As a nation, the United States is awash in a sea of troubles: residual strands of the Covid-19 pandemic, inflation, authoritarian provocation in international relations, ballooning debt, a chaotic southern border, and rising violent crime, to name a few. Yet, a dangerous and pervasive undercurrent underlies all these challenges, frustrating our ability to address them coherently. Extremist polarization has undermined our ability to locate a governing center and move forward as a nation. Several factors have helped to produce and prolong this polarization, including long-standing institutional changes, often starting as well-meaning progressive reforms but yielding pernicious unintended consequences – the over-popularization of the presidential nominating system, campaign finance reform, for starters. The strains in our social and political fabric caused by the pandemic, by reactions to the death of George Floyd, and by the bitter election of 2020 have also helped to weaken tolerance and respectful discourse.
But the proximate catalyst of this polarization is the failure of our political leadership to promote the unity we need. Three individuals in particular bear the most blame and are, ironically, the ones best-positioned to contain and reverse this threat to our common welfare: Nancy Pelosi, Joe Biden, and Donald Trump. The clearest diagnosis of their failure and the surest prognosis for reversing it are to be found in the constitutional vision of the Founders and the institutional roles that Pelosi, Biden, and Trump have both assumed and neglected.
The Founders were not naive about the messiness of political life. They knew that the clash of ambitions and interests that constitutes politics would quickly surface after they had settled the nation’s institutional framework. For more than 230 years, the Constitution has contained and channeled the ugly energies of our politics, often strained to the breaking point but more often than not succeeding in producing ordered liberty and preserving the nation. The venality of our contemporary politicians and the gravity of the issues we face are not essentially different from previous generations. How, then, have we come to our present dysfunction?
Setting aside the unique role of our independent judiciary, the primary governing energies under the Constitution consist of a synthesis of the Madisonian legislature and the Hamiltonian presidency. Each of the political branches embodies a competing version of national unity, with the combination of both and the tension between them producing a mix of power and restraint on power that constitutes good government. As James Madison explains in Federalist 10, the legislature expresses the conflicting patchwork of competing interests in our large commercial republic. The critical function of legislative leadership is to manage these competing interests by forming majority coalitions that give their constituents what they want and need yet are inclusive enough to approximate an impartial public good. The development of political parties introduced coalition-building but did not fundamentally alter the legislative function.
Alexander Hamilton in Federalist 70-74 focused on the presidency as the center of “energy” for the political system, an office blending action, leadership, and rhetoric to pilot the ship of state. When the executive office is functioning as designed, the president serves to think, act, and speak for the American people. The challenge, of course, is to attract to the office the most capable person, with a combination of incentives that include avarice, ambition, and, as Hamilton wrote, “love of fame, the ruling passion of the noblest minds.” When mediocrity, opportunism, and vanity erase the “noble” part of that blend, the presidency drifts dangerously close to the demagoguery the Constitution was designed to prevent.
National unity and good governance, then, require in Congress a deft coalition-builder and in the presidency an individual of competence and vision who transcends party and petty self-interest. Nancy Pelosi is reputed to be a skillful legislator. In these times of crisis, however, she has exploited the structural majoritarianism of the House, exacerbating the deep divisions within the body and rendering it all but impossible to overcome the profound differences of opinion pervasive among the public. In particular, she has turned the Democratic majority into an instrument of its progressive wing and marginalized the Republican minority that is three members shy of majority status.
Joe Biden and Donald Trump have demonstrated political talent and governing capacity, but both have acted in ways to call into question their fitness for the office. At this perilous moment, the Senate alone has risen to the task of moderate and responsible government, born of its 50-50 composition and the cumulative effect of its rules, especially the filibuster. Ironically, this has led to the berating of certain senators for behaving, of all things, like senators.
What is the worst of the bad behavior of this national troika? For Pelosi, the formation and impaneling of the Jan. 6 Committee. For President Biden, his increasingly strident partisanship, culminating in his race-baiting in Atlanta advocating the passage of the two Democratic voting reform bills. For former president Trump, his reckless behavior during his last month in office and, in particular, his inexcusable conduct on Jan. 6 of last year.
We can all agree that the attack on the Capitol last January was a dark and ugly episode in American history. Was it an “insurrection” or “rebellion” equivalent in impact and seriousness to the Civil War, Pearl Harbor, or 9/11? For Pelosi and the committee under her leadership, the answer is yes. By rejecting the Republican Conference’s nominees for the committee and including only Republicans who supported the second impeachment of Trump, Pelosi all but guaranteed the committee’s warped and exaggerated narrative, its ever-expanding subpoenas, and its dogged determination to investigate only those aspects that support the dubious claim that Trump planned and incited an attempted coup. Andrew McCarthy has aptly described the committee’s direction as “the third impeachment of Donald Trump.” Indeed, if the first Trump impeachment was strained and opportunistic and the second sloppy and hyper-partisan, this third iteration is dangerous, threatening to worsen Congress’s dysfunction and the nation’s divisions.
