In a democracy, the desires of the people rule the day. The law is the mandate of the people.
In a republic, a minority of professionals in governance have a clear duty and job to execute the laws and see to it that they are faithfully followed.
In a democratic republic where the the emphasis has moved from the latter word to the former, the representatives in government are fearful of acting without the approval of the people, while the people look to the representatives to tell them which way they should be cheering for. This creates a catch-22 standoff and leads to crisis, because it ultimately comes down to the people and the people simply don’t have the information nor time to govern. See Brexit and the political inability for anyone to deal with Trump.
So, it wouldn’t have worked. No one is offering a plan. The closest that I have seen is a recent Elizabeth Warren position piece to recreate the Office of Technology Assessment which is a good step to take but, almost certainly, insufficient.
My expectation is that the Democratic party’s general plan is to continue on with the country as it is and trust that the Constitution is sufficient. It has worked until now and, to the extent that it doesn’t some times, it was at the will of the people and fundamentally the government works at the will of the people. This is as opposed to working as the embodied representatives of the people, granted the trust to execute their work in freedom.
Now, possibly, the system will go back to working after Trump. But, personally, I think of Trump as a symptom of growing polarization, the increasing treatment of political issues as team sports, and the ease of both physical and intellectual movement of people to join people whom they agree with (whether that be the Internet or moving away from the Deep South to go live in New York).
And, worse, I believe that it’s necessary to understand how innovation works and what that means for our systems.
Innovation doesn’t create something out of nothing. When we learned how to ride horses, the horses didn’t fall out of the sky all of a sudden and immediately become usable. The horses were there running around all the time for hundreds of thousands of years. At any point in all of that time, a human could have grabbed one, broken it, and started to ride it around. But until someone did, no one did. Once they did, everyone did. The raw material was there, but no one had the right idea or - having the idea - couldn’t figure out the set of techniques to make it work.
Cars existed for a hundred years before someone figured out that you could drive them into a crowd of people, as a means of mass murder. In retrospect, it may seem like something that should have been obvious and yet it just didn’t happen. But now that it’s a thing, it will continue to be a thing.
There are people in the world with a direct aim of breaking the Constitution and they’re doing a good job at narrowing in on the right technique.
And by that, I mean less Donald Trump and more Mitch McConnell.
In Japan, the Prime Minister is fully acknowledged to be a fall guy for The Party. That role exists to serve as a buffer against unpopular policy. If some policy goes wrong, that the party decided, then they blame it on the PM, axe him, put in some other idiot who’s good at distracting everyone, and try a different policy or try to implement it more slowly.
Ultimately, good government requires smart people to be in charge but electoral systems aren’t particularly good at that.
If the people are electing, then there’s very little to prevent the election from becoming America’s Got Talent, so far as what the people are looking for - entertainment and spectacle. To be sure, we used to do some amount of trying to elect for intellect and reason but, as said, innovation.
And if the parties are electing, then you’re giving all of the power to a single party for a while and, over time, that encourages single-party rule and that power will be used to propagate their success forward. In Japan it happened early. In the US and the UK, it’s still migrating that direction.
Ultimately, this leads the parties to internally select a leader and give them the power, while outwardly still running things in accordance with the constitutional setup.
Mitch McConnell (who, I would suspect, is the unofficial person in this role) loves the idea of a single-party state and the RNC have gotten some good experience through Bush II and Donald Trump exactly what sort of person is good as President in terms of being pliable to their desires, directing attention away from them, but being popular with the people.
At the moment, they haven’t yet landed on the sort that the Japanese have discovered, but they are certainly narrowing in.
And, idiot though he may be in most things, Trump is a genius at taking advantage of polarization and distracting the media - the one part of the system that’s not an official branch of the government - and many will learn from that. Trump’s “Caravan / George Soros” venture will prove to be a very strong template for future elections.
Mitch McConnell is the sort of slimy bastard to have noticed that, and I’m sure that Trump is collected a good supply of people who are good at using those same techniques, whom McConnell can hire on after Trump goes to jail.
The issues that need to be dealt with require more than having an Office of Technology Assessment. Even if McConnell isn’t the guy to move this to the next step - I’m not saying that this is our future - we have still seen a system that has clearly failed to operate in any sane way and that, eventually, some innovator will act to explicitly take advantage of those same things - and do so effectively.
The problem is, to make those changes, you have to choose country over party - but the only people who get into office are those chosen by the parties. And you also have to reduce democracy - but democracy has been advertised as the end-goal of the country for a hundred years, despite that being in conflict with the explicit words and ideas of our founders. Reversing that idea will take a long time and it’s to neither party’s advantage to reduce democracy. Democracy is the key to establishing and maintaining party power since the people are easily mobilized to back sports teams.
If the presidency of Donald Trump wasn’t a big enough shock to the system for the Democratic candidates for President to even be talking in the slightest bit about how to fix the system, then we can reasonably expect the country to continue to march downhill. The Democrats may well continue to elect somewhat reasonable and sane people to the Presidency and so give us some time to go forward, in sanity. Moscow Mitch might pass away, retire, or lose his position to someone else and someone more boy-scoutish, like Paul Ryan, might take over the position and rope the RNC back towards a more patriotic view of its role in the world.
But polarization isn’t just an aspect of the parties fighting each other, it’s also an aspect of TV, internet, physical mobility, and other things. Polarization isn’t going to shrink on its own and, so long as it exists and isn’t being mitigated, it’s going to continue to empower the worse and more predatory members of the parties. Eventually, one of them will move to stage II.