My Love Affair With Parliamentary Government Is Over

Richard L. Strout (pictured) and Michael Kinsley bequeathed it to me. Events of the past decade made me reconsider, and the House speaker fight is killing it dead.

I feel a little silly discussing the influence exercised over me by Richard L. Strout, who wrote the New Republic’s TRB column for 40 years. I met Dick a little over 40 years ago, when he was 82. We didn’t exchange much more than a handshake, either then or in subsequent encounters, but my 22 year-old self couldn’t help noticing that he loped around Washington (he was fairly tall) wearing a backpack. My parents were trying to get me to carry a briefcase instead of the backpack I’d carried around at college. I was resisting. Seeing Strout was the final straw. If TRB could wear a backpack in Washington, then so could I.

Through his writing, Strout was one of many people who persuaded me (Michael Kinsley, who succeeded Strout and remains a good friend, was another) that the United States would be better off with a parliamentary form of government. Such thinking was especially voguish in the aftermath of the Carter era, when Congress was constantly at war with President Jimmy Carter. I’ve since learned that Carter signed more bills into law than any postwar president since Lyndon Johnson, but that wasn’t the impression people had at the time. Anyway, Strout had been praising the parliamentary model since the 1940s. I maintained my admiration for parliamentary government when I succeeded Strout, Kinsley, and various other gifted writers as TRB columnist in 2011. (The column was terminated in 2013.)

I mention all this because liberal parliament-envy—mine and I think other nerdy liberals’ as well—has been waning during the past decade thanks to bad examples set by the United Kingdom and Israel. The parliamentary simulacrum underway right now in the House of Representatives, as Kevin McCarthy in effect struggles to form a government, is driving the last coffin nail into the dream. That’s the subject of my latest New Republic piece. I’m sorry, Dick, but it has to be said.