When is a nation stable? That means that it is unlikely to violently change its form of government. A political scientist I knew thought it a compliment to tell a sociologist such as myself that I would know the answer, that I could measure whether a nation was somewhere on a one to ten scale of national stability, but I did not know that answer. This was in the deeply functionalist version of sociology. Parsons showed what were the essential needs for creating and sustaining a society but only dealt passingly with when a nation was on the brink of collapsing and his student Neal Smelser separated different kinds of unrest, from food riots to cultural upheavals, but couldn;t say what Marxists called revolutionary situations, everything in the social structure ready for a spark to turn a nation topsyturvy. There were so many explanations. The French government had exhausted its finances just before the Revolution, but that could have led to a gradual evolution to constitutional monarchy based on the National Assembly that developed out of the calling of the Estates General. The Russian Revolution was inspired by the prolongation of the First World War but it did not have to mean the Communist takeover. Germany was unstable in the Weimar regime, as was shown by there being paramilitary organizations on all sides, but things were calming down before political shenanigans put Hitler in legal power, allowing him to overturn that in short order and create a one party state. Why did the American Union hold together and even pass useful legislation such as the railroads and land grant colleges during the Civil War? Hard to say.
What I can say, however, is why a democratic nation is able to remain stable. It is because the issues that divide the population remain stable over long periods of time and are waged in elections, these issues never resolved but moving, from one election to another, in incremental advances or when there are major changes, such as the Civil Rights acts of the Sixties, ways in which to continue or morph the issue so that the sides can stay in opposition to one another without resolving those issues that reflect the continued frictions between the groups within America.The basic conflicts and continuing accommodations between factions in the nation allow it to remain stable and those parameters have existed ever since the New Deal. Union vs. management conflict was ameliorated through the Wagner Act but new pacts or old pacts revised to deal with the continuing friction, as happened recently when Congress had to intervene to settle the potential rail strike. Health care has been on the public agenda since Truman and gets readjusted with new congressional actions. The civil rights laws are now being seen by conservatives as having to be revised to allow discrimination about same sex marriage. But just as Eisenhower in effect ratified the New Deal by not opposing its major provisions, it would indeed be destabilizing to seriously consider, as George W. Bush suggested making Social Security an investment in the stock exchange rather than a tax scheme whereby money recently paid in by workers is used to pay off retired benefits. To do so would be to violate a basic trust the government pledges to its workers and might lead to social unrest.
The stability of the nation rests on the predictability of the electorate, that it will respond to its economic interests as well as its cultural values, the shifts in the electorate on these matters slow and cumulative until a consensus emerges whereby racial descrimination is no longer a custom even if initially disabused by legislation and the Supreme Court. The same political processes operate to deal with even relatively contentious issues such as abortion where a fifty year period under Roe v. Wade is abrogated by the Supreme Court but where there are legislative remedies to restore it nationally or perhaps more gradually by states one by one having to accommodate, to what seems the right thing to do. The abortion issue is not destabilizing because people disagree about what is the right thing to do and it is not the only issue between people, while in the years before the Civil War, slavery was the single and divisive issue that could turn over the applecart of union.
There are two recent events which give pause in thinking the United States to be stable. The first is the shift from politics based on interest and cultural values to matters of personality. Now, it was always the case that Presidents and even Senators were elected because they were tall, like Washington and Lincoln, or charming, like FDR and JFK, or seemed reliable and thoughtful, like Eisenhower and Obama. But they were backed up by where they stood on the issues, I remember people thinking Lyndon Johnson was uncouth because he mashed his peas with a fork, but i reminded them that LBJ got through major civil rights legislation and that was what counted and I could turn against him, peas aside, because he could never find a handle on resolving Vietnam. The issues counted, and did so, I think, until 2016 when people voted for Trump precisely because he was so mean spirited, while previous presidential candidates at least claimed to be judicious and having the interests of the nation at heart and abiding by the Constitution even if some of them were better than others at running the government or changing direction, as when republican presidents wanted to have lower taxes for the rich while Democratic presidents wanted to have lower taxes for the poor. Something very different and destabilizing occurred and that was before Jan. 6th, when Trump fomented an insurrection, though it was only in the last few weeks that he articulated that he wanted to suspend the Constitution, as if his action had spoken more loudly than his two year later words. The protection of the Constitution and of political stability rests on various institutions that surround the President circumventing or ameliorating a President who is so outrageously different from other Presidents in that he is out to undermine rather than foster its system. That happened when various chiefs of staff and cabinet secretaries dismayed or blocked Trump’s incentives and Trump was not agile enough politically to thwart those who surrounded him, or at least was able to do so for most of his term. A second term for Trump or an abler Trump like figure might be more successful at destabilizing what always remains a delicate system however long lived is the American system in comparison to that of other nations.
