Sheehan is professor of political science and international studies at Iona College and the author of "American Democracy in Crisis: The Case for Rethinking Madisonian Government" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021).
Even before he took office, President Biden repeatedly expressed his commitment to proving to the world that our government works, that democracies are still vital and that they can deliver for their people.
As he said during his first joint address to Congress: "Can our democracy deliver on the most pressing needs of our people? ... America's adversaries — autocrats of the world — are betting it can't. ...They are wrong. And we have to prove them wrong. We have to prove democracy still works — and can deliver for the people."
It is a noble sentiment and a worthy goal, but to say it's a Sisyphean endeavor is an understatement.
The impossibility of the task stems not from any failing peculiar to Biden. The reason can be summarized in three words: it's the system. Or to borrow and butcher a phrase from James Carville circa 1992, "It's the system, stupid!"
The fact is, Biden can wish it, will it, even put the power of the presidency behind it — but he is no match for the constitutional system the Framers constructed and ratified 234 years ago.
The system they created was designed with one overarching purpose in mind — protectionism.
Specifically, protection of liberties. It is important to recall that liberty is not just freedom in general, it's freedom from government.
But how to design and construct this system, which protects our liberties? The Framers found their answer in a treatise written 40years before the founding: Montesquieu's "The Spirit of the Laws." In it he argues that the best way to protect liberty is to divide power and he devises the innovative notion of trias politica (or separation of powers) to achieve this task.
James Madison followed Montesquieu's admonition with abandon. He not only adopted a scheme of separated powers, but he went much further implementing by checks and balance, bicameralism, federalism and the like.
The result was a system of government that "'worked" precisely the way our Framers wanted — which is to say very little.
As James MacGregor Burns puts it, for Madison government was "a necessary evil that must be curbed, not an instrument for the realization of men's higher ideals or a nation's broader interests."
Madison did not want people to turn too quickly to the government for help, he did not see it as an instrument for realizing ideals, broad interests or resolving problems. He saw it instead as a vessel that could protect us from majorities — tyrannical majorities who, in a free state, threatened to take control of the government and tyrannize the minority.
The minority population of greatest concern to Madison and the other Framers was the moneyed interests, of which they were members. Like John Locke, they felt that the principal factor that energized dangerous majority "faction" was unequal distribution of property and wealth.
This is not surprising because this was their experience under the Articles of Confederation. This is what the Framers saw happening at the state level just after the Revolution as poor farmers began revolting in western Massachusetts and the federal government was unable to put down their insurrection. These and other similar incidents frightened the Framers enough that they gathered in Philadelphia in the hot summer of 1787, determined to replace our first Constitution with one that was better able to protect liberty.
This is precisely why Biden's quest to prove to the world that our government can "work" is such a Herculean task. Our system wasn't designed to do anything of the sort — not to deliver, not to solve problems, not to work. It was designed to protect us from majorities that might threaten our liberties.
Biden's fight is not with Xi Jinping or Vladimir Putin, any more than its with Alexander Lukashenko, Nicholas Maduro or any other autocratic leader — it is with our Founders — the men who constructed our system.
To win this battle it is going to take more than will, guts and even the power of the presidency.
It is going to take engaging Americans in a conversation about whether the Framers' stated objective still serves our needs today. If not, what should the purpose of government be?
This will allow us to get to a much-needed conversation about what types of structural reforms are best able to achieve these objectives.
On the latter point, we are in luck. There have been great thinkers, going back to Justice Joseph Story in the 1830s and continuing to this day, who have offered plenty of rich reform proposals. The problem has been two-fold, as structural reforms are generally not a very "sexy" topic they have garnered little public attention and certainly not enough to drive any sustained efforts at amendment.
On the former, there is still little agreement amongst Americans today on what the object of our government should be. And that is where we should start because the purpose dictates the structure, which determines the possibilities.
If Americans want government to deliver in the way Biden suggests, then the current structure left untouched is not going to serve that purpose. The problem is, it's unclear if that is what Americans want or if they prefer the structure built by the Framers, which, stunningly, has not changed much since they adopted it more than 230 years ago.
Children watch a July Fourth Parade along the Walkway of Heroes and Independence Avenue on July 04, 2026 in Tappan, New York.
