It’s been 52 years since Congress passed, and the country ratified, a constitutional amendment: the 26th Amendment, which lowered the voting age to 18 in the wake of the Vietnam War and the broader disruption of the 1960s (the 27th amendment, ratified in 1992). , was approved in 1789). It’s been 64 years since Congress added new states to the union: Alaska and Hawaii, in 1959. And it’s been 94 years since Congress limited the size of the House of Representatives to 435 members.
You might be tempted to treat these facts as trivia. But the truth is that they say something profound about American politics. For more than 50 years, the United States has been frozen in a kind of structural and constitutional stasis. Despite profound changes in our society, including significant population growth and at least two generational waves, we have not made formal changes to our national charter, added new states, rearranged the federal system, or altered the rules of competition. politics.
One reason this matters, as Kate Shaw and Julie C. Suk note in a recent essay for Times Opinion, is that “several generations of Americans have lost the habit and muscle memory of seeking change formal constitutional”. Unaccustomed to the concept and convinced that it is functionally impossible, Americans have abandoned the very idea that we can change our Constitution. Instead, we place the responsibility for change on the Supreme Court and hope for the best. Outside with popular sovereignty, inside with judicial supremacy.
There is another reason why this matters. Our stagnant political system has produced a stagnant political landscape. Neither side has been able to gain a lasting advantage over the other, nor is it willing to do so. The margins of victory and defeat in national elections are slim. The Republican majority that gave President George W. Bush a second term in the White House—and briefly inspired visions of a “permanent Republican majority”—came 50.7% of the total votes. President Barack Obama won his second term by about 4 percentage points, and President Biden won by a similar margin in 2020. Donald Trump, as we know, didn’t actually win a majority of voters in 2016.
Control of Congress is also tied. Majorities are won by narrow margins in a handful of contested races, where victory can be based more on the shape of the district map, and the extent of gerrymandering, assuming it holds, than on any kind of political persuasion. This is the House. In the Senate, control has been back and forth based on a few competitive seats in a few competitive states. And the next presidential election, thanks to the Electoral College, will be a game of inches in a small batch of very similar states, rather than a true national election.
Past periods of political dynamism often stemmed from some change in the general political order. Throughout the 19th century, for example, the addition of new states transformed the terrain on which Americans fought partisan politics or opened new avenues for long-term success for either major party. The states could be used to consolidate partisan control in Washington — the reason we have two Dakotas instead of one — or be used to extend and expand an existing coalition.
The constitutional transformations of the Progressive Era—the direct election of senators, women’s suffrage, and prohibition— reverberated through partisan politics, and the flood of black Americans from the fields of the South to the cities of the North put an indelible stamp on the behavior of Democrats and Republicans.
We lack a political disruption of this scale. There are no constitutional amendments on the table that could alter the terms of partisan combat in this country. There is no chance, anytime soon, that we will end the Electoral College or radically expand the size of the House, moves that could change the national political calculus of both parties. There is no prospect, at this time, of new states, be it DC, Puerto Rico, or any of the other territories where Americans live and work without real representation in Congress.
There is nothing constitutional or structural on the horizon of American politics that can unsettle or pull the political system itself out of its stasis. Nothing that can push citizens in new directions or force the parties themselves to build new types of coalitions. Nothing, in short, that can help Americans untangle the pathologies of our current political order.
The fact is that there are forces trying to break the stasis of American politics. There is the Supreme Court, which has used its iron grip on constitutional meaning to amass power in its chambers to the detriment of other institutions of American government. There is the Republican Party, which has used the anti-majoritarian features of our system to build strongholds of power, isolated from the voters themselves. And there is an authoritarian movement, led and encouraged by Trump, who wants to abandon constitutional government in favor of an authoritarian patronage regime, with his family at the center.
Each of these forces is trying to game the current system, to build a new order out of the pieces as they exist. But there’s nothing that says we can’t write new rules. And there’s nothing that says we have to play this particular game.
