America on the brink

The whole system needs fixing, and it's not about Trump and Biden

Image of bedraggled Uncle Sam via Unsplash

"What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again," it says in the biblical book of Ecclesiastes. "There is nothing new under the sun." It means that the human experience is essentially constant, and we should keep our powder dry. This is usually true, but not in the United States right now: there is dirty work afoot. We have a pretty big problem.

I am not talking about the attempt last weekend to assassinate former President Donald Trump. No individual's actions, however impactful, can teach us very much (other than that randomness governs the universe). Rather, I mean a combination of extreme polarization with shocking distortions, debilitating dysfunction and systemic paralysis that are driving many to insulate themselves from national politics—if not from the nation.

One symptom of the polarization is Trump's selection Monday as his running mate of 39-year-old Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance, a populist conservative who opposes gay marriage and has suggested support for a federal abortion ban (see our article on him last week). If Trump were inclined to try to heal the country, he would have instead picked one of several centrist alternatives.

But the problems bedeviling the Republic go far beyond quotidian events, and have more to do with the distortions, dysfunction and paralysis. And much of that originates from an excessive focus, so baked into the system that it can seem imperceptible at times, on the states. This is the source of the fundamentally anti-majoritarian reality of the U.S. system — which both creates the distortions and blocks change.