Matt Yglesias has an article about our doomed American democracy that’s getting a lot of play on the Internet. I’m not sure I’ll bother with a comprehensive “reply,” since I’m more cranky than pessimistic these days, but I would like to call attention to a rather stunning flaw in a quote that Matt takes from Juan Linz, a professor of political science at Yale, to use as a springboard for his piece. Matt doesn’t link to Linz’s article, but quotes the professor as saying “aside from the United States, only Chile has managed a century and a half of relatively undisturbed constitutional continuity under presidential government — but Chilean democracy broke down in the 1970s.” Well, our democracy didn’t break down in the 1970s, but it did more or less explode in the 1860s, in a civil war that cost over 600,000 lives. I don’t call that “relatively undisturbed constitutional continuity.”
