Stephen Skowronek, "The Adaptability Paradox: Political Inclusion and Constitutional Resilience" (U Chicago Press, 2025)

Summary

---

Episode Overview

Podcast: New Books Network – New Books in Public Policy
Host: Ursula Hackett
Guest: Professor Stephen Skowronek (Yale University)
Book: The Adaptability Paradox: Political Inclusion and Constitutional Resilience (University of Chicago Press, 2025)
Recorded: January 12, 2026

This episode features a deep dive into Stephen Skowronek’s latest book, which interrogates the trade-offs inherent in American constitutional development—specifically, how increasing political inclusion may undermine the adaptive capacities and stability of constitutional order. Skowronek challenges the assumption that the U.S. Constitution is endlessly self-correcting and explores the historical mechanisms—often extraconstitutional—used to manage shifting boundaries of inclusion. The conversation weaves together historical analysis, constitutional theory, and the implications of contemporary democratic conflicts.

---

Main Themes and Purpose

• Exploring the ‘Adaptability Paradox’: The paradox that as American democracy achieves broader inclusion, the Constitution’s ability to stably accommodate change is weakened.
• Historical Patterns of Inclusion and Exclusion: How American constitutional development has repeatedly relied on auxiliary institutions (like political parties and administration) to channel conflict arising from expanding rights.
• Current Political Crisis: Analysis of why the standard fixes—policy innovation and reform proposals—may be inadequate today, and the challenge of sustaining consensus in an era of near-universal inclusion.

---

Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. Origins of the Project

[03:09–04:25]

• The book is a thematic companion to Skowronek’s prior work, The Policy State (co-authored with Karen Orren).
• Central concern: Are there limits to America’s continual adaptation? At what point does adaptation undermine constitutional integrity?
  • Quote: “Is this just an ongoing process that just goes on forever, or are there any limits to this constant reconfiguration of American institutions?” — Skowronek [03:51]

2. Defining Constitutional Adaptability

[04:25–06:25]

• Adaptation differs from revolution: changes are incremental, cumulative, not total.
• Adaptation means stabilizing the system by crafting new rules all parties accept, not just change for its own sake.
  • Quote: “The Constitution is adaptive to the extent that all participants are willing to buy into a new arrangement.” — Skowronek [05:54]

3. The Adaptability Paradox Explained

[06:25–08:16]

• Major constitutional adaptations have been responses to democratization and extending inclusion.
• The paradox: The closer the U.S. gets to full inclusion, the harder it is for the Constitution to re-stabilize—there is no longer an “outside” group whose exclusion can secure new settlements.
  • Quote: “…once ‘we the people’ became a fully inclusive reality, the Constitution seems to have lost its capacity to reestablish firm footings and to stabilize the polity. That’s what I see as the paradox.” — Skowronek [07:26]

4. Boundaries, Exclusions, and Theories of Democracy

[08:16–11:20]

• Historic exclusions—while unjust—functioned to balance instability and enable governance.
• Raises the difficult question: “Does constitutional government require exclusions?” Skowronek hopes not, but suspects American constitutional order has in practice needed them for stability.
  • Quote: “If the answer is yes, that it has required exclusions, then the implication … is not to exclude people, but to find a different set of arrangements.” — Skowronek [10:43]

5. Extra-Constitutional “Auxiliaries”

[11:20–13:41]

• Excluded groups and rising conflicts historically managed via auxiliaries—institutions outside (or in addition to) the Constitution.
  • 19th century: Political parties (the “party state”) to organize conflict.
  • 20th century: The administrative state (bureaucracy/expert agencies) to regulate new demands.
  • These were practical responses to the relaxation of earlier formal constraints.

6. Historical Illustrations of the Paradox

[13:41–16:30]

• Expansion of white male suffrage managed by suppressing the issue of slavery.
• Expansion of labor rights managed by excluding African Americans from state benefits.
  • Quote: “…inclusions were all premised on exclusions.” — Skowronek [16:18]
• The paradox is submerged because democratization’s greatest achievements are intertwined with these exclusions.

