System doesn’t like reform

Democrats are a maddening bunch, especially to their supporters.

A party that should be celebrating its efforts to expand health coverage, help families with children, build roads and fight climate change is instead engaged in a messy and increasingly angry confrontation over how much it can and should accomplish.

Much of the blame for the public chaos is falling onto Democratic Sens. Joe ManchinIII (W.Va.) and Kyrsten Sinema (Ariz.) because they have insisted on cutting the spending level for President Biden’s program from $3.5 trillion over a decade to as little as $1.5 trillion.

If Democrats compromise at, say, $2 trillion or $2.5 trillion, a lot of good programs will still have to be cut or thrown over the side.

They’re popular not just among liberals but also with moderate voters and many of Donald Trump’s supporters.

For the life of me, I can’t see how it helps middle-of-theroad Democrats in swing districts to do less to help beleaguered households with childcare and elder-care costs, or less to expand health coverage and to beef up Medicare benefits, or less to contain the obvious and dangerous warming of our planet.

Nor is it good for any Democrat to have these priorities set off against each other in a legislative cage match. Those whose programs are lost or gutted will feel very bruised.

Finally, shouldn’t Democrats be eager to bypass Senate filibuster rules as quickly as possible to stop the GOP-led attacks being leveled against democratic elections in states across our nation? Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) announced that he’d try to move forward this week on a sensible, far-from-radical bill that pushes back against the vote suppressors and election subverters.

Severe structural problems in our politics and institutions are making it far harder to solve problems — and to have productive debates over how to do so.

We can begin with a Republican Party that, except on physical infrastructure, has largely taken itself out of the business of dealing with social challenges. Ross Douthat, the constructively conservative columnist for the New York Times, recently invoked a dream of how Democrats and Republicans might have had a creative conversation on family policy.

But even as he laid out the arguments and trade-offs, Douthat conceded that Republicans “most interested in family policy” — Sens. Marco Rubio (Fla.) and Josh Hawley (Mo.), for example — have “the strongest incentives” not to work with Democrats, namely their “desire to be president someday.”

The GOP’s evasion of responsibility and growing radicalism mean that debates that once took place between the parties are now forced to happen inside the Democratic Party. Manchin and Sinema are stand-ins for the moderate conservatives of yore.

In September, Manchin offered a provocative challenge to progressives fighting for a larger program. “Elect more liberals,” he instructed them.

It’s a goal I embrace wholeheartedly, except that the Senate is structurally biased against liberals and Democrats.

I sat down last week with the political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, co-authors of the justly celebrated 2018 book, “How Democracies Die.”

Both speak with deep worry about the anti-majoritarian nature of the American system with a Senate and electoral college that vastly underrepresent urban and suburban voters as well as racial and ethnic minorities.

This gets in the way of governing, they argue, creating forms of instability that could threaten democracy itself. It also weakens the influence of more moderate voices within conservatism and the Republican Party.

All of which means that Democrats are effectively running what would be a coalition government in countries with multiparty systems — but without the disciplines that formal coalition agreements typically impose in advance on an alliance’s various components. Democrats are making their deals on the fly, and it shows.

None of this gets Democrats off the hook. As the late Donald H. Rumsfeld might advise them, you have to work with the system you have, not the system you wish you had.

It is no excuse for making a mess of what should be a moment of achievement.