Yale political scientist explains why government-by-crisis will just get worse.

The debt ceiling is getting closer.  As I think about the ramifications of hitting it, I keep thinking about two recent articles that I read.  The first was on website called Slate; the second is in the New York Times.  The Slate article summarizes work by a former Yale political scientist.  (see link)

 his analysis has a disturbing message for residents of the contemporary United States. The current atmosphere of political crisis isn’t a passing fad and it isn’t going to get better. In fact, it’s very likely to get worse. Much worse. And lead to a complete breakdown of constitutional government and the democratic order.

Linz saw systems with prime ministers as inherently more stable.  When conflict arose, the government is dissolved and voters select a new government.

 In a presidential system, by contrast, the president and the congress are elected separately and yet must govern concurrently. If they disagree, they simply disagree. They can point fingers and wave poll results and stomp their feet and talk about “mandates,” but the fact remains that both parties to the dispute won office fair and square. As Linz wrote in his 1990 paper “The Perils of Presidentialism,” when conflict breaks out in such a system, “there is no democratic principle on the basis of which it can be resolved, and the mechanisms the constitution might provide are likely to prove too complicated and aridly legalistic to be of much force in the eyes of the electorate.” That’s when the military comes out of the barracks, to resolve the conflict on the basis of something—nationalism, security, pure force—other than democracy. 

The other article is about European perception of the United States gridlock in Washington (see link) :

The United States has gone through government shutdowns before, Mr. Fitoussi noted, but this time it feels different, even if it turns out to be short-lived.  “Perhaps we have not completely understood the American Constitution, and the effective power of the president is not as strong as we believed,” he said. “And maybe it’s because Obama is not using his constitutional power very well.”

The weekend military strikes on terrorist targets in Libya and Somalia are a perfect indication that the American government can act when its direct interests are at stake, said Ms. Dormandy of Chatham House. But the deeper question is whether a more insular, less globally active United States is emerging for the longer term, or is just a function of the Obama administration’s reaction to events. 

So...will all this gridlock and strife in Washington pass?  Or is the United States a fundamentally different place?  If Tanzi were writing about Washington in 2013, how would he characterize the state?