THE LAST DAYS OF DISCO: WHY THE AMERICAN POLITICAL SYSTEM IS DYSFUNCTIONAL

INTRODUCTIONWhit Stillman's 1998 film The Last Days of Disco portrays the misadventures of aimless young people in the early 1980s who engage in meaningless and occasionally misguided behavior and who are slowly transitioning to adult life.1 For my purposes, "the last days of disco" also refers to the period of the late 1970s and early 1980s when the United States was going through a political transition - between an older, exhausted political regime and a newer one.Near the end of the 1970s, many people believed that the United States of America was thoroughly ungovernable; by 1984, most people did not say that anymore.2 As Ronald Reagan's 1984 presidential campaign argued, it was "morning in America," and even people who opposed President Reagan's policies understood that the Republic was back up and running again, just not in ways they particularly liked.3 The last days of disco marked the end of a previous political regime, which had ground into dysfunction, and the end of an older constitutional order - the New Deal/Civil Rights regime. The last days of disco also marked the beginning of a new political regime and a new constitutional order - the conservative regime in which we have been living for the past three decades.Today, our political system once again seems remarkably dysfunctional. Many people think that our 225-year-old Constitution is the problem.4 But what looks like constitutional dysfunction is actually constitutional transition, a slow and often frustrating movement from an older constitutional regime to a new one. This particular transition has been - and will continue to be - particularly difficult, for two reasons. First, gradual transformations in the role of the presidency and the growth of the modern state mean that even the most politically adept and fortunate Presidents face greater obstacles to implementing transformative change than they once did; they are less able than past reconstructive leaders to disrupt existing institutions and clear the ground for a new politics. This, by itself, does not prevent the emergence of a new constitutional regime. But second, and perhaps more important, the transition will be especially difficult because we are near the peak of a long cycle of increasing polarization between the nation's two major political parties. That polarization greatly raises the stakes of a transition to a new constitutional regime; and therefore, the defenders of the old regime have every incentive to resist the emergence of a new regime until the bitter end.For these reasons, and others I will describe, the political transition will be a long, hard slog. But we will get through it. And once we get through it, things will look quite different. Most people, including most academics, will no longer say that we have a dysfunctional Constitution or that America is ungovernable. They may still complain about what the government is doing, and they may strongly oppose its policies. That is not the same thing, however, as saying that the government is paralyzed and cannot function. A dysfunctional regime is not the same thing as an unjust regime or a regime in which your favorite party loses elections.One should not confuse my argument with unalloyed optimism. This is not a story of "all's well that ends well." The period of transition we are going through is likely to be protracted and hard - harder, perhaps, than most of America's previous political transitions (though not all). It will almost certainly be more difficult than the last transition that occurred in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when the two parties were not as polarized. While our political system treads water, the nation's problems will continue to mount. The economy remains sluggish because of fundamental disagreements about how to repair it; millions of Americans remain out of work. Necessary reforms will be delayed or crippled; our infrastructure will continue to degrade. Enemies abroad may seek to capitalize on our political distractions and our self-inflicted injuries. …