WHEN U.S. lawmakers returned to Washington in December 1849 for the Thirty-First Congress, they knew they faced a raucous session. As Washington’s Democratic newspaper, the Daily Union, editorialized, “A crisis in our affairs is rapidly approaching, and great events are near at hand.” But the members could not foresee the magnitude of legislative dysfunction. The crisis emerged when the House couldn’t muster a majority to elect a Speaker. Without a Speaker, the chamber couldn’t organize, and committees couldn’t meet. Without a functioning House, the Senate couldn’t do business either. President Zachary Taylor couldn’t send up his annual message and set a national agenda. Congress couldn’t appropriate money. The government froze.

By the thirteenth ballot, some suggested the chamber should abandon the majority-vote principle and allow a plurality winner. But there was no majority for that idea either. The nation was hopelessly split over a controversy widely seen as a defining national issue—whether slavery would be allowed in the southwestern territories that had been acquired through the Mexican War. Both Democrats and Whigs were split along sectional lines, and the upstart Free-Soilers—vehemently opposed to slavery extension—held the balance of power. But the stiff-necked Free-Soilers refused to put any of the major Speaker candidates over the top.

“This is a fearful state of things, and may be the beginning of sorrows for our happy country,” wrote the St. Louis Democrat in an editorial cry from the heart that was shared by millions of Americans. Soon House members were hurling political epithets at each other. Southerners threatened to leave the Union; Northerners dared them to go ahead.

The deadlock continued for three weeks and was broken, on the sixty-third ballot, only after weary lawmakers finally accepted a plurality-vote solution. “The long agony,” wrote the Union, “is over.”

But it wasn’t over. The agony was just beginning, as the slavery issue continued to roil the nation until the deadlock was finally broken, starting with the 1860 presidential election. Then came war, realignment of the party system (with those Free-Soilers now dominating the nation as Republicans), a solution to the slavery issue and an opportunity for America to once again move forward. The historical lesson is stark: when America is deadlocked over an issue widely seen on both sides as defining the nation, politics turn ugly and governmental dysfunction sets in.

We are living in such a time. Although the defining issues are less explicit and not so clearly tied to moral sensibilities, the country is deadlocked. Congress can’t function, and nobody remembers a political climate as rancorous as the current one. As U.S. Representative Paul Ryan, a Wisconsin Republican, puts it, “It is rare in American politics to arrive at a moment in which the debate revolves around the fundamental nature of American democracy and the social contract. But that is where we are.”

What’s more, a reality is seeping into the national consciousness that the political battles of our time aren’t going to just fade away. They will have to be resolved one way or another. That means we are living through a time of transition; we are living through a crisis of the Old Order. It is in large measure a crisis of conflict between entrenched powers and their constituent groups on one hand and ordinary Americans on the other. Increasingly, Americans who lack access to special favors feel the elites, and the big institutions they dominate, have hijacked the American system for their own exploitation. Whether the target is Wall Street’s big finance, Washington’s big government, big corporations throughout the country, big labor representing increasingly well-off public employees, or self-aggrandizing state and local governments, the issue is bureaucratic bigness and special favors acquired through bigness.

This sentiment is seen equally in the right-wing Tea Party movement and the left-wing Occupy movement. But the elites and their allies know how to fight back, as evidenced by Wall Street’s ability to avoid paying a price for its follies leading to the Great Recession; by public-employee unions fending off efforts to clip their wings; by the federal workforce and federal pay growing in a time of economic stagnation; and by the ongoing sway of bureaucracies throughout the land.

Thus, while the debate may be only vaguely defined, it is powerfully joined. As New York Times writer Matt Bai puts it, the new populism is no longer about struggling workers versus corporate masters, as in the industrial era. Now, he says, “It is about the individual versus the institution—not only business, but also government and large media and elite universities, too.” He should have included Wall Street and public-employee unions.

The fundamental reality of American governance is that the country’s prevailing political consensus, in force for eighty years, can’t adequately address the nation’s problems, particularly the looming financial crisis that threatens the foundation of U.S. democracy. Americans increasingly feel that the elites who pushed the country toward that crisis now are thwarting all solutions. Another harsh reality is that Americans don’t want to relinquish what government has bestowed upon them over the past half century, even though the government soon won’t be able to afford that ongoing distribution of largesse.

