42 μ£¥³¤ ¬μμ¬JACOB S. HACKER is Director of the Institu-
tion for Social and Policy Studies and Stanley B.
Resor Professor of Political Science at Yale
University.
PAU L PIERSON is Co-Director of the Success-
ful Societies Program at the Canadian Institute
for Advanced Research and John Gross
Professor of Political Science at the University
of California, Berkeley.more intense version o the ruinous
politics that plagued Barack Obama’s
presidency after 2010. Solutions to
pressing national problems would still
be stuck in partisan gridlock. Narrow,
powerful interests would still dominate
debates and decisions. And popular
resentment—rooted in economic and
demographic shifts and stoked by those
seeking to translate voter anger into
proÃt or votes—would still be roiling
elections and governance alike.
For a generation, the capacity o the
United States to harness governmental
authority for broad public purposes has
been in steep decline, even as the need
for eective governance in a complex,
interdependent world has grown.
Almost every aspect o today’s crisis is
part o this long-term shift. In 2017, for
example, the Trump administration
pulled the United States out o the Paris
climate accord, but Trump’s short-
sighted decision was only the latest
example o the country’s halting and
grossly inadequate approach to climate
change. The current radicalized debate
over immigration reÁects heightened
racial and cultural resentment, but it also
stems from three decades o failure to
reach a consensus on reasonable reforms
to the nation’s antiquated border and
citizenship laws. Rising death rates
among middle-aged white Americans in
large swaths o the country are not
merely a contributor to the backlash that
elected Trump; they are also a symptom
o the virtual collapse o the federal
government’s ability to address major
public problems.
What went wrong? Skyrocketing
inequality, regional economic divergence,
and demographic changes have all played
their part. But there is one overridingThe Republican
Devolution
Partisanship and the Decline
of American GovernanceJacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson
I
t is a measure o the chaos o
Donald Trump’s presidency that just
months after the longest govern-
ment shutdown in U.S. history, nobody
in Washington seems to remember it.
Congressional Republicans transitioned
seamlessly from backing the president
as he inÁicted gratuitous harm on the
economy in pursuit oÊ his unpopular
border wall to acquiescing as he declared
a phony emergency to usurp Congress’
constitutional power o the purse.
Now, they are back in their familiar role
o defending his eorts to thwart an
independent investigation into the links
between his 2016 campaign and a
hostile foreign power bent on subvert-
ing U.S. elections.
American governance, it seems, is in a
bad way. But the crisis did not begin
when Trump entered oce. I Hillary
Clinton had won the presidency in 2016,
Washington would hardly be humming
along. Instead, it would be mired in aWHAT HAPPENED TO THE AMERICAN CENTURY?
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