7. The Policy State, Cludges, and “Thickening” of Institutions

[18:28–22:10]

• Connection to Steve Teles’ concept of the “clodjocracy”—systems patched by clumsy fixes.
• Skowronek notes that while institutional complexity (“thickening”) initially provided stability, dismantling old systems of authority has overloaded the Constitution with unresolved social conflicts.
  • Quote: “…what we’ve done is we’ve upended all of these other institutional systems … that has thrown everything into the constitutional system … and in some ways overloaded it.” — Skowronek [20:54]

8. The Hollowing of Limits—Federalism and Rights

[22:10–28:48]

• As non-government systems of authority (patriarchy, localism, private hierarchy) are democratized or upended, social ballast for the Constitution is lost.
• Federalism, once rooted in social realities, is now a “free for all”—no longer helps limit conflict.
  • Quote: “Federalism now is a free for all.” — Skowronek [25:34]
• Expansion of rights leads to less security for all: “When everybody has rights, rights become very politicized…” — Skowronek [27:14]

9. Perceptions of Inclusion and the Limits of Consensus

[28:48–34:13]

• Full inclusion is never truly “full”; new categories continuously emerge, but the capacity for stable consensus is undermined.
• Recent attempts at exclusion (trans rights, abortion, voting) don’t reset the system—they intensify conflict and are rejected as illegitimate.
  • Quote: “…exclusion after democratization … does not restore consensus, they do not support new rules, they do not promote forbearance. They are rejected as illegitimate…” — Skowronek [33:18]

10. No Easy Fixes—The Challenge for Elites

[34:13–37:20]

• Skowronek resists offering a “to-do list”—the very habit reflects the adaptability faith he is questioning.
• The core failure is an elite failure: Before, elites constructed new vehicles (parties, administrations) to recapture consensus, but since the rights revolution, this has broken down.
  • Quote: “The problem is not ideas. The problem is that we don’t have a vehicle that recaptures a sense of whatever it is that unites us.” — Skowronek [36:30]

---

Memorable Quotes and Moments

• On the paradox of inclusion:
  “As democratization advances and more people are included, ultimately you approximate full inclusion. … But with full inclusion, we seem to push. We include everyone, but institutional settlement seems to be moving farther out of reach.” — Skowronek [07:06]
• On the function of exclusion:
  “Has the Constitution, our Constitution’s capacity, this particular Constitution’s capacity required exclusions to provide security to all participants and to manage conflict effectively?” — Skowronek [10:19]
• On the inadequacy of past solutions now:
  “Excluding people after democratization … does not restore consensus … they are rejected as illegitimate expressions of what constitutional government is.” — Skowronek [33:18]
• On the collapse of consensus vehicles:
  “There is no vehicle that articulates what it is that unites us. And that’s what elites were able to do before … party and administration that captured what we agreed on … Elites, in our time, we have not been able to create such a vehicle.” — Skowronek [36:29]

---

Important Timestamps

| Timestamp | Topic/Quote | |------------|----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------| | 03:09–04:25| Origins of the book and the question of adaptability | | 06:25–08:16| The adaptability paradox defined | | 11:20–13:41| Definition and historical role of “auxiliaries” | | 14:28–16:30| Inclusion and exclusion in 19th and 20th century adaptations | | 20:54 | Overloading the constitutional system after upending alternate systems of authority | | 25:34 | Federalism as a “free for all” | | 27:14 | Rights expansion and the paradox of less security | | 33:18 | Why new exclusions are not a solution; legitimacy crisis | | 36:29 | The elite failure and loss of consensus-building vehicles |

---

Final Reflections and Next Steps

[37:36–38:43]

• Skowronek is considering a future project on strands of American nationalism:
  • Liberal universalism vs. pluralism (“America as a beacon of liberalism” vs. “America as a space for plural coexistence”).
  • Interested in the origins and trajectories of these competing ideas.

---

Summary Takeaways

• The adaptability paradox centers on the predicament that maximal inclusion may sap the American Constitution’s capacity to regenerate stable political order.
• Key moments in American history managed inclusion’s challenges with new, often extraconstitutional institutions, but these fixes depended on simultaneous exclusions.
• Today’s predicament is not a lack of ideas or proposed reforms, but an absence of institutions or “vehicles” to capture shared consensus and channel conflict productively—a challenge the elite class has not solved since the rights revolution.
• Attempts to exclude marginalized groups after the fact worsen, rather than resolve, conflict and legitimacy.
• The book reframes common narratives of progress, cautioning that inclusion and constitutional resilience are at tension—a warning designed not to halt further democratization, but to inspire creative political invention.