A second source of American destabilization results from the change of the United States Senate where every Senator was a prima donna who negotiated with the body as a whole to becoming more like the House of representatives in that members can be whipped into supporting one party or the other, only the totals making a difference in that the speaker is able through favors and persuasion and campaign donations to bring people in support. Nancy Pelosi was able to corral the Squad of Four, supporting them but getting them to quell their own antisemetic impulses while it is yet to be seen whether Kevin MacCarthy can tame his own extreme fringe. Historically, voters would decide on whether a Senate candidate was up to muster regardless of party. Alabama rejected Roy Moore in 2017 because of his association with young women and elected Doug Jones even though he was defeated for a full term when someone acceptable was presented in 2018. But that is no longer the case. The vote in Georgia between Warnock and Walker was very close even if many Republicans were aware of Walker’s shortcomings, such as being a Texas resident and a secret abortion provider, because Republicans decided that independent judgment was less important, even in the Senate, rather than lining up with one or the other caucus, as would have been the case myself who, if a Republican, i would have held my nose and voted for the Republican just so as to make the two caucuses equal. That shows just how divided the two sides are, so inimical to one another and that does not bode well for the sides coming together to create compromises or top rise for a national emergency, though so far a bipartisan coalition has supported Bideen on Ukraine, but might not hold if relations with russia might get seriously threatening.Biden treats his as a usual presidency, in solid command when his legislative maneuver is very narrow and still has been able to get through a number of measures despite that, to everyone’s amazement. Biden was not the caretaker government expected in 2020. But vote count Senates are destabilizing despite the ability of Biden to score touchdowns, especially since the Congress is gridlocked and has been for many things since Brown v. Board when significant changes are done at the Supreme Court and theCconservative activist court is likely to do even more unpopular things than just reject Roe v. Wade.
But be wary of the hypothesis that arrangements that will destabilize American democratic politics will achieve their fruition. A force for destabilization may be a transitory thing that is countervailed by so many arrangements that would allow the society to remain stable, or else that something destabilizing may in fact be an evolution in institutions that had their internal logic. Donald Trump may be a flash in the pan, a fluke, a fad, Republicans chastened not to go that way again, and some twenty years ahead, Trump regarded as a strange sort, not in coming with the gravity expected of Presidents, even Ronald Reagan, who knew enough to follow who he was told to appoint as cabinet officials. And the Senate may already have changed from being a somewhat deliberative and somewhat consensual body into being a vote count where what individual members think is not very important. Joe Manchin is a dinosaur especially if the Senate gets enough running room when one party or the other has more than a few votes in excess.
Moreover, there are destabilizing arrangements that don't’ result in destabilization even if one would expect it to happen. The arrangements whereby the Senate is arranged is fundamentally unfair even if it made sense at the time the Constitution was drafted to provide two Senators for each state. But that means that California has twenty million people for each Senator and North Dakota has 350,000 people for each Senator. If you add up the states of the Great Plains and the mountain region, excluding the purple and Liberal states of New Mexico and Arizona, then ten states (North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, Montana, Idaho, Colorado, Wyoming and Utah) have about seven percent of the United States population but twenty percent of the Senators. You would expect the East, the Great Lake states and the Pacific West to be angry but there is no unrest about that issue, no call to amend the Constitution so that Senate representation would be more equitable, even though the present arrangement is as inequitable as what prevailed in early nineteenth century England where there were “rotten boroughs” whereby seats with virtually no people had members in Parliament while burgeoning cities did not. Maybe it is weirdly stabilizing to allow trees rather than people to have representation in the Senate, but the basic constitutional system has said otherwise since .No telling when people will come to find this a grievance, perhaps when the rural and urban areas are so similarly heterogeneous that areas will not cling to their own natures, which is a long time away given that regionalism is also a basic characteristic of American society and has been so since its beginning.
An argument about destabilization, what are the arrangements that allow nations to remain non-violent, is functionalist in that it posits the notion that institutions evolve so as to further the survival of its political structure, the mechanism becoming ever more capable of sustaining the entity rather than the polity disintegrating or in permanent upheaval, as happened in France between 1789 and the beginning of the Fourth French Republic in 1870. The destabilizing forces are replaced with more reliable ones, just as happened in France where De Gaulle ushered in the Fifth French Republic in 1958 by putting in a Constitution with a strong Presidency rather than relying on quickly changing legislatively backed Premiers. More than that, but different from functionalism, is that the main mechanisms to stabilize a nation are its institutions as those are embedded in the legal institutions rather than in the culture or mores of the population. We do not depend on the wisdom or good sense of the population as the basis for democracy or for a demographic balance of forces, even though theorists like to think the United States is just fortunate to have the cleaves of the parties more or less closely balanced and so allowing an election to decide who wins the horse race. That also contends with the idea of members of the Founding Fathers who thought that the Republic would survive because of the virtues of the people, that they would engage in good sense, democracy as well as a republic always an experiment that might fail if one or two elections went basically wrong, as happened in Germany in 1932 or when a radically unequipped Czar prevailed during the First World War. Rather, mechanisms can be improved by a clever political mind and minds, just as happened when the Founding Fathers devised their government, which has weathered a good many storms and remains capable, I think and hope, to be creative in further adjusting its structures.