Inaction is not gridlock

In The GOP: King of the Hill by Jay Cost, Cost makes a point I have been harping on. Gridlock is only a negative when viewed through partisan lenses. If you want to achieve policy X and you cannot get the opposite party to agree, then you complain about dysfunctional government and gridlock. But if your perspective is that of having a political system which is both stable and reflects the consent of the governed, then inaction is simply a consequence of lack of consensus in the electorate. The system is working as it ought to.

Cost's synopsis:

Surely this must be bad for our government, some say. The Framers could never have intended our elections to produce such a muddle. Gridlock—as the Beltway pundit class assures us—is dangerous and un-American.

But this is not true! In fact, the Framers might celebrate these mixed electoral messages if they were with us today.

Before the American Revolution, many political philosophers held up Britain as a nearly ideal system of government. The British system balanced power among the monarch, the nobility, and the people. The idea was to prevent any one faction from upending another for its own gain. The Americans did away with this idea in 1776, when they declared it self-evidently true that all men are equal and that all power derives from the people alone.

The problem was that the American governing experience in the decade after the Declaration of Independence was disastrous. State governments were exquisitely democratic and utterly atrocious: Fractious majorities often controlled them, punishing political minorities, squabbling with other states, violating the treaty rights of loyalists, failing to support the federal government, and making a wreck of public finances.

After the failure of the Articles of Confederation, the Framers sought to retain the egalitarianism of the Declaration, but to inject the notion of balance. They did not empower a landed gentry to check the masses; all power would continue to flow from the people as a whole. Yet by dividing power among the branches of government—and within the legislative branch, between an upper and a lower chamber—and designing a different selection system for each, they created artificial distinctions within society. Power would still flow from the people, but it would travel to different branches of government, by different routes, at different intervals. Thus, the government would be balanced—like the British system—yet at the same time radically egalitarian. The people would rule, but no fleeting majority could get its hands on all the mechanisms of government at once.

That is not so far from what we have now. The rules of the game favor the Republican coalition for the House and Senate; they favor the Democratic coalition for the White House. Far from being a distortion of the constitutional vision, this is a realization of it.

[snip]

To put it simply, our country is not a radical democracy run on a straightforward popular vote. The people experimented with something like that in the 1780s, and the Framers thought it an unmitigated disaster. So they built a republic in which, to acquire all the levers of governmental power, a party must build a big, broad, and durable majority, one vast enough to sweep up control of all the federal institutions, each with its own peculiar rhythms.

What many overlook is that our system is designed to safeguard the rights of minorities, whether political, religious, racial, class, regional, ethnic, or other. The price of those protections is inaction until there is sufficient consensus across multiple groups and interests.