---

Transcript

[Professor Stephen Skronik]

Hello everybody.

[Marshall Po]

This is Marshall Po. I'm the founder and editor of the New Books Network. And if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million people. You may have a podcast or you may be thinking about starting a podcast. As you probably know, there are challenges basically of two kinds. One is technical. There are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed. And the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience in podcasting is the hardest thing to do today. With this in mind, we at the NBM have started a service called NBN Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Productions. Click that, fill out the form and we can talk. Welcome to the New Books Network.

[Ursula Hackett]

Hi, I'm Ursula Hackett of the New Books Network New Books in Public Policy podcast. Today I'm delighted to welcome Professor Stephen Skronik of Yale University, the author of the Adaptability, Political Inclusion and Constitutional Resilience, which was published by the University of Chicago Press in 2025. Welcome to the show, Stephen.

[Professor Stephen Skronik]

Thank you, Ursula. That's great to be here.

[Ursula Hackett]

Well, I'm absolutely delighted to speak to you, Stephen, because I'm a huge admirer of your very long and rich career defining the field of American political development and making some major contributions, of course, to the study of the presidency and to the administrative state. And this is a profound book that deals, I think, with some of the major crises of our time. Questions around democratic inclusion and exclusion, the exercise of national power and the stresses and strains on the American Constitution. Whether that's partisan polarisation, crumbling norms of engagement, uncertain rights, election denialism, the list could go on. And you make in the book this incredibly striking claim that there is a trade off between, between wider political inclusion and the structural integrity of the U.S. constitution. And you're challenging the assumption that the Constitution is in some way self correcting. So I'm really looking forward to digging into some of these huge ideas in our conversation, but I'd like to start with a question about the origins of this project. And you write in the book that you see this as a sort of companion piece to a book that you published in 2017 with Karen Oren, the Policy State, where you're looking at the consequences of expanding the sphere of public policy. And I wondered if you could tell us a bit about the origin story for the adaptability paradox, how it came about, and how you see this book fitting in with your existing body of scholarship.

[Professor Stephen Skronik]

Yes. Well, as you say, the idea for this book came when I was writing the Policy State with Karen Oren, the idea of adaptability as really the characteristic mode of political development in the United States. But as I thought about it, this idea really is a kind of runs throughout my career, thinking about how the political system, and the institutional system in particular, periodically regenerates itself. So that is a theme that ran through my very first book on building the administrative state, and it followed through in my work on the presidency, about reconstructive presidents. And I was drawn to this book because I was thinking about, well, is this just an ongoing process that just goes on forever, or are there any limits to this constant reconfiguration of American institutions? And began in this book to think about whether there are limits to adaptability.

[Ursula Hackett]

So you talk about reconfiguration and regeneration and these ideas about adaptability. And obviously this concept of adaptability is absolutely central to this book. Tell us a bit about what you mean by constitutional adaptability.

[Professor Stephen Skronik]

Well, we usually, often we talk about the great adaptations of American government. We talk about them as revolutions like the rights revolution or reconstruction as the second American Revolution. But in fact, adaptations are quite different than revolutions. They carry forward at least as much as they change. They don't change things holistically. So one question about adaptability is how often can you go back to the well and tweak the system? Changing some, getting rid of some things, adding some other things, pulling other things forward. How long can you do that before the entire system begins to lose any sense of integrity or essential purpose? The other thing about adaptations are adaptation is not just change. Adaptations are a particular kind of change. Adaptations reset the system. They stabilize the system. They don't eliminate political conflict, but they do establish rules that all the participants are willing to buy into. And so you could say that the Constitution is adaptive to the extent that all participants are willing to buy into a new arrangement. And that's very different than just saying things will change, that things change. Things are changing all the time.

[Ursula Hackett]

And so you derive from these observations about adaptability the adaptability paradox of the title of your book. So tell us, what is the adaptability paradox?

