How a Too-Strong Presidency and a Too-Weak Congress Are Destroying the American Experiment

Lee Drutman wrote a piece for the Los Angeles Times based on his policy paper, “Can Our Institutions Survive Our Divided Politics?”:

The United States is a divided nation: There is Redland, where Donald Trump won among exurban non-college educated whites, and Blueland, home to diverse city and coastal cosmopolitans, where Hillary Clinton triumphed. Voters in these two lands have fundamentally different views about what it means to be an American, and they increasingly view their fellow citizens as enemies.

Our political system, which requires compromise and collaboration, is not set up to handle such profound differences. Worse, our current political rules are exacerbating and reinforcing them.