The flip side of the Madisonian system is that while its harder to make those gains than under a parliamentary system, its also easier to defend themso the reforms do not automatically collapse as soon as the progressive movement evolves into a coalition focused on protecting its hard won gains. This is not sufficient to offset the structural conservative bias, but if reform was as hard to enact as in the US and as easy to rollback as in Europe, it would be the worst of both worlds.

Fundamental progressive reform simply has not in the past 200+ years and arguably cannot, without massive structural reform, happen as a consequence of regular political activity in the US - it happens because every once in a long while some progressive movement is able to stitch together a strong enough temporary governing majority to gain the reform, despite all the deliberate construction of the system to be resistant to reform.

You'd probably get more interesting US based responses, though obviously not as many, posting this to Docudharma. dKos is fine for generating comment counts, but for getting surprising responses, I find Docudharma more useful.


I've been accused of being a Marxist, yet while Harpo's my favourite, it's Groucho I'm always quoting. Odd, that.