[Professor Stephen Skronik]

I would say that democracy, popular sovereignty, is the Constitution's most democratic principle. And the great adaptations of American government have been adaptations to fuller inclusion or to democratization. And we've done that many times, including new groups to one extent or another. And each time we include new groups, reconfiguring the constitutional system, reconfiguring our institutions. The paradox is that as we, as democratization advances and more people are included, ultimately you approximate full inclusion. And the paradox is that once we the people, became a fully inclusive reality, the Constitution seems to have lost its capacity to reestablish firm footings and to stabilize the polity. That's what I see as the paradox. So, yeah, so previously we were able to include some groups while leaving other groups out, and we were able to establish new constitutional settlements. But with full inclusion, we seem to push. We include everyone, but institutional settlement seems to be moving farther out of reach.

[Ursula Hackett]

Right. So this is, this connects with this concept of boundary resilience that you also coin of another really resonant term in this book about how these adaptations, so successive series of adaptations steadying themselves somehow against these limits. And then those limits are kind of articulating and re. Articulating those constitutional structures. And then if you remove once you get beyond those limits, it's sort of, you know, what happens next. And I was thinking as you were talking there about inclusion and exclusion and ways in which historically all these exclusions have served to underpin some of those limits that you're talking about, that I was thinking of the democratic theorist Suzanne Dovey, who wrote about a democratic exclusion as being in some way something praiseworthy on the basis that democratic representation is sort of zero sum. And she's talking here about kind of curtailing the power of the wealthy and white males in order to facilitate particular democratic ends. Of course, you're talking here about the consequences of full democratic, democratic inclusion. I mean, did you find that you were thinking, and as you were writing this work about how it connected with those ideas within the sphere of political theory on democracy and its inclusion and exclusions?

[Professor Stephen Skronik]

I've thought about it a little bit since I wrote the book. We think about Reconstruction after the Civil War was all a story about who's going to be included and who's going to be excluded. And the radical Republicans wanted to exclude the oppressors to give black freedom a chance. And as it turned out, it worked the other way around. Those the old white ruling Class was included and black inclusion was severely limited. So the question I think that you're raising is, does constitutional government require exclusions? Right. And on that I hope. I guess I'm hopeful that it doesn't. I'm hopeful that it doesn't. But one of the questions that's raised by this book is has the Constitution's ability to provide security for its participants and to provide. To manage conflict? Has the Constitution, our Constitution's capacity, this particular Constitution's capacity required exclusions to provide security to all participants and to manage conflict effectively. So the implication for that, for me, is if the answer is yes, that it has required exclusions, then the implication for that is not to exclude people, but to find a different set of arrangements.

[Ursula Hackett]

And actually, one of those arrangements that you talk about quite a bit in the book and which appears at various points historically during your narrative, it's incredibly rich central sections where you're talking about the history of American political development and you talk about auxiliaries. I wonder if we could just define that for our listeners as well. So you've got this idea of these sort of extra constitutional contrivances that are sort of somehow playing a role here in managing these disputes. Tell us a bit more about those and give us some examples as well from history.

[Professor Stephen Skronik]

So the idea, as you began, you know, the idea of the book is that the advance of each advance of democracy has reconfigured the Constitution. And one thing that it's done is to relax the formal constraints of the Constitution, relaxing those constraints. So the question is then, how do you manage conflict if you're relaxing, if you keep relaxing constraints? And the answer has been historically that we develop these auxiliary institutions to manage the new conflicts that arise from including previously excluded groups. So one of those auxiliaries, of course, was party. Of course, the framers of the Constitution were very suspicious of parties. They saw them as a threat to their system. It turns out that parties helped manage conflict for a long time. Certainly the dominant managerial device in the 19th century was party. In the 20th century developed a different managerial auxiliary managerial device, and that is administration. The rise of the administrative state as a way of managing the new social conflicts that were arising from the inclusion of wider range of groups and their conflicts. These two great adaptations, the Party State of the 19th Century and the Administrative State of the 20th Century, both relied on extra constitutional devices to manage to compensate for the relaxation of the formal structure and to manage conflict in a new way.

