American Democracy Isn’t Broken… It Never Worked as Advertised

The guardrails weren’t real — they were simply norms. The Constitution wasn’t a firewall. And the Madisonian dream? Always more myth than reality. So now what?The Federalist Papers, argues our guest, University of Maryland law professor Maxwell Stearns, belongs in the fiction section of the library. And after watching the Trump years dismantle everything we were told would hold, it’s getting harder to disagree.Back in 2024, we asked the hypothetical question of Stearns whether American democracy had reached its sell-by date? It’s no longer hypothetical.Stearns, author of Parliamentary America: The Least Radical Means of Radically Repairing Our Broken Democracy, returns to the WhoWhatWhy Podcast to talk to me about what’s been lost — and more provocatively, what might still be salvageable. His diagnosis is clear: We have thrived in spite of our constitutional structure, not because of it.The guardrails weren’t structural; they were customary. The Constitution wasn’t a firewall; it was a framework held together by norms that turned out to be entirely optional. And the Madisonian dream of competing institutional jealousies keeping power in check? That, Stearns says, was always more mythology than reality. Get full access to Talk Cocktail Podcast at jeffschechtman.substack.com/subscribe