Ben Studebaker’s Good-Bad Book on the Great American Breakdown
Daniel Lazare reviews 'The Chronic Crisis of American Democracy'
The good news about The Chronic Crisis of American Democracy (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023) is that it’s a compelling account of the great American breakdown following the collapse of the post-World War II capitalist long wave in the 1970s. As author Benjamin Studebaker tells it, real wages rose just eight percent between 1979 and 2019, even though GDP increased more than sevenfold. International trade more than doubled from 11 to 25 percent of GDP, allowing the rich to take advantage of globalization by stashing as much as $36 trillion in offshore tax havens. Between 1975 and 2021, tuition and fees at four-year private colleges rose 15 times, while at public colleges, they rose 40. Adjusted for inflation, the average college graduate in 1975 owed just $5,060. Today, Studebaker goes on, he or she owes $31,100.
It’s a story of unprecedented wealth accumulation for the top one percent and stagnation and decline for workers and the poor, one that Studebaker tells in simple yet vivid prose. Indeed, he does such a good job of it that readers are hereby advised to keep plates, glasses, etc. out of reach while making their way through his damning statistics. Otherwise, they’ll be so furious that they’re likely to smash them against a wall.
But there’s bad news too, which is that Studebaker shows remarkable disregard for the cause. His approach is remarkably non-analytical. All he knows is that American democracy, such as it is, is in decline and that the process is unstoppable. But that’s it. As he puts it:
As long as Americans see no credible alternative to democracy and American democracy continues to heavily feature an extensive set of checks and balances, there is little chance of replacing the American political system with some other system. To be sure, this doesn’t preclude the possibility of American democratic procedures being gently reformed, by changing the Supreme Court, creating new states, overhauling campaign finance, opening up voter access laws, and so on. But if oligarchs can block ordinary reforms that might threaten their wealth and power, they can just as easily block procedural reforms that might do the same things.
Democracy equals checks and balances equals unstoppable decline. Elite interests are so entrenched that it’s useless to struggle against them. So what can you do?
This is what was known as oriental fatalism in less PC times, and it’s startling to see it in a recently-minted Ph.D. who writes for the Platypus Review and other leftwing journals. Studebaker showed his thoughtful side when he took part in a Platypus panel about the Middle East in July. Yet there is a void in The Chronic Crisis of American Democracy where rigorous analytics ought to be. The reason is simple. While invoking democracy in seemingly every paragraph, Studebaker makes no effort to define it, explore what it means, or question whether it adequately describes the US system. He quotes the conservative political theorist Francis Fukuyama to the effect that America is turning into a “vetocracy” in which the goal is no longer to win, but to use the structure’s myriad checks and balances to prevent the other side from winning. Studebaker says the system “checks madness with madness ... creates conflicting forms of unreasonableness, pits them against one another, and ensures they stand in each other’s way.”
But he never questions why it generates so much madness to begin with. Why are checks and balances so intrusive? Isn’t there some way of making them less onerous? These are vital questions that Studebaker leaves unexplored.
Blindness of this sort used to be all but mandatory. Americans were supposed to worship the Constitution rather than dwell on its many contradictions and absurdities. “My faith in the Constitution is whole, it is complete; it is total, and I am not going to sit here and be an idle spectator to the diminution, the subversion, the destruction, of the Constitution,” Barbara Jordan, a congressional black Democrat from Texas, declared at the height of Watergate, and everybody cheered. The Constitution is what makes America great. Everything about it is perfect, right down to the commas and semi-colons. Questioning it was undemocratic in the same way that questioning the Bible was once un-Christian. It just wasn’t done.
