Read an Excerpt from “The Adaptability Paradox” by Stephen Skowronek
Faith in the resilience and adaptability of the US Constitution rests on a long history of finding new ways to make the system work. In The Adaptability Paradox, political scientist Stephen Skowronek examines the rearrangements that regenerated the American government in the past and brings that experience to bear on our current predicament. He shows how a constitution framed in writing some 230 years ago can run into serious difficulties directly related to its long and impressive history of adaptation.
No longer a socially bound framework for national action, the Constitution has become an abstract matrix of possibilities, a disembodied opportunity structure open to starkly different, mutually unacceptable futures. Rather than being liberated by this unbound Constitution, the American people now appear entrapped by it. Is it possible that the development of American democracy has exhausted the adaptive capacities of the Constitution?
In the following excerpt, Skowronek interrogates the difference between change and adaptation, revealing how this incredibly important distinction has impacted social movements throughout history.
The post–New Deal settlement nestled within boundaries breached by the civil rights movement. In the 1960s, African Americans “cast down the last barrier to perfect freedom.” Defying Jim Crow restrictions, the movement disrupted the foundations of political order in the South and dislodged the most stubborn of all exclusions from the grip of federalism. For a critical period, cooperative partnerships between the two levels of government gave way to a coercive posture.
The federal government had demanded racial inclusion before, but this time the effort did not misfire. Quite the contrary, the liberating effects proved contagious. In the wake of the civil rights breakthrough, national incorporation picked up steam. It reached to women, to indigenous people, to other racial minorities, and to young people. Eventually, it extended to disabled people and LGBTQ+ people. The most conspicuous boundary left to condition inclusion was the nation-state itself. The rights of citizens and control of the border remained to set others apart, though notably, immigration restrictions too were relaxed, and quotas that had discriminated against entrants from outside of northern Europe were removed.
This was “the rights revolution,” and notwithstanding subsequent slippages, it was a crowning achievement. The old status hierarchies regulating domestic relations lost their remaining protections in state and common law. For the first time, American citizens met one another on a playing field stripped of stark incongruities in the recognition of their rights. The purview of the federal government widened correspondingly, its operations no longer cramped by deference to rights reserved. The Constitution was unbound, freed from the preset social content that had previously delimited American nationalism and conditioned American democracy.
There is no gainsaying the significance of the changes that ensued. As the community of rights holders became more equal and diverse, previously established arrangements of power and authority came under sustained assault. American institutions were recast once again through regular procedures and continuous operations. The transformation turned out to be as profound as any in American history.
But change and adaptation are not quite the same thing. Profound as it was, the transformation that followed upon the rights revolution ran into difficulty in accommodating this new state of affairs. The rewiring was ham-handed, the glitches pronounced. An adaptation to full inclusion, a transformation that pulls the disjoint parts of the Constitution back together into a new rendition of regular order, has proven stubbornly elusive. American democracy had broken through social barriers many times in the past, but in this instance, it did not regenerate agreeable arrangements for governing. Boundary breaking had given rise to intractable difficulties before, but with full inclusion, there was no recourse to bracketing the issues raised and changing the subject. Government and politics were thoroughly reorganized, but the adjustments made in this instance failed to provide a sturdy platform for managing the new conflicts brought into play.
It’s not just that no stabilizing formula took hold. The institutional response to the rights revolution marks a singular turn in the development of the constitutional government in the United States because power and authority were reconfigured in ways that magnified conflicts over the essentials of good order. Far from easing the new stresses on the system, the innovations of this era intensified them. The social antagonisms released when the last barriers fell steadily tightened their grip over national affairs. Absent the creation of some new institutional contrivances capable of recovering common ground and inducing buy-in from the expanded pool of participants, social divisions “calcified,” and rival coalitions pulled farther apart. In time, the unrelieved stress would strain the authority of the government itself.
