Roberts explains 'real crisis' of American government

Flyer by RJ Peltz-Steele (with AI art) CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

At UMass Law last week, Alasdair S. Roberts, UMass Amherst professor of public policy, lectured on "The Real Crisis of American Government" and spoke to my international law class about his 2023 book, Superstates: Empires of the 21st Century.

In research for his next book, Professor Roberts is investigating deficiencies in the design of American government and how they might be remedied. The work follows naturally after Roberts's most recent book, The Adaptable Country: How Canada Can Survive the Twenty-First Century (2024), as the author turns his scrutiny to the United States. 

The subject could not have been more timely with the dramatic and controversial changes afoot in the federal government. Here was the teaser for the talk:

The United States isn’t facing a crisis of democracy. It’s facing a crisis of adaptability: the inability to adjust institutions to meet today’s challenges.

Prof. Alasdair S. Roberts
RJ Peltz-Steele CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

I don't want to steal Professor Roberts's thunder; his ideas will be more fully developed as the research unfolds. I will summarize two prongs of his presentation this way:

First, as Roberts put it, if one were to design a government for a polity as socially pluralistic, geographically vast, and ideologically diverse as America is today, it would not look like the system of the U.S. Constitution. The delta between what we have and the ideal is the root of our problems, which span the three branches of government.

Second, fixing things won't be easy or fast, even after, and if, we acknowledge our problems. The drifts of dysfunction have accumulated for more than a century at both federal and state levels, and it will take just as long to reverse adverse trends and to re-revolutionize—one hopes bloodlessly—American government.

Problems wrought by the unanticipated contemporary complexity of the American nation were precisely where Professor Roberts left off in Superstates, in which he pondered the expansiveness, population, diversity, and complexity, unprecedented in the history of human civilization, of the United States, European Union, China, and India. Roberts talked to my international law class about how these modern polities are and are not like extinct historical empires, and what that means for our species in an era of existential challenges such as climate change. 

Superstates has been one of my favorite nonfiction books since I read it two years ago, when Professor Roberts visited my freedom-of-information seminar. Re-reading its first chapter last week, I found it only more salient to rapidly evolving international relations.

Professor Roberts's school-wide lecture was well attended in large thanks to sponsorship by student organizations, the Federalist Society, the Law and Political Economy Society, the National Lawyers Guild, and the Veterans Law Association, for which I am faculty adviser; and by the public interest law program and the Office of the Dean, which provided pizza. I am grateful to Professor Roberts for visiting campus and to all the students, faculty, and deans who supported his visit.