But then something happened. Maybe it was the January 6 coup attempt, repeal of Roe v. Wade, a resurgent MAGA movement, social breakdown in the form of the fentanyl crisis and the like, or the increasingly poisonous atmosphere on Capitol Hill. Regardless, a lightbulb switched on over the heads of well-placed academics who had previously defended the Constitution but now began having second thoughts. In April 2024, Aziz Rana published The Constitutional Bind, which explored the question of how Americans had become so dangerously besotted with a document that is increasingly dysfunctional. In August, Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the UC Berkeley law school, published No Democracy Lasts Forever, which warned that America’s antiquated constitution was not raising society up, but dragging it down. In 2018, a couple of Harvard scholars named Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt published How Democracies Die, yet another tale of woe about conservatives beating up on America’s sacred document. But in September, they reversed course by publishing Tyranny of the Minority, which described how the real problem is a constitution whose myriad chokepoints allow well-placed interests to stop democracy and render it inoperative. (I reviewed Tyranny of the Minority in October 2023 while Luke Pickrell reviewed it the following January.)
Even the New York Times, formerly a font of constitutional piety, got into the act. In August, it ran a lengthy news analysis asking whether “Trump owes his political ascent to the Constitution, making him a beneficiary of a document that is essentially antidemocratic and, in this day and age, increasingly dysfunctional.”
Works like these were not without problems. Nonetheless, they signaled that sections of the intelligentsia were placing the Constitution under a microscope. The patient was sick, a diagnosis was urgent, and a growing number of critics were now throwing themselves into the effort.
As a consequence, The Chronic Crisis of American Democracy reads like a time capsule from the days when such problems were studiously ignored. Yet, as readers of this blog know, they are legion:
An Electoral College that nearly quadruples the per-capita voting power of lily-white Wyoming versus a minority-majority giant like California and has given us two unelected presidents in the last 25 years.
A filibuster that allows 41 senators representing as little as 11 percent of the population to block any and all legislation.
A Supreme Court dominated by six ultra-rightists, five of whom were nominated by presidents who lost the popular vote and four of whom were confirmed by senators representing a minority of the population.
A heavily gerrymandered House that provides rightwing Republicans with a major electoral advantage.
Most important of all, an amending clause that allows 13 states representing as little as 4.4 percent of the population to veto any and all efforts at constitutional reform.
The cumulative effect is to turn popular sovereignty on its head. Where Studebaker thinks the problem is democracy, it’s really an anti-democracy that makes a mockery of rational self-government. His book is thus peppered with comments and assertions that are wildly off-base.
One is that Americans are “committed, not just to democracy, but to the US constitution.” But this is incorrect. They’re committed to democracy but trapped by a constitution that denies it at every turn.
Another is his statement that “[a]n overwhelming 85 percent of Americans feel the political system ‘needs to be completely reformed’ or ‘needs major changes.’” Yet, he goes on, “[n]one of these amendments go anywhere. The constitution hasn’t been successfully amended since 1992. ... As much as our political system frustrates and infuriates our citizens, they see no viable alternative to it.” But if Americans see no viable alternative, it’s merely because they haven’t figured out a way of extricating themselves from a constitution that is effectively unchangeable.
Then there is this: “American democracy is much more miserable and much less just than the liberal realists admit, but it is much more durable and much harder to shift than most folks on the left acknowledge.” But while the system has proved durable so far, we have no idea how durable it will prove in the years to come. “While there is frustration today with the way the political system is performing,” Studebaker continues, “the founding fathers still enjoy enormously high favorability ratings.” But these enforced ratings for individuals whose words are now law. If Americans worship the founders, it’s because the law, in effect, requires them to.
French monarchs once enjoyed enormously high favorability ratings, too. When Louis XVI traveled some 200 miles in 1786 to inspect new harbor works in the city of Cherbourg, anyone who witnessed the enormous crowds cheering him at every stop would have agreed that, despite mounting financial problems, the ties between the monarchy and its subjects were indissoluble. Six years later, no one lifted a finger when the Jacobins marched him to the guillotine. The people saw no alternative to the ancien régime until suddenly they did. Then, they saw no alternative to the revolution as it wended its bloody course.
Americans are the same. They may worship the Constitution now. But once it’s overthrown, they’ll wonder what took them so long.