[Ursula Hackett]

So that's fantastic. So I think about these periods of time that you describe in the book, you're talking about the founding, of course, Talking about the 19th century party state, the administrative state of the early 20th century, and so on, right up to the rights revolution and the consequences of that, of that revolution. And so you've talked a bit about auxiliaries and how they have, at these various points, served to channel and to limit some of the conflict over these boundaries. But where, I mean, tell us a bit about how the adaptability paradox has played out in these different periods of time. And where has it been at its sharpest, would you say, with respect to the battles and the political battles that are taking place in these different eras?

[Professor Stephen Skronik]

Well, in the 19th century, and the origins of the party state were an attempt to manage the inclusion of white men, all white men. The expansion of the suffrage to all white men. That expansion of the suffrage is coincident with increased conflict over slavery. So this party system that's developed principally by Martin Van Buren, to a certain extent by Henry Clay, this party system that's developed organizes these parties across the sectional divide, across the divide over the slavery issue, to suppress that issue while including white men. So you get this vast expansion of democracy that's premised on excluding the issue of slavery in the 20th century. You include the great. The driving force behind the great adaptation of the 20th century, I think, is the labor movement, including the interests of organized labor. There's also a women's movement, but the labor movement, including the interests of organized labor, is coincident with the exclusion of African Americans from the services that this new administrative state is going to provide. So it's inclusion and exclusion at the same simultaneously to manage now the government is becoming more democratic. In some ways, this book is a celebration of these adaptations in the sense that they are including more people, they're finding ways to make the government operate. But it's a realistic appraisal that those inclusions were all premised on exclusions.

[Ursula Hackett]

And that's exactly the source, I suppose, of your really quite resonant claim here that you say the adaptability paradox has escaped close attention precisely because it lies submerged in American democracy's greatest achievements.

[Professor Stephen Skronik]

Right. We know a lot about democratization in America. We know about its initial limitations, we know about its periodic expansions. We know about the ingrained forces that resist it, that are still resisting it. But we don't really think about how American government was changed by democratization and the implications of those changes. And so, yes, as you say, we talk about democratization as a good, as a positive, and it is a positive but it wasn't benign. It had profound institutional implications. And at some point in each case, democratization has to hold the polity together, right? And the question here is, at what point does this constitution accommodate democracy and still hold the polity together?

[Experian Ad Voice]

New Year, new me. Cute. But how about New Year, new money? With Experian, you can actually take control of your finances. Check your FICO score, find ways to save and get matched with credit card offers giving you time to power through those New Year's goals you know you're going to crush. Start the year off right. Download the Experian app based on FICO scoring model offers an approval not guaranteed. Eligibility requirements and terms apply subject to credit check, which may impact your credit scores. Offers not available in all states. See experian.com for details.

[Ursula Hackett]

Experian Absolutely. And at what point does democracy, in your phrase, outstrip its accommodations? And it's interesting, I was thinking, thinking as I was reading your book about this idea of a sort of cumulative impact of serial adaptations to a particular structure. I was thinking there about Steve Tellers work on the Clodjocracy. And I come from a field of public policy making and of course this idea that policy becoming more complex, more incoherent, clumsy, lacking in clear organizing principles. And obviously Steve Teller sees this as a threat to democracy in and of itself, a wasteful low levels of visibility. And I'm just wondering whether, you know, do you see that connection directly with the policy world or do you see this as in some ways dissimilar to those claims that have been made there about cludges and clumsy fixes?

[Professor Stephen Skronik]

Yeah, well, I'm a big fan of Steve's work, but and in my presidency book, in my book on the politics presidents make, I talk about the thickening of the institutional universe of political action and how that makes reconstructions more difficult because institutions are thicker and it's harder to cut through. I think the abundance movement today is addressing itself to that. But in this book, this book is a little different. In some ways it's the opposite. In that I'm arguing that so much of that the government was actually thicker in the beginning than it is now. That is what we've done is we've upended all of these other institutional systems, all these other systems of authority that provided auxiliary ways of governing, the master slave relationship, the employer employee relationship, the husband wife relationship, that these relationships have all been upended. And that has thrown everything into the constitutional system, into that system of authority and in some ways overloaded it. I think For a long time we were able to adapt by getting new groups and old groups to buy into new ways for governing a commercial republic. The original aspiration of the Constitution was a commercial republic, right? The Constitution addresses itself. You just read the Constitution addresses itself to finance, commerce and security, the basic elements of a commercial republic. But after the rights revolution of the 60s and 70s, a whole new set of issues arise that the Constitution was not only not designed to address, that the Constitution was designed to. This may be too strong to suppress, or at least was designed with the sense that these other issues would be taken care of by other systems of authority. So this commercial republic runs into social justice issues, which it seems to be wholly incapable of addressing.

