American democracy, R.I.P.?

This essay has prompted some interesting responses from Dylan Matthews, Ross Douthat, Jonathan Chait and Ed Kilgore, all of which are also worth reading.

Certainly, Yglesias is onto something. His argument resonates with public opinion polling that shows an erosion of trust in every public institution except the military. It also resonates with a theme I’ve been harping on here at Spoiler Alerts: Obama’s use of executive action on foreign policy to bypass a truculent Congress, and the congressional response to those executive actions. The erosion of informal American political norms — which helped to ensure that basic government functions happened — is certainly another data point for Yglesias.

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That said, the more I think about his argument, however, the sillier it sounds to me. Yglesias embeds three assumptions into his argument that need to be seriously unpacked.

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