Francis Fukuyama: The Decay of American Political Institutions
Whatever the reasons, the American state has always been weaker and less capable than its European or Asian counterparts. And note that distrust of government is not a conservative monopoly; many on the Left worry about the capture of national institutions by powerful corporate interests and prefer to achieve their desired policy outcomes by means of grassroots activism via the courts.
.. What makes this system so unwieldy is not the level of regulation as such, but the highly legalistic way in which it is pursued. Congress mandated the creation of an alphabet soup of new Federal agencies—the EEOC, EPA, OSHA and so forth—but it was not willing to cleanly delegate to these bodies the kind of rule-making authority and enforcement power that European or Japanese state institutions enjoy.
.. Morris Fiorina has shown that the American “political class” is far more polarized than the American people themselves. Most Americans support moderate or compromise positions on many contentious issues.
.. In most European parliamentary systems, it makes no sense for an interest group to lobby an individual MP since the rules of party discipline allow little or no influence over the party leadership’s position. In the U.S. system, by contrast, an influential committee chairmanship confers enormous powers to modify legislation, and therefore becomes the target of enormous lobbying activity.
.. The American political system has decayed over time because its traditional system of checks and balances has deepened and become increasingly rigid. At a time of sharp political polarization, this decentralized system is less and less able to represent majority interests, but gives excessive representation to the views of interest groups and activist organizations that collectively do not add up to a sovereign American people.
.. Many of these problems could be solved if the United States moved to a more unified parliamentary system of government, but so radical a change in the country’s institutional structure is barely conceivable. Americans regard their Constitution as a quasi-religious document. Persuading them to rethink its most basic tenets short of an outright system collapse is highly unlikely.