Scholars have asked why the reconstruction of race relations succeeded in the 1960s and ’70s after failing in the 1860s and ’70s. But that question has worn thin. The relationship between the two episodes has grown more complicated with each passing decade. Both were attempts to adapt, and each pulled the Constitution forward in a new formation. On inspection, however, the rights revolution presents the flip side of the dilemma negotiated in the aftermath of the Civil War. In that earlier effort, the incorporation of African Americans was cut short on the way to a new settlement. In this case, it’s just the reverse. Inclusion, now more firmly established and socially encompassing, seems to have pushed settlement out of reach. The riddle of democratic exclusion was not resolved by full inclusion. It was too deeply embedded in the government’s structure to work itself out so benignly. Instead, the advent of full inclusion has displayed its opposite.
Many decades have passed since the civil rights movement breached the outer boundaries of constitutional containment and ushered in the rights revolution. America’s burgeoning democracy has been struggling to find agreeable institutional accommodations for some sixty years. The struggle has itself become the new normal, and the issues that attend it have expanded with the range of inclusions. They now extend well beyond those associated with the political incorporation of African Americans. They have come to affect virtually every aspect of American government and society.
To be sure, a long period of irresolution does not speak for itself. Time elapsed can be a muddy diagnostic of the Constitution’s capacity to adapt. Sixty years of irresolution might be thought proof of resilience, of the system’s ability to cope without settling on any particular way of doing so. The government continues to function. Living with irresolution—dispensing with settlements for less predictable, more freely fluctuating arrangements—may be what real democracy is all about. Alternatively, the long period of irresolution could be just another reminder that reordering has always been an extended process. The administrative settlement that came together in 1946 was, as we saw, decades in the making. Resolution in that case followed upon social dislocations and institutional innovations stretching all the way back to the Gilded Age. It could be that a reset in this case remains just around the corner.
On both counts, however, there are grounds for skepticism and good reasons to wonder whether something categorically different is afoot. No one can rule out a future in which some comparable discipline accommodating this new democracy takes hold, but sixty years after the initial disruption, no such adaptation is pending. If there is a formula that all the interests now in play might be willing to buy into, it remains inarticulate and out of sight. The administrative remedy of the previous era, though long in the making, became apparent early on. It paced the emergence of industrial America, and it drew support from both major parties. Responding to the attendant social disruptions, it demonstrated its ameliorative potential well before its consolidation in the wake of World War II. In contrast, the interim in this instance has been marked, not just by irresolution, but by hardening divisions. The throughline is a gradually accelerating shakedown of authority. For all the rearranging, the system does not seem to be regaining its bearings; the various parts of the government’s complex frame are not sorting themselves out in an authoritative way; the expanded pool of participants is not groping toward some new constitutional common sense. Far from prompting the creation of more agreeable institutional accommodations, these culminating acts of social inclusion appear to be driving American government to wits’ end.
Whatever the future holds, this is a difference to reckon with. All along, America’s democratization had closed off safe places for “peculiar” interests and exposed contentious social groups more directly to one another. In prior instances, however, a new deal was always in the offing, a different way of mediating conflicts and ordering social relations. Repeatedly, democratic breakthroughs relaxed formal constraints on the exercise of national power. In prior instances, however, auxiliary intermediaries—creative configurations of party management and administrative management—were interposed to compensate for newfound limitations in the old frame and to provide alternative accommodations for sharing power. Eliminating the last of the safe places appears to have short-circuited those pathways to adaptation. What might have been thought a difference of degree, just one more step in the long process of democratizing the Constitution, the rights revolution now looks suspiciously like an opening to a difference in kind.
Stephen Skowronek is the Pelatiah Perit Professor of Political and Social Science at Yale University and cofounder of the journal Studies in American Political Development. He is the author or coauthor of several books, including Phantoms of a Beleaguered Republic, The Policy State, and The Politics Presidents Make.
The Adaptability Paradox is available now. Use the code UCPNEW to take 30% off when you order from us directly.