[Ursula Hackett]

It's fascinating, this idea of the thickening these institutions, the complexity of these institutions as being kind of ballast or sort of support structures. I mean, the ballast metaphor. I keep thinking of naval metaphors in discussing your work. I was thinking about being adrift and the ballast and jettisoning the ballast and what the consequences might be.

[Professor Stephen Skronik]

So much of American government, what made sense of the Constitution's complex structure, what made it plausible, was that all this other governing was being done elsewhere by other systems of authority. And. Yeah, and that was kind of the ballot. It made sense of the Constitution. It lent a workability to its complex design. And as you hive off, you democratize and you upend those other systems of authority, everything is thrown onto the Constitution. And Suddenly those complex 18th century structures. Make. Instead of resolving conflict, they exacerbate conflict.

[Ursula Hackett]

Tell us a bit more about why it exacerbates conflict. So there's a lot of anxieties that are provoked by the. I'm not the thinning out with these constraints. I think perhaps we shouldn't go that far. But just of the cutting through and including so many within this sphere of action.

[Professor Stephen Skronik]

Right. So we think about federalism. Think about federalism. Federalism was not just a formal constitutional arrangement, a division of power between states and national government. Federalism had a dense social basis that local control, common law, state law would govern these other relationships, the labor relationship, the slave relationship, race relations, work relations, family relations, gender relations, all of these things were being governed locally. And the Constitution was addressing itself to common issues of commerce and security. And then suddenly when those other relations get upended, the Constitution has to deal with all of those other issues. And that draws out. So then what does federalism mean when. What does federalism mean when it's not excluding issues from the national government? Now all the issues are in and now we Have a battle. What does federalism mean? And so people on both sides of that issue are claiming to speak for the genuine, original purposes of the Constitution or the constitutional idea or consistency with the Constitution or some essential feature of the. But nobody. But it has no social foundation anymore. It has no social content. It's a purely political contest, purely political contest. And people just go at it. There's no, as I. As you say, there's no ballast to kind of limit the kinds of issues that surround federalism. Federalism now is a free for all.

[Ursula Hackett]

It's really interesting parallels with some of the things I've been thinking about with respect to drift, policy drift and constitutional drift and situations in which you have a very rigid rule. And that rigidity, combined with external environmental changes of various sorts, whether social, cultural, political, technological, economic, has the capacity to transform the existing arrangements even without formal revision. And I suppose this is sort of. I mean, do you see that. Do you see these as completely opposing understandings of policy change or political change? That on the one hand, we've got a rigidity provoking change through its interaction with this environment as opposed to on this. In this situation? What we've got here is something that is hollowed out almost. Is that the fair way of describing it?

[Professor Stephen Skronik]

I think in this book I'm making the case of hollowing out that it's not that it's a free for all, that there is no. There is no external or agreed upon limit to what the government. As we say in political science, all issues are national issues now. There are no limits. So in that situation, nobody feels secure. One of the great paradoxes we talk about, the adaptability paradox, is we expand rights, right? And this is a point that Karen and I make in the policy state, when you expand rights, then all rights become less secure because all rights are being balanced against all other rights. So when everybody has rights, rights become very political, very politicized, and it becomes a kind of a free. It just depends on the balance of political forces and mobilization and counter mobilization. So the one thing you could say that the Constitution was designed to provide participants a sense of security so that they would buy into participation in the national government, and they buy into what the national government decided to do, right? But with full inclusion, that sense of security, ironically, that sense of security dissipates and the Constitution's original premise, right, is lost. That is, nobody can abide who is next in charge, right? Nobody can discount the importance of who is next in charge. So you get mobilization and counter mobilization, mobilization and counter mobilization. Each wave out to reconfigure institutions for themselves. And as I say, no institutional settlements, no sense of constitutional security and protection.

