Or rather it's the U.S. political system that worries Foreign Policy's Steve Walt in this post about America's rocky future. This is a theme that keeps coming up with pundits, especially those (such as Thomas Friedman and Mathew Yglesias) who are frustrated by the lack of policy action on climate change and other big ticket issues. Walt usually confines himself to the international relations sphere. But he and some of his Harvard buddies were discussing the homefront recently and concluded a few things:
The danger, as my colleagues generally agreed, is the incapacity of the U.S. political system to make timely decisions, except in conditions of absolute crisis, and its tendency over the past decade to make boneheaded decisions that are hard to correct. The Founding Fathers were wary of concentrated power (and with good reason), but the system they created is both filled with veto points (i.e., places where ...