A CATALOUGE of elites fighting back illuminates the fault lines of today’s spasmodic politics. Consider Wall Street and the big banks, abundantly complicit in fostering the real-estate bubble that gave us the financial crisis of 2008–2009. As the financial meltdown emerged, one significant body of thought held that a true recovery couldn’t commence until the housing market could “clear,” meaning real-estate prices had to reach bottom so consumers would know that an organic recovery could begin. That didn’t happen. Instead, Wall Street elites applied political muscle to coax the federal government and the Federal Reserve into providing bailouts, stimulus packages and other financial props—all in the name of helping mortgage holders when in fact the real beneficiaries were the big banks. Thus, instead of using federal resources to remove toxic assets from the banks’ balance sheets (which would have necessitated a restructuring of the banks and upended a few lofty careers), the government used those resources to buoy bank stock prices. Arguably, this has contributed to the country’s current languid recovery.

The banks benefited additionally from the Fed’s lingering policy of near-zero interest rates. That practically guaranteed huge profits as the banks borrowed from the Fed’s discount window for next to nothing in order to buy much higher-yielding government paper (with no need to add to their reserves, as they would have had to do with big private-sector loans). Meanwhile, ordinary Americans—“the humble members of society,” as Andrew Jackson called them—saw their money-market funds and other fixed-income investments plummet. As financial consultant David Smick has suggested, this may represent “the greatest transfer of middle-class and elderly wealth to elite financial interests in the history of mankind.” It isn’t surprising that all this helped spawn the Occupy movement in cities across America; the surprise is that the protests were so mild.

Consider next the shift in wealth and power represented by the increasing size and scope of government. Since 1946, the number of state and local government employees has increased from 3.3 million to 19.8 million, according to newsletter analyst Michael Hodges, using Bureau of Labor Statistics numbers. That’s a 492 percent increase in a nation whose population grew by 115 percent over the same period. In 1947, he adds, national income was divided along these lines: 78 percent to the private sector, 16 percent to the federal-government sector, and 6 percent to state and local governments. Now, the percentages are 54 percent private, 28 percent federal government, and 18 percent state and local governments. With growing governments and more public employees, a major shift in the nation’s distribution of political power was inevitable.

In using this power to enhance their economic standing, these forces have helped push the country into a debt spiral that threatens financial disaster. As best-selling author Michael Lewis pointed out in Vanity Fair, during the boom years from 2002–2008, states increased their spending by two-thirds while their level of indebtedness almost doubled. With government pension programs getting bigger and bigger, states allowed their pension plans to get increasingly underfunded—even as they piled up other future liabilities. The result is unfunded liabilities amounting to between $1.5 trillion and $3 trillion. To compensate, states then began investing their pension funds in riskier assets. In 1980, some 23 percent of state pension money was invested in the stock market, with the rest in safer fixed-income accounts; by 2008, that number had increased to 60 percent. Further, in projecting future liability, governmental pension funds blithely assumed they could earn 8 percent on their investments at a time when interest rates were being held to near zero. The result: more and more inadequately funded pension programs. Writes Lewis: “Toss in underfunded health-care plans, a reduction in federal dollars available to the states, and the depression in tax revenues caused by a soft economy, and you were looking at multi-trillion-dollar holes” that will require massive spending cutbacks or default—or both. He quoted one expert as predicting the states will push these liabilities down to the municipal level, where default prospects are growing ominously.

How has this happened? In part, it’s because public-employee unions have managed to make these benefits so large that some states simply can’t afford them. Note that public-employee unions have a form of leverage that no other union has: they can fire their bosses. Dues money represents political power and can be used to campaign against politicians deemed insufficiently solicitous of public employees’ interests. At contract time, this translates into bargaining clout that yields big benefit packages.

California, for example, has a “3 percent-at-fifty” retirement policy, whereby at age fifty many categories of state employees are eligible for 3 percent of their final year’s pay multiplied by their number of years of employment. Thus, an employee who began work at age twenty can retire at fifty with 90 percent of his last year’s pay. Consider the financial liability this entails as more and more early retirees jam this money-lined retirement system and then seek employment elsewhere, often in new government jobs. In many public fields, in California and elsewhere, workers also game the system by finding ways to boost their final years’ pay in order to increase their pensions—through added overtime, disability claims or temporary assignments with added compensation.

In just eight years, from 2004–2012, state pension payments doubled in California. According to then governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, writing in the Wall Street Journal in August 2010, his state was saddled with $550 billion in retirement debt. Add preretirement compensation to pension payouts, said Schwarzenegger, and spending on state employees grew at nearly triple the rate of state revenues. As a result, other programs inevitably got squeezed. The picture is no better in other states. Illinois has unfunded pension obligations of $80 billion, with unfunded retiree-health obligations adding another $40 billion. New York State’s local governments likely will have to triple their annual pension contributions during the next six years, from $2.6 billion to $8 billion.

