America's earliest leaders were fearful of both the king and his royal governors on the one hand, and the people -- the mob -- on the other. So they devised institutions that reflected a system of checks, balances, and constraints that made the accumulation of power -- let alone the deployment of that power in the service of dramatic change -- very difficult.
How many truly transformative moments engineered by government have there been in America's history? Only a handful -- the American Revolution itself, the drafting of the Constitution and birth of the Republic, the Emancipation Proclamation and the freeing of the slaves, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal; President Lyndon Johnson's civil rights and Great Society legislation, and President Ronald Reagan's success in changing the terms of the debate over the role of big government.
And even those changes took years to bear fruit. We are at best "evolutionary revolutionaries," who fear unbridled change and who seek to temper it. Indeed, our three undeniably greatest presidents -- George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and FDR -- were still very much conservative revolutionaries who found a balance between their principles and the pragmatic tactics necessary to realize their ideals. Change in America is no easy matter.
...and it requires real crisis
Transformative change in the United States requires something to go very wrong -- and we're not talking about your garden-variety crisis. Only serious crises can override the unruly nature of our politics, and overcome the structural constraints the founders built into the system.
Once such crisis was the issue of slavery. The founders punted on the issue, and American leaders spent the next half-century looking for ways to manage the southern-northern divide -- until the system could no longer accommodate those compromises. It was only secession and war that made them face up to the reality that the survival of the nation required a resolution of the race issue. And it would still take another 150 years to reconcile the promise of the Declaration of Independence with the reality of the U.S. Constitution.
Today, we face crises of a different order. Our challenges certainly weaken our nation -- they could perhaps even destroy our power. But they are slower bleeds that threaten us over time -- and they lack the immediacy of Depression-era bread lines in the 1930s or the violent images of baton beatings and police dogs charging civil rights demonstrators in the 1960s.
The United States is too big, and too easily distracted. The media covers everything -- and nothing seems to last more than 15 minutes. The terrible shootings in Newtown fade, the Boston Marathon bombing takes over and is then displaced by the explosion at a fertilizer plant in Texas. The U.S. government's capacity to focus on problems is made all the harder.
And our modern-day crises don't tame our political system, but polarize it even further. It's not the worst polarization in U.S. history -- Lincoln had it far worse. But a combination of factors, including redistricting, the collapse of the centers in both parties (but much worse on the Republican side), and fundamental gaps on core issues such as the role of government have made our political system both too petty and too principled to get things done.
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