"Mental Secession."

I usually regard anything published at The Bulwark as bearing an anti-imprimatur, a bright orange sticker sternly warning DO NOT READ.

The publication is a digital refugee camp for the most clapped-out of free market defenses of corporatism, exploitable cheap labor and neo-conservatism's poisonous foreign adventurism.

But once in a while, there is something worth considering. Such is the case with this piece from AEI (ugh, but...) Resident Scholar Adam J. White, "Mentally Seceding from the Union." 

Like all critiques of populism, it completely ignores the role of corporations putting their iron gauntlets on the political scales. Of course it does--it's the American Enterprise Institute. Corporate actions are sacrosanct, and the corporate persons must be given as much latitude as possible to compete and act for the good of the market. Which leads to such piquant behavior as trying to bully Georgia for a pro-life law even as they desperately try to kill or water down a congressional bill which would cut off their access to literal slave labor in China.  And let's not get started on Big Tech's blatant censorship.

None of this appears in Mr. White's piece, making it an extremely faulty diagnosis of our current state. And the determination to see Trump as more cause than symptom is a common failing. But it has something worth considering, namely the fact that the party which captures the Presidency rules the endlessly-expanding administrative state (not to mention the courts which can rein it in):

Mental secession results from the way we live. We increasingly segregate ourselves geographically into communities of shared values, as Bill Bishop documented a decade ago in The Big Sort. And we segregate ourselves intellectually, relying heavily on politically or culturally inbred sources of information. No wonder a presidential election’s losing side sees the winners like foreign occupiers—the two sides live in different worlds.

Mental secession is worsened by the way we govern ourselves. Our Constitution originally entrusted lawmaking to Congress, so that our laws would be enacted through a checked-and-balanced process of deliberation and compromise, sometimes over the course of years or decades. Today, however, our government’s center of gravity is the administrative state, which makes law much more swiftly and unilaterally, and thus less moderately; groups not part of the president’s political coalition have no substantial voice in governance, except when they sue to block the agencies’ work.

Institutions that might dampen these problems are reinforcing them. Detachment from our federal government would be less significant if we channeled our energies into other attachments: state and local governments, charities, churches, or others. But today even our civic and private institutions serve often as components of the red and blue confederacies into which we’ve seceded—either proxies for, or tools to be wielded in, the national power struggle.

Unfortunately, the piece then descends into wishcasting about statesmanship and compromise.

Is there a way out of this cycle? Maybe--and it can be found in this panicky-sounding Slate piece about the potential revival of the "non-delegation" doctrine.

Short version: the non-delegation doctrine states that Congress cannot fob off its lawmaking duties to the executive branch. The Slate piece paints an apocalyptic crippling of the Federal government if it is revived, so you can discount that. However, if the administrative state is forced to draw in its horns, that will lower the stakes of presidential elections--not to mention force Congress to actually think about the legislation it crafts and act expeditiously. You know, the job it's assigned under Article I.

It's not a cure-all by any means. But no longer letting the party controlling the executive branch issue diktat after diktat, the fever might drop some.