WHO IS going to pay for all this? The governments and their public-sector unions have an answer: taxpayers. Whenever the suggestion of cutting back on government-employee pay and benefits is broached, public-sector opposition forces kick into high dudgeon and high gear.

This was seen in last year’s battle between Wisconsin’s Republican governor Scott Walker and the unions and lawmakers representing state workers. That political drama rivaled December 1849 in Washington. Walker mustered the votes to pass legislation requiring teachers to contribute 5.8 percent of their income toward their pensions and all state employees to pay 12.6 percent of their health-care premiums. The latter requirement, amounting to about half of what many private-sector employees pay, was necessary, argued Walker, to offset the exploding costs in state retiree funding. But the unions and their legislative allies fought back. Some fourteen Democratic senators fled the state to thwart a vote. Protesters flooded the statehouse, and Walker needed a security detail of twenty-five officers to escort him through the capitol building.

Ultimately, the issue was less about pay than power. Walker’s legislation would have reduced the bargaining clout of the unions, particularly by ending automatic withholding of union dues from the paychecks of three hundred thousand municipal workers. This would have given workers, who could have saved as much as $1,400 a year by opting out of dues payments, more leeway in exiting the system. The result would have been a huge blow to the unions, whose political reach stemmed from that income flow. It also would have given the state greater leverage in bargaining with its employee unions.

In the end, Walker got his legislation. But in today’s political environment, no opposition victory is accepted as a legitimate outcome. A judge ruled the law was passed illegally, and his ruling went to the state supreme court for review. In the meantime, outside groups directed some $3.5 million to upend a conservative supreme-court justice in his forthcoming reelection battle so he couldn’t rule on the case. He won, and the lower-court ruling was reversed. Then union supporters spent some $35 million in an attempt to recall enough state-senate Republicans to return the chamber to Democratic control. That failed. Now, anti-Walker groups have forced the governor into a recall election expected to generate some $70 million in campaign spending.

So we have, in a medium-sized state, legislation designed to address an undeniable looming financial crisis, and yet opposition elements appear willing to force campaign spending of more than $100 million to overturn it. This doesn’t happen in ordinary times; it happens in crisis times when the nation faces widely divergent future paths and powerful interests have big stakes in which path is chosen.

If Wall Street’s self-aggrandizement and capture of Washington in a time of crisis helped spawn the Occupy movement, the growing scope and intrusiveness of the federal government generated the Tea Party backlash a couple years before. This expansion had been going on for decades, but it accelerated mightily in this century’s first decade, beginning with George W. Bush’s reaction to the 9/11 attacks. The result, as the Washington Post reported, was a vast new national-security bureaucracy. It encompasses some 1,200 government agencies and 1,900 private companies working on counterterrorism, homeland security and intelligence gathering at some ten thousand sites throughout the nation. Officials with top-secret security clearances, nearly a million strong, produce some fifty thousand reports a year, a number that defies suppositions that most of them are read by anyone important.

Then came President Obama’s expansion of the government’s domestic apparatus. His health-care law created 183 new agencies, commissions, panels and other entities. As Times columnist David Brooks has noted, the purpose was to transfer power from the private sector to government commissions and panels of “experts” presumed to be smarter and more knowing than ordinary citizens. Brooks calls another of Obama’s legislative victories, his 2,319-page financial-reform law, “an intricately engineered technocratic apparatus.” Again, the power to direct behavior is transferred from citizens to governmental technocrats, charged with writing new rules in some 243 separate policy areas.

Brooks says such numbers reflect today’s “progressive era,” characterized by “faith in government experts and their ability to use social science analysis to manage complex systems.” But he adds this development has unleashed

a fierce, almost culture-war-style backlash . . . among people who do not have faith in Washington, who do not have faith that trained experts have superior abilities to organize society, who do not believe national rules can successfully contend with the intricacies of local contexts and cultures.

People with power inevitably leverage it for self-aggrandizement. Thus do we see that federal employees earned average pay and benefits worth $123,000 in 2009, compared to $61,000 in the private sector. Average benefits for federal workers amount to nearly $42,000 a year, mostly in government contributions to pension plans. The average federal salary has expanded 33 percent faster than inflation since 2000. usa Today reports that the federal government pays an average of 20 percent more than private firms for comparable work. These trends are ongoing. Federal compensation has expanded by nearly 40 percent since 2000, after adjusting for inflation, compared to 8.8 percent for private workers.

