How the Government Lost Its Mind

Alexander Hamilton and his colleagues wrote 85 separate essays to make their case that Americans should take a risk and ratify the 1787 Constitution. Three sentences into the very first of those Federalist Papers, Hamilton made clear that he knew full well the stakes of the gamble he and his co-authors were proposing.

“Whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice” was, Hamilton wrote, entirely uncertain. People are prone to tribalism and irrationality, easy targets for leaders who traffic in demagoguery and corruption. Hamilton doubted that it was even “seriously to be expected” that “We the People” would be able to set aside existing passions and prejudices long enough to debate the ratification of the Constitution itself solely on its merits. How on earth could the Constitution’s Framers then have convinced themselves to expect the people to manage running an effective national government?

The Framers’ faith in that regard has been sorely tested by the American government’s catastrophic response to the COVID-19 pandemic. For as much blame as the president himself deserves for the country’s current dire condition—and his malign incompetence is breathtaking—the federal government’s failure here is not the president’s alone. Expert agencies such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Food and Drug Administration have, from the start, stumbled and delayed, struggled to collect data, secure accurate tests, or convey a consistent message. Congress, too, has proven unable to compel swift action to address shortages or coordinate the distribution of essential supplies, and equally unable to constrain apparently rampant corruption in the allocation of the funds it has authorized. Even the courts have at times balked at accepting pandemic basics, such as the notion that states might have reasonable grounds for permitting large gatherings outdoors but not in. As the Atlantic journalist Ed Yong recently set out in painful detail, the response has “careened between inaction and ineptitude,” leaving the people in “illness and financial ruin.” In the face of such systemic failure, is it time to rethink the system itself?

[Read: How the pandemic defeated America]

To answer that question, it is worth recalling what “system” that is, and how it