Over at Vox, Matthew Yglesias argues that American Democracy is Doomed.  The flaws that have taken down every other constitutional republic in the world will one day come for America, irrevocably altering the system and ending the experiment of 1776.  It's a neat essay.  He's also set up his argument so that you'd have to be an extremist American exceptionalist to say he's wrong.

As dysfunctional as American government may seem today, we've actually been lucky. No other presidential system has gone as long as ours without a major breakdown of the constitutional order. But the factors underlying that stability — first non-ideological parties and then non-disciplined ones — are gone. And it's worth considering the possibility that with them, so too has gone the American exception to the rule of presidential breakdown. If we seem to be unsustainably lurching from crisis to crisis, it's because we are unsustainably lurching from crisis to crisis. The breakdown may not be next year or even in the next five years, but over the next 20 or 30 years, will we really be able to resolve every one of these high-stakes showdowns without making any major mistakes? Do you really trust Congress that much?

I think the only problem with Yglesias' argument is that it's too apocalyptic.  He's waiting for some sort of identifiable, world-changing crisis. But this is why apocalyptic thinking is almost always wrong -- the world is usually sneakier than that.

Maybe it's the third season of House of Cards talking, but I see as more plausible a crisis that the public never knows about.  In House of Cards a manipulative congressman manipulates his way into the White House without ever winning a national election. Of course, it's melodrama, but what speaks to me about it is how something in the system can be so clearly wrong but how people will mostly just accept it, if it doesn't impact their lives too much.  For all the talk of individualism, people tend to bend towards authority figures.

Yglesias writes about the 2000 election, for example.  It really is amazing to me what a nothing of an issue it has been.  Even if it had not been eclipsed as a news event by 9/11, it seems that people, including Bush's opposition, were quite willing to let the matter drop once the initial furor burned out.  There's a certain belief in the system at work that allows for a good number of Americans to accept outcomes that are contrary to their desires.  There's little will to unmake such systems, despite much rhetoric.

Where House of Cards gets things wrong is that one power couple manipulates the system for their own ends.  In reality, I think things are more complicated.  The manipulators would be well placed in corporate and political America and they would represent interests larger than their own. The trick would be to undermine the constitutional democracy while keeping all of its trappings.

Giving corporations the same rights as individual citizens, for example, would very much accomplish that. It subverts democracy because corporations have extreme wealth and potential immortality but it's an idea that can fit seamlessly into our rhetoric (once people start talking about Google's rights, the argument has been lost).

I'm pretty sure that whatever cataclysm might result that most people will never notice there was a problem.  The revolution will not be on the Facebook feed.