What could Pelosi and the committee do to restore trust and produce something that the country actually needs? She could reverse her initial decision and appoint four Republicans who enjoy the support of the Republican Conference. The committee could curb its misguided attempt to demonstrate that Trump’s intention was to overthrow the government. To be clear, Trump failed as president on that day. He attempted to use a fatally weak constitutional argument to persuade Vice President Mike Pence, the real hero of the day, to reject valid elector slates, and peddled the last-ditch narrative of a stolen election. Still, Trump likely believed, and continues to believe, that the election was stolen, even if the evidence demonstrates otherwise. Three out of five Republicans and not a few independents still suspect that the election contained widespread corruption and irregularities. If the committee’s purpose is to give a transparent account of the election and ensuing riot and thus bring the country to some kind of consensus, why not investigate the many reports of election malfeasance, if only to dispel suspicions and assure the millions of Americans who voted for Trump of the integrity of the election?
President Biden, campaigning as a moderate centrist grounded in his decades of experience in the collegial Senate and his service as vice president in the Obama administration, announced in his inaugural address that his primary goal was to unify the nation, to heal its wounds, and to help it move forward. He quickly betrayed his own promise. Reducing “governance” to repudiating Trump and placating the progressive fringe of the Democratic Party, he has spoken and acted as the Great Divider. He has refused even to refer to his predecessor as “President Trump,” thus supporting the progressive Resistance that refused legitimacy to Trump’s 2016 election. All presidents attempt to put their novel stamp on policy through “executive orders.” Biden, however, immediately began dismantling almost every rational and successful action of Trump’s (the Keystone XL Pipeline, the Abraham Accords, the Stay in Mexico asylum policy), all with adverse consequences.
One might think that, by the character of some of Biden’s executive and judicial appointments and his legislative agenda and leadership, the Democratic Party had nominated, and the country elected, Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren. Setting aside the president’s missteps in tacking to the hard Left, the most egregious of his moves so far was his speech in Atlanta. In castigating anyone who did not support his voting reforms as racists, white supremacists, and unreconstructed segregationists or Confederates, he gave America perhaps the worst speech in presidential history. The president, as Hamilton suggested, is the voice of the nation. President Biden used that voice to stigmatize half the country and half the Congress. The speech left a damaged nation in its wake. Even more than the botched withdrawal from Afghanistan, the vicious Atlanta speech must surely call into question Biden’s fitness to hold the presidential office. Can he redeem his presidency and ease our divisions? Perhaps, but only if he were to govern as the centrist president he promised to be.
President Trump demonstrated streaks of character and action that embodied elements of the Hamiltonian presidency, but much of the good he accomplished was washed away in his last weeks in office as his anger and desire to enlist public passions ended his presidency in a cloud of demagoguery. Neither he nor his supporters produced the proof necessary to validate their claims that the 2020 election outcome would have been different but for corruption.
As Jan. 6, 2021, approached, Trump became ever more strident, and though he did not order the crowd to attack the Capitol, he clearly stoked its passions. Trump sat in the Oval Office and watched the horror of that day unfold. He showed what a man moved by the love of fame severed from nobility can sink to. Not only did he fail to meet the needs of the presidency in the immediate crisis; he also aggravated the nation’s divisions, giving fire to the febrile Left and empowering the anxious Right. At that moment, he deserved censure and undermined his case for deserving another term in office.
What would a more statesmanlike president have done? He would have rushed to the head of the swelling crowd and stopped them in their tracks, reminding them that mob rule is not the American way. To heal the nation’s wounds and enable it to unite and move on, he would have conceded the election gracefully and conclusively, as Richard Nixon did in the contestable election of 1960. Today, as a former president, Trump can demonstrate his love of country and his commitment to the Republican Party by using his new media platform to pledge support for the party’s nominee in 2024. By doing so, he would unite the party and rally the base of Trump supporters behind the candidate and the campaign.
Pelosi, Biden, and Trump would do well to glance backwards to the Founding to point us forward into the future. Our ability to find a confident American political center between the paranoia of the Right and the Stalinism of the Left hangs on the ability and willingness of these pivotal individuals to summon the better angels of their nature – and help us to find ours.
Jeffrey J. Poelvoorde is Associate Professor of Political Science at Converse University. Bradford P. Wilson is Executive Director of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton University.