The Great American Grumpfest
Our nation’s 250th birthday party didn’t feel especially patriotic and wasn’t as much fun as the 200th anniversary was.
President Trump, who did his best to co-opt our holiday for his personal aggrandizement, was a major reason. The party he threw in Washington, D.C., was crankier than uplifting, and less about celebrating our shared past and a promising future than about reminding us how far we have strayed from our founders’ plan to create a republic that future Americans would keep in good working order.
Credit Trump this much. He has a singular gift for picking at scabs that other politicians would rather ignore and pushing us into reckonings we don’t need.
The thing is, Americans have seen all this before. Sometimes the makeover we were encouraged to undertake was more conservative, sometimes more liberal. Whatever direction we were pushing, however, the reckoning we had in mind this time had to be more forthright and the conclusion more definitive than it was the last time.
Our current discontents, the ones behind the reckoning President Trump has been trying to inspire, are not trivial. Included among them are immigration, birthright citizenship, exploding healthcare costs, election rigging, a gag-inducing national debt, how we educate our children, too many genders, racial differences we can’t move past, a lopsided economy that favors more well-off Americans, and historic levels of political corruption and graft. Add to these the several foreign adventures he has pushed us into or is anxious to undertake, and you have the makings of a national headache the likes of which we haven’t had in half a century.
All the elbow-throwing and overheated rhetoric we’re using today have begun to look almost normal in all the ways that bickering neighbors and feuding family members appear normal. But they have also made us look mean-spirited and have portrayed our differences as irreconcilable. To ourselves, of course, but also to many people outside the United States who might be forgiven for turning their heads and not looking at the national car wreck we Americans show no interest in avoiding.
The good news, as I suggested above, is that Americans have had a great deal of practice dealing with challenges and national car wrecks like these.
This essay begins to lay out the reasons why.
By way of illustration, we have our seemingly insatiable demand for more bad news about race in America.
Sixty years after being released from the legal constrictions that bedeviled both white and black Americans, many white people have come to believe the color that used to make them unassailable is now a sign of a moral inferiority born of a racial animus they can never wash off. Many black people, on the other hand, are insisting that America is as hopelessly stacked against them as the formerly unassailable white people’s ancestors used to tell their black ones.
The result is that many people today are buying into racist nightmares and mumbo jumbo that their black and white ancestors worked hard and effectively to put in each other’s heads.
This might be dismissed as crazy behavior if it weren’t so important to rituals Americans have long used to express their deepest fears about each other while figuring out what move they can make that won’t end with their world crashing down on everybody’s head.
Unfortunately, the kind of cultural sleight of hand we have used to ramp up our racial differences has been appropriated by people who have many other cultural fears and unresolved differences with each other. Their clumsy but culturally prescribed missteps are making all these other issues look as irremediable as our racial problems.
A good place to start an answer to how we back away from ledges is Alexis de Tocqueville’s writing on early-19th-century American democracy. He had an optimistic take on Americans’ unscripted displays of public bravado, recrimination, and payback.
For him, these were occasions when people tried to mitigate the effects of the unfair hand they were dealing someone else or had themselves been dealt by behaving in ways quite at odds with how they would otherwise be expected to act. These inversions of what Tocqueville called “the natural order of conscience” presented themselves as a loud but culturally muted challenge to the hypocrisies that people had built into the world they’d made together.
One of his favorite illustrations of early-American hypocrisy involved slave masters sleeping with their less-than-worthy slaves. To the best of my knowledge, he didn’t pick up on all the ways that slaves messed with their owners. Their well-chronicled and quiet resistance showed that even severely ill-treated people can exercise more control over their lives than outsiders appreciate.
Be that as it may, such inversions of a people’s “natural order of conscience” make a good public show of them wrestling with demons they can’t or may not want to shake off, but in any case, are nowhere close to figuring out how to cast out.
Implicit in these disruptions was the discomforting idea that people might flip the entire script and turn the world on its head in more permanent ways. That kind of flipping worked out better for us in our revolution against England than in our Civil War. These events taught us the value of stepping back from historically unprecedented ledges.