In Congress, we see power aggrandizement that is nakedly brazen. Those famous earmarks—embedding specific benefits for favored constituents in legislation, often in return for campaign contributions—are widely seen as a recipe for corruption. Redistricting in recent decades has gerrymandered congressional districts into contorted territories designed to protect incumbents, shielding them from shifting winds of public sentiment and contributing to the polarization of Congress. Congress only recently began grappling seriously with lawmakers’ widespread practice of trading in the stock market based on inside information gained in the course of their official duties.

And the ethos of buying votes with federal largesse has contributed to one of the most pervasive elements of the country’s ongoing crisis—the unfunded liabilities represented by federal entitlements. Annual spending on Social Security now exceeds defense spending, while Medicare’s proportion of the federal budget hit 15 percent in 2010, up from 8.5 percent in 1990. By the end of the decade, it is projected to exceed 17 percent. Federal spending for all health programs topped 27 percent of the federal budget in 2010, compared to 20 percent for defense. As Yuval Levin wrote in the Weekly Standard, “Medicare is at the center of both our health care dilemma and our fiscal crunch, and it will be very difficult to avoid a calamitous debt crisis without making changes to the program’s basic structure.”

And yet, as Levin adds, “recipients of benefits are powerfully resistant to change.” Even members of the antigovernment Tea Party movement, according to polls, oppose major entitlement reductions. Without such reductions, there is no solution to the country’s looming debt crisis. The Congressional Budget Office speculates that it would take $15 trillion in spending reductions or tax increases, or both, over the next decade just to maintain the country’s ratio of debt to GDP at current levels. As journalist Peter Coy has written in Bloomberg Businessweek, “The U.S. is in danger of reaching a generational tipping point at which older Americans have the clout to vote themselves benefits that sap the strength of the younger generation.”

Smick, the economic consultant, suggests America’s debt crisis is merely part of a growing global phenomenon reflected in an ominous statistic—the world’s public and private debt exceeds “an incredible 300 percent” of global GDP. He says some money managers see this as part of a three-phase “ugly, downward, global mark-to-market in asset prices.” The first phase was the 1990s Asian debt crisis, in which interest rates soared, equity markets fell, banks failed and currencies collapsed. The second phase is happening now in Europe. The third phase will come when it hits the United States. Already, U.S. public debt exceeds 70 percent of the economy—up from just 40 percent in 2008. As the Wall Street Journal writes, “This isn’t as high as Italy or Greece, but it’s rising fast toward the 90% level that begins to debilitate an economy.” With the national debt projected to hit $16.6 trillion this year, that ominous percentage looms.

As columnist Robert J. Samuelson writes, “We Americans fool ourselves if we ignore the parallels between Europe’s problems and our own.” Europe, he explains, faces a crisis of the welfare state, “which has grown too large to be easily supported economically. People can’t live with it—and can’t live without it. The American predicament is little different.”

Samuelson says we are shifting from “giveaway politics” to “takeaway politics.” He points out that from 1960–2010, the share of federal spending dedicated to “payments to individuals” (entitlements, food stamps, etc.) increased from 26 percent to 66 percent. During that time, the tax burden remained relatively stable, increasing from 17.8 percent of GDP to 18.5 percent. How was this possible? Consistently strong economic growth and plenty of young people in the population to support the elderly. It also helped that military spending declined to today’s 20 percent of federal outlays from 52 percent in 1960. That long postwar era was a grand time for citizens who wanted largesse from their government and for politicians who loved giving it to them.

Those days are gone. America doesn’t dominate the world economy as it once did, and the old growth rates aren’t returning anytime soon, particularly with the country’s crushing public debt and traumatized business sector. With baby boomers retiring over the next eighteen years, demographics are no longer favorable. And the transfer of spending from defense to nondefense has largely taken place already—and might have to be reversed depending upon global events. As Samuelson writes, the old governing formula of giveaway politics no longer works, “and politicians face the opposite: taking away—reducing benefits or raising taxes significantly—to prevent government deficits from destabilizing the economy.”

THIS REPRESENTS a major shift in American society, stark evidence of a crumbling Old Order. Yet many in America cling to the old days, holding fast to the status quo as if that could somehow forestall the decline of that heady postwar era when abundance was the norm and a general consensus prevailed over the role of government. The big questions in today’s era of transformational politics are, first, what will replace the Old Order; and second, how much civic instability will attend the transition from old to new.

