EP 449 Healing America Will Require Government to Work Again

American government is broken and has been so for a long time.  In some periods of history we muddle through and use our natural advantages, like remote location from adversaries, to give us time to figure things out.  At other points, like after The Great Depression, we needed a whole new toolkit of government ideas to begin to pull us out of the morass.  Given our yawning divisions and deep mistrust of our government and each other in the wake of the pandemic and the 2020 election/insurrection, we need a moment of government effectiveness, once again, to deal with overlapping crises.  The question is whether we are constitutionally constructed to make radical change?  Checks and balances by three branches of government was a great idea in the 1700’s, but does it serve us well in the moment?  In their book, ‘Presidents, Populism and the Crisis of Democracy’, Professors William Howell and Terry Moe argue that structural changes will be needed to unlock the problem-solving capacity of a moribund government.  And those changes need to happen swiftly.  Terry Moe joins us to discuss.

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