How to Repair America’s Broken Democracy

The Michael Shermer Show

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Looking ahead to the 2024 election, most Americans sense that something is deeply wrong with our democracy. We face extreme polarization, increasingly problematic candidates, and a government that can barely function, let alone address urgent challenges. Maxwell Stearns has been a constitutional law professor for over 30 years. He argues that our politics are not merely dysfunctional. Our constitutional system is broken. And without radical reform, the U.S. risks collapse or dictatorship.

The Framers never intended a two-party system. In fact, they feared entrenched political parties and mistakenly believed they had designed a scheme that avoided them. And yet the structures they created paved the way for our entrenched two-party system. that now undermines our basic constitutional structures, with separation of powers and checks and balances yielding to hyper-partisan loyalties. Rather than compromises arising from shifting coalitions, we experience ever-widening policy swings in increasingly combative elections. This two-party stranglehold on our politics is exactly what the Framers feared.

To survive as a democracy, we must end the two-party deadlock and introduce more political parties. But viable third parties are a pipe dream in our system given the current rules of the game. Stearns argues that we must change the rules, amend the Constitution, and transform America into a parliamentary democracy.

Although difficult to do, Stearns explains why his specific set of proposals is more politically viable than other increasingly prominent reform proposals, which cannot be enacted, will not end our constitutional crisis, or both.

Maxwell L. Stearns is the Venable, Baetjer & Howard Professor of Law at the University of Maryland Carey School of Law. He has authored dozens of articles and several books on the Constitution, the Supreme Court, and the economic analysis of law.