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.
image of U.S. President Donald Trump is displayed on a digital billboard in Times Square in New York on April 8, 2026.
Trump is stuck between two realities. Neither serves the American people
Normally, I worry that events may overtake a column. But not so with the Iran war.
I don’t worry about running afoul of a headline or Truth Social post from the president because what is said about the situation is no longer very relevant to the reality.
On April 8, Nick Catoggio, my Dispatch colleague, dubbed an earlier stoppage with Iran “Schrödinger’s ceasefire.” This was a reference to the famous thought experiment by the physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who was trying to explain the weirdness of “superpositionality” in quantum physics. A cat in a box is both dead and alive at the same time until you open the box. Schrödinger meant to illustrate the absurdity of the idea that particles aren’t any one thing, but a “cloud of probabilities.”
The Trump administration is stuck in a word cloud of probabilities of his own making. The war is over. The war is on. The war isn’t a war. We have a deal, but we don’t have a deal, but we’re about to have a deal. We destroyed Iran’s military. No, we left it intact. We want regime change. No we don’t. We already accomplished it. We “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program a year ago. We had to go to war in February to prevent nuclear war. The Strait of Hormuz is open, closed, or something in-between. No deal without “unconditional surrender.” Let’s make a deal!
This everything-all-at-once vibe can be disorienting, particularly since most Americans didn’t have a war with Iran on their bingo cards until the shooting had already started. President Trump didn’t prepare the country or consult with Congress beforehand because he thought it would all be a smashing success in a matter of weeks.
The miscalculation that started it all: killing Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and much of Iran’s senior leadership, on the first day of the war. To “the great proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand,” Trump announced on Feb. 28. “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.”
I support regime change in Iran and shed no tears for Khamenei or his goons. But when you start a war by killing the regime’s top leaders, it’s not unreasonable for the remaining ones to conclude that you really intend regime change.
Khamenei was a murderous fanatic, but he was a fairly cautious one. He liked to threaten closing the Strait of Hormuz or attacking our regional allies, but he was reluctant to actually do it, fearing it would invite a regime change war. The mullahs and IRGC goons believed, not unreasonably, that if they lost their grip on power, they’d be lynched by the Iranian people they’ve brutalized for decades.
By starting with a regime change war, Trump removed any reason for the regime not to go for broke. When you have nothing to lose — particularly when you are a millenarian religious fanatic — a Persian Alamo strategy makes a lot of sense.
So Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz and attacked its neighbors.
But it turns out this wasn’t the Alamo. In the contest of wills, Trump blinked. The Iranian regime’s tolerance for punishment proved — so far — to be greater than Trump’s and that of our gulf allies. Militarily we could finish the job, but that would require ground troops and much greater economic turmoil. In a conflict Trump launched unilaterally without the prior support of Congress, NATO or the American people, Trump doesn’t have the political capital for that.
But that’s only half the problem. Trump wants the war over, but he doesn’t want to pay — militarily, economically, politically — what that would cost. So he wants to make a deal that ends it. But there is no deal available that wouldn’t come at an equally undesirable cost. Any deal that looks like what President Obama struck with the Iranians would be too embarrassing to bear. But the Iranians are convinced that they can get just such a deal, and they’re willing to drag things out as long as it takes.
The result: Trump’s in a box of his own making. He thinks he can talk his way out by simply asserting a reality that doesn’t exist. When the financial markets get nervous, he announces a breakthrough that is, at best, a possibility. When the Iranians agree to a deal that looks similar to one Obama might negotiate, Trump goes back to his threats.
It can’t go on forever. But I’m sure it’ll last until long after this column is forgotten.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.