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The founding fathers not only did not design a blueprint for the America of 1980 but had not the faintest idea what it would be like. Where the White House now stands, there were only a few empty meadows upstream from the barnyard where George Washington tried to breed new varieties of mules; Ronald Reagan's smog-filled Los Angeles was a tiny settlement of Spanish friars surrounded by thousands of miles of wilderness. The principal danger envisioned by those squires and merchants who had rebelled against King George was that of monarchy, and their remedy for that danger was the theory of checks and balances. "Ambition must be made to counteract ambition," said James Madison. The theory is reasonably sound, but as circumstances have changed and become more complex, the doctrine of separate powers can be partly blamed for the present imbroglio, a presidency unable to get any program through Congress unmauled and a Congress unable to get its wishes carried out by an entrenched bureaucracy.
Despite these shortcomings, however, radical surgery on the Constitution is not the answer. It is hard to imagine any major overhaul of the nation's fundamental charter that would not create more problems than it would solve. In fact, some of the problems afflicting the system today derive from various reforms undertaken—with the best of intentions—during the past decade.
These were primarily liberal reforms, designed to improve the way Presidents are elected and the way Congress deals with legislation. The chief target was "the bosses," the chief goal a more open political process. Only now that bossism has been largely overthrown can it be demonstrated that the party bosses performed a valuable function after all, that they were a corrupted form of a system known as representative democracy, and that the new vogue for various forms of "direct" democracy could itself become undemocratic.