We are living through a moment of intense division in American public life, and it often seems like our constitutional system exacerbates our bitter conflicts.
That system can be slow and cumbersome, riddled with veto points and mechanisms of restraint, which can make the majority party in our politics at any given time feel as if its will is being denied. But the system is also democratic, and so in crucial respects majoritarian, which often makes minorities in our politics feel endangered and unprotected. And the key institutions of the system now seem to serve increasingly as venues for vicious partisan combat and clownish culture-war shenanigans. They are places where we display our divisions more often than where we repair them.
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