To understand this, it helps to consider the fault-line domestic issues that have rippled through American history from the beginning. The question of government’s role in society has been at the heart of American politics forever, and an effort to trace this ongoing debate offers insight into what’s happening today.

The debate began with the Federalist Party of George Washington and Alexander Hamilton, which harbored an elitist regard for concentrated federal power. That spawned a countermovement led by Thomas Jefferson, who brought forth new political catchphrases: small government, strict construction of the Constitution, states’ rights, reduced taxes and less intrusion into the lives of citizens. Jefferson’s administration, writes historian Joyce Appleby, spoke for “the rational, self-improving, independent individual who could be counted on to take care of himself and his family provided that intrusive institutions did not interfere.”

Jefferson eliminated internal taxes, cut the size of government, reduced the national debt and sold federal lands at modest prices to foster a growing yeoman class that would build up the nation from below, thus obviating the need for elites to build it from above. His Democratic-Republican Party dominated American politics for the next twenty-four years, but eventually it split into two factions that would become Andrew Jackson’s Democratic Party and the Whig Party of Kentucky’s Henry Clay. Clay wanted federal power in Washington brought to bear boldly on behalf of domestic prosperity. His “American System” included calls for big federal public-works projects; high tariffs to protect manufacturers; support for the magisterial public-private Second Bank of the United States; and federal land sales at high prices to generate federal dollars and hence federal power.

Jackson opposed all this. He believed concentrated governmental power always leads to corruption and abuse. To prevent that, he said, the country must maintain a diffusion of power, keeping it as close to the people as possible. If it were spread out through the polity, it couldn’t be directed toward special favors and privileges for those well-positioned few who always managed to get their hands on such governmental resources. This sentiment was reflected in a message he sent to Congress in vetoing legislation to foster a big federal road project. The people, he said, had a right to expect a “prudent system of expenditure” that would allow the government to “pay the debts of the Union, and authorize the reduction of every tax to as low a point as . . . our national safety and independence will allow.” In principle, he said, he didn’t oppose federal fund transfers to the states for internal improvements decided by them—but never while there was a national debt and never for direct federal projects that went beyond defense and national benefit.

The problem, he explained, was that such expenditures would lead inevitably to “a corrupting influence upon elections” by giving people a sense that their votes could purchase beneficial governmental favors to “make navigable their neighboring creek or river, bring commerce to their doors, and increase the value of their property.” This, he warned, would prove “fatal to just legislation” and the “purity of public men.” (It’s fun to speculate on what the blunt-spoken Jackson would say about today’s congressional earmarks.)

It’s difficult in our time to conceive that Jackson’s ethos largely dominated the country’s political discourse for nearly a century. But in the Republic’s early decades, the central concern was concentrated federal power, and that political sentiment carried forward in large measure until FDR. Abraham Lincoln, in waging his war against Southern secession, vested greater power than ever in the federal government, but he did so in ways designed to ensure that this power concentration didn’t linger beyond the war. Then, at the beginning of the twentieth century, more and more Americans perceived that the industrial era was spawning major problems that required national solutions. The first big initiatives came from the Republican Party, which had become the party of industrialization but also of a slow, progressive awakening.

Theodore Roosevelt was the first to shape the concepts of progressivism into a successful governing philosophy, resurrecting for the new century the politics of Henry Clay—the idea that certain concentrations of federal power were necessary to maintain the country’s prosperity and ensure the well-being of its people. His initiatives included his trust-busting efforts, creation of the Interstate Commerce Commission, and legislation to foster safety in the country’s food supply and drugs. Further such initiatives were pursued by Roosevelt’s successor, William Howard Taft, and by Democrat Woodrow Wilson when he became president in 1913. Still, these were carefully calibrated concentrations of power, and the Jackson sensibility still held considerable sway in American politics.

Then came the Great Depression. In his book on those years, The Crisis of the Old Order, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. makes clear it was a crisis of capitalism. The grand years of the twenties, of unfettered and seemingly unbounded capitalist success, had come crashing down, and a view took hold that a new order would have to emerge. But nobody knew what it might look like, and many foresaw—even advocated—socialism or even Russian-style communism. One leading humanist thinker of the day, Irving Babbitt, speculated that the country might need “the American equivalent of a Mussolini . . . to save us from the equivalent of a Lenin.”

