Fukuyama thinks American governing and political institutions are decaying - this should be applicable to the material in 2305 because we spend a lot of time looking at the gradual development of these institutions over history and the importance of maintaining them. Is the politicized environment we are now in undermining the stability these institutions are supposed to provide?
He makes a handful of observations, each suggests a structural problem is at the root of the curretn dysfunction:
1 - He argues that the judicial and legislative institutions are growing at the expense of the executive, and that the ability of the executive branch to effectively implement the law is being undermined - which undermines the effectiveness of governing institutions.
2 - He also argues that the growth of interest groups and lobbying undermines the efficient operations of government - personal relationships rather than impersonal govern decision making. This means that narrow special favors are more likely to drive policy making than the general welfare.
3 - Ideological polarization has allowed the system of checks and balances to go far beyond what it was originally intended to do - check excessive executive power - and made it unable to do what it is designed to do.
He argues that we are now a nation of "courts and parties" and that ain't good:
The decay in the quality of American government has to do directly with the American penchant for a state of “courts and parties”, which has returned to center stage in the past fifty years. The courts and legislature have increasingly usurped many of the proper functions of the executive, making the operation of the government as a whole both incoherent and inefficient. The steadily increasing judicialization of functions that in other developed democracies are handled by administrative bureaucracies has led to an explosion of costly litigation, slow decision-making and highly inconsistent enforcement of laws. The courts, instead of being constraints on government, have become alternative instruments for the expansion of government. Ironically, out of a fear of empowering “big government”, the United States has ended up with a government that is very large, but that is actually less accountable because it is largely in the hands of unelected courts.
He makes an ironic observation - two actually. The first is that efforts to democratize government - such as the passage of the Pendleton Act in the late 1800's (discussed in the section on campaign finance) have allowed wealthy interests to expand their influence over the political process. The second is that limits on the executive branch not only lead to decreases in opinion of it's performance, but to political movements that use that dissatisfaction to further place limits on the executive branch. This leads to a negative spiral that creates a less and less effective governing apparatus.
Ordinary people feel that their supposedly democratic government no longer reflects their interests but instead caters to those of a variety of shadowy elites. What is peculiar about this phenomenon is that this crisis in representativeness has occurred in large part because of reforms designed to make the system more democratic. Indeed, both phenomena—the judicialization of administration and the spread of interest-group influence—tend to undermine trust in government, which tends to perpetuate and feed on itself. Distrust of executive agencies leads demands for more legal checks on administration, which further reduces the quality and effectiveness of government by reducing bureaucratic autonomy. It may seem paradoxical, but reduced bureaucratic autonomy is what in turn leads to rigid, rule-bound, un-innovative and incoherent government. Ordinary people may blame bureaucrats for these problems (as if bureaucrats enjoy working under a host of detailed rules, court orders, earmarks and complex, underfunded mandates coming from courts and legislators over which they have no control). But they are mistaken to do so; the problem with American government is less an unaccountable bureaucracy than an overall system that allocates what should properly be administrative powers to courts and political parties.
He makes an intriguing, counter-intuitive argument for a less accountable bureaucracy in order to improve performance, and public attitudes towards government.
