simply go on strike, refusing to fulfill their responsibilities. Nothing can compel them to act.

Until recently, American politicians have generally made the compromises necessary to govern. The trouble is that cultures evolve. As American politics grows increasingly polarized, the goodwill that oiled the system and helped it function smoothly disappears...."