From Bruce Cain’s essay, appearing today at the NYU Democracy Project:
At Caltech, I was asked to assist a group of distinguished physicists who were evaluating the technical feasibility of President Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI, aka “Star Wars”). The group ultimately concluded that SDI would not work because a sophisticated missile offense could easily overwhelm a missile defense with decoys. There was no AI yet to separate the missiles from the chaff. We are in a similar situation today with President Trump’s numerous attempts to refashion American democracy, i.e., he generates so much offense it is hard to defend effectively.
In Democracy More or Less, I distinguish between first and second order democracy issues. The first concerns systemic features that distinguish democracy from autocracies, such as holding free and open elections, First Amendment speech and association rights, accepting office turnover after electoral defeat, and the like. At the time, I did not believe that such matters were still controversial in America. January 6th was a wakeup call for me. Second order democratic design issues are disputes over the relative merits of various democracy design choices such as parliamentary or presidential, highly federalized or unitary, and proportional representation or single member simple plurality. President Trump has willy-nilly taken on both types of questions.
Some of Trump’s ideas such as annexing Canada or renaming the Gulf of Mexico are the political equivalent of the chaff that my physicist colleagues feared would confuse SDI. Other proposals like reinstituting tariffs conflate a policy debate with a procedural question about whether tariff power resides with the Congress or the President. In such instances, policy, not procedure, usually matters more to the public and activists. We count on officials in the system to defend their powers. But when they don’t, as in the case of Republican members of Congress, a crucial assumption behind checks and balances breaks down. Tribalism and getting policy wins are pulling institutional turf protection into a political black hole.