The Paradox Paradox

Notes on the gloomiest possibility

Economic Principals was designed to rummage around the world of books: economs, law, history, and social science, seeking to relate their arguments to the business of everyday life. Those columns were easy enough to write in newspapers days, when space was abundant and attention easily paid. It is more difficult in the digital age. There are podcasts, of course, but writing for all kinds of screens has its own rules. No lengthy analyses; leave them to print. Instead, short-form and timely posts, occasionally little more than an early warning, like this one.

Stephen Skowronek has long been an EP favorite. A professor of political science at Yale Law School, he has produced one imaginative works after another. Presidential Leadership in Political Time is the most recent in a long line of stories about the cycles of American history. (What do Washinton, Jackson, Lincoln, McKinley, Roosevelt, Reagan, and Trump have in common?) A prescient essay in the Harvard Law Review laid out the ambitions of the “unitary “ extravagantly powerful presidency before they were put into play. On the eve of Trump’s second term, Phantoms of a Beleaguered Republic: The Deep State and the Unitary Executive foresaw the shape of present-day politics.

Now, in The Adaptability Paradox: Political Inclusion and Constitutional Resilience, he has forcefully raised a most troubling issue. Aa swift return to “normal?” Nobody expects that now. The question is, will Americans ever again see a return to constitutionally- bound law for a for their representative republican government? Maybe not. The Constitution itself, says Skowronek, may have reached the limits of its capacity to absorb change.

For nearly 250 years, a document drafted by a handful of prosperous white men has periodically rearranges the principles of governance to take account of changing circumstance. From “states’ rights” to Civil War; from “Reconstruction” to one-party rule in red and blue states and Jim Crow law; from a Gilde Age amid industrialization to a Progressive Era; from the Roaring Twenties and the Great Depression to the New Deal with its bureaucracies; from a “rights revolution” to whatever it is that is happening now. American adaptability itself created the nation in just such a metamorphosis: from the Declaration of Independence to the Constitution of 1787 ten years later, ” from “all men are created equal” to the three-fifths clause. “Those serial adjustments are our security blanket,” Skowronek writers.

He asks:

Has American democracy finally outstripped its constitutional accommodations? The verdict is out. But simply entertaining the thought that the old frame may, at last have exhausted its capacities to adapt to democratization open us to consideration of other questions on which we might make some headway. Are these problems of our day just more of the same or is there something categorically different about the challenges of re-orderings we now confront?

Adaptation Paradox is too good a book to write about quickly or carelessly. That is the paradox for this August today. The University of Chicago Press will publish book in late September. Keep an eye out for its reception.

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