Franklin Roosevelt harbored no such thoughts. The change he had in mind fit within the tradition of American political discourse. But he methodically set about to craft a new order based on a massive new concentration of power in Washington. He viewed a powerful federal government as a necessary agent of economic renewal, but he also saw this power consolidation as a positive good in itself. Thus, he was to leave behind a thoroughly entrenched federal establishment. The Jackson-Clay tension that had animated political discourse through most of American history suddenly tilted heavily toward Clay’s view and then stretched far beyond anything seriously contemplated before.

The American people embraced this new order—within limits. When Roosevelt sought to aggrandize his political position after his huge reelection victory in 1936 by “packing” the Supreme Court, the voters slapped him down at the next election and thwarted any further major initiatives. Nevertheless, subsequent American political struggles unfolded within the FDR consensus. The first post-FDR Republican president, Dwight Eisenhower, made no effort to dismantle the New Deal because it was too thoroughly entrenched in the country’s political consciousness. After Lyndon Johnson in the 1960s successfully expanded federal power on behalf of civil rights and other liberal causes, a backlash ensued that brought the FDR consensus back toward what voters considered an appropriate equilibrium. When Americans concluded in the late 1970s that the government was no longer working, they elected Ronald Reagan based on his promise to thwart federal expansionism and return power to the states. But Reagan, a former Democrat and FDR admirer, still operated within the FDR consensus. After Reagan’s eight-year presidency, the Old Order remained intact.

But there was one element of Roosevelt’s political schema that contained the seeds of an eventual crisis, and that crisis is now at hand. FDR delighted in fostering the emergence of new national constituency groups beholden to his party and thus intensely dedicated to it—workers flocking to unions under the Wagner Act, senior citizens mobilized by Social Security, farmers appreciative of agricultural subsidies, artists and intellectuals stirred by the Works Progress Administration, and rural Americans focused on the prospect of cheap electrical power. This was a significant political development in America—“special interests” fostered by federal policy making—and precisely the kind of development that Jefferson and Jackson had sought to prevent. There was also an elitist element in this push to establish a vast federal bureaucracy of officials—essentially a new governmental elite—empowered to direct events in multiple areas of American life.

THIS POLITICAL system worked for a long time, but now it is sputtering under its own weight. The government can’t seem to get at the problems of our time because too many entrenched interests possess the power to prevent it. Favoritism is rampant throughout the system—in a tax code riddled with special breaks and preferences for well-placed citizens; in crony capitalism that favors big corporations averse to fair competition; in favored treatment bestowed by Congress on its members to enhance their everyday lives and reelection prospects; in congressional favors to special interests with easy legislative access and quick cash for reelection campaigns; in governments at every level expanding their power and feathering the nests of their workers; in Wall Street’s ability to game Washington to protect itself from its own folly; and in public-sector unions conflating money grabs with rights.

David Brooks writes that this has undermined the country’s traditional ethos of responsibility and fairness—that hard work, merit and enterprise should be rewarded while laziness and sly manipulations should not. “The result,” he writes, “is a crisis of legitimacy. The game is rigged. . . . The United States suffers from a horrible crisis of trust that is slowing growth, restricting government action and sending our politics off in strange directions.”

Put another way, we are facing a crisis of the Old Order, just as those congressional representatives did in 1849 and as Franklin Roosevelt did in 1933. The FDR consensus is breaking down—in part because it can’t address the country’s looming financial crisis and in part because it has simply lost its civic steam. What will replace it has become a defining issue for America. It may be a European-style social-democratic system, as Democrats under President Obama seem to want. Under this concept, the crisis will be addressed by transferring even greater increments of power to the government and giving greater societal sway to governmental technocrats. Another possibility would be a return to some kind of Jacksonian ethos, as Republicans advocate. This would entail flows of power in the other direction, from the federal government back to the states and the people. Meanwhile, the status quo forces will seek with might and main to preserve and protect the Old Order even as its demise becomes increasingly discernible.

Thus does the country face an epic struggle along a fault line that goes back to the days of Jackson and Clay. The stakes for America in this time of political fluidity are immense. That’s why tempers are high, Congress can’t function and the deadlock continues. And it will continue further until a new political consensus emerges to replace the old—and a new political order emerges out of that new consensus. This process could take years, and in the meantime the country’s politics will be the politics of crisis.

Robert W. Merry is editor of The National Interest and the author of books on American history and foreign policy. His next book, on the U.S. presidency, is due out from Simon & Schuster on June 26.

Part of TNI's special issue on the Crisis of the Old Order.

Image: Getty

Image: Pullquote: Many in America cling to the old days, holding fast to the status quo as if that could somehow forestall the decline of that heady postwar era when abundance was the normEssay Types: Essay