Americans of late have been giving loud expression to a long list of things they don’t like about each other and the last makeover they started but didn’t finish a half-century ago. The outcome of our fights today will be as revealing as they are embarrassing to everyone who imagined they could recast our country in a way that privileged their favorite kind of Americans.
Their disappointment with the accommodations they strike will be palpable, but the middling results they achieve with all their pushing and shoving won’t be anything they can’t live with.
Anthropologists who have written about such moments in other cultures less “advanced” than our own show that people find ways to work around their seemingly irreconcilable differences without ever fully resolving them. Indeed, the patches and repairs people make have the unheralded effect of reinforcing rather than undermining the legitimacy of the practices and values they thought were fundamentally flawed.
For example…
White guilt and black pessimism do more good than putting cash into the pockets of professional shamers and handwringers. They give the rest of us who don’t feel guilty or powerless more time to make the world less racially unequal. Good news.
Regarding illegal immigration, the entrance requirements for future immigrants will remain stringent. Americans will applaud the continued detention and deportation of the few illegal immigrants who commit serious crimes. Good news.
All the people who came to the United States without being legally vetted and were locked up for a time will be released in numbers small enough to avoid serious media attention. Along with the several million other good people who snuck in but avoided capture, the former detainees will go to school, find gainful employment, pay their taxes, and stay out of trouble. Many will eventually become citizens. Good news.
Investigations into election tampering and Donald Trump’s 2020 presidential loss will come to an unceremonious conclusion the day after his second term ends. Many Americans will grumble about this, but there will also be some quiet partying, too. Good and bad news.
Congressional hearings into all the grifting accomplished by people tied to the Trump administration will end without anyone having to pay a dime back to the American taxpayers. Bad news, we’ll learn to live with.
New laws and regulations will be created in the hope that the kind of corruption practiced by President Trump will not be repeated for another 250 years. Good news, I hope we’ll live long enough to enjoy.
Show trials for people who allegedly vandalized the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, if they happen, will get big television viewer ratings. Good news.
Trials for pardoned Capitol insurrectionists who committed serious crimes after their release should get more attention, but won’t. Bad news.
We will continue to hear nothing from most of the people who were pardoned for crimes they committed in the insurrection at the Capitol on January 6, 2021. They will keep their mouths shut and their heads down for the rest of their life. Good news.
The gold-gilded ornaments that Donald Trump had plastered all over the White House will be shipped to Mar-a-Lago, where the former president will sell them on eBay. Fun news.
American taxpayers end up paying for most of the new East Wing, the removal of the miniature gladiatorial arena that was built behind the White House, and the restoration of the White House rose garden. Bad news.
The Triumphal Arch was never built. Good news.
Trad wives and gay couples raise perfectly lovely children. Good but unsurprising news.
Trans men and women learn that most Americans can’t figure out who they used to be. No one gives a second thought to their use of “family bathrooms” or “unisex bathrooms” in public settings, businesses, and schools. Communities will sponsor athletic teams that have trans boys and girls just to show they can. Good news.
Budget deficits will be kicked down the road for someone else’s children to pay down. Bad news.
Federal agencies that had their budgets and employee ranks slashed during President Trump’s second term are getting some of the money and lost positions back. Good news.
Elite universities will buy their way out of DEI purgatory by competing for conservative scholars whose inflated salaries dwarf those of their liberal colleagues, who will think about suing their institutions for reverse discrimination but won’t be able to figure out who would pay for it or care. More fun news.
Okay. I’ve probably missed some ways that Americans will step back from the ledges they have been making noises about leaping off. But to the extent that my predictions pan out, the best and most important moral of the stories about us stepping away is this: everything we lost and took back, or had returned to us, will have happened without our government collapsing, civic traditions crumbling, or our people beating each other up.
The reason why is that the differences Americans have with each other really weren’t as irreconcilable as we made them out to be. The empty-sounding bromide that Americans have more that unites us than divides us turns out to be true, not just metaphorically but in fact.
Now that is really something to celebrate.
Daniel J. Monti (danieljmonti.com) is Professor of Sociology at Saint Louis University and the author of American Democracy and Disconsent: Liberalism and Illiberalism in Ferguson, Charlottesville, Black Lives Matter, and the Capitol Insurrection.