[Ursula Hackett]

Yeah. When it's right all the way down.

[Professor Stephen Skronik]

For all of the groups, protections for these people are deprivations for others.

[Ursula Hackett]

Yeah, yeah. And actually the sort of sense of hollow victory in securing those rights if you lose that sort of basic common sense or agreement amongst the players within these arenas that are fighting it out. I mean, I was interested in this question about, you know, because you state it very starkly in the book. You say, well, what happens when we run out of exclusions and when it's no longer the case, you know, that any conflicts are sublimated. And I was wondering about that in relation to some of the sources of conflict that we see today and the contentions over inclusion and exclusion, obviously the status of trans people. I know that you do talk briefly in the book about that. Immigrants, new ways in which African Americans and other people of color are denied full citizenship, and perhaps not just the exclusion of specific groups, but also maybe different understandings about what constitutes full inclusion that might actually be playing into this discussion here, that actually, I wonder whether some of the key sort of moving parts within your analysis relate not just to inclusion and exclusion per se, but also perceived inclusion and exclusion and what people understand. Maybe our fuller understanding of what constitutes full citizenship could play into this and construct new sources of conflict that maybe. That maybe might provide some. Not a corrective, but just, you know, I suppose a response to some of the concerns that you're raising here. What do you think about that? Do we ever. I mean, the sense in the book is that we. That we've run out of road. Is that the case with respect to each of these categories?

[Professor Stephen Skronik]

A couple of things on that. So I think it's true that full inclusion is kind of a loaded term. Is it ever fully inclusive? We're always finding new ways to include new kinds of interests. But I think in the book, I want to say that full inclusion refers to how much can be included and still have some consensus, still build some consensus as to what is essential and what is constitutional. And I think that we begin to lose that with the rights revolution in the 1960s and 70s. What is acceptable? With the Goldwater campaign immediately coincident with the rights revolution, what is acceptable, what is constitutional, what boundaries are sacrosanct and what boundaries can be breached. And so that's one thing I would also say about the rights revolution and the approach to full inclusion. The rights revolution not only incorporated African Americans Also women to other minorities, reached out to disabled people, reached out to young people, immigration reform, this rights revolution was a massive inclusion of previously partially included or previously excluded groups. And I think that is a pivotal moment because the old solution, which was exclusion is no longer available. So let me take the Trump question or the Trump question, right? Can order instability be restored by excluding people now? Excluding. I think excluding people after democratization, after they've been included is a very different proposition than these incremental inclusions that we saw over the course of American history. I don't think that people take kindly to having their rights limited. So the trans issues that you raise, the restriction of abortion rights, the restriction of voting rights, these things do not do. These things are efforts at exclusion, but they do not do what previous exclusions did, and that is they do not restore consensus, they do not support new rules, they do not promote forbearance. They are rejected as illegitimate expressions of what constitutional government is. So I think that exclusion after democratization is a very dicey proposition. I think that's basically where we are right now. You know, there's all sorts. We talk about backsliding. Backsliding is, you know, is exclusion after inclusion. And I think that, at least in the American context, that does not. That is not a solution to the problem of governing that just exacerbates, magnifies the conflict.

[Ursula Hackett]

You state in the book that it's customary to provide a to do list of proposals. I thought that was quite fun at the end about how to set things right after you've diagnosed the problem. But of course, as you also point out, the convention of having a to do list of proposals kind of speaks to our faith in adaptability, which is precisely the thing that you're trying to sort of question. So, I mean, you say there's no quick fixes. I'm inclined, of course, to agree with you about that. But I do wonder how far you think Americans are collectively and elites in particular, willing to do the necessary thinking about what these circumstances really demand in the current moment.

[Professor Stephen Skronik]

Now, I think that the adaptability paradox, the whole book can be read as an elite failure. That is what's striking to me is throughout Americanism through the New Deal, elites were able to reconfigure the system to find a way to accommodate new groups and to promote buy in from the principal participants. And that elites have failed at that since the rights revolution, since the 1970s. And it is not, it is not because we don't have ideas. We have lots of ideas. I think in the book. I have lists of ideas that people have proposed, and some of these are good ideas. I mean, you know, I think we should end partisan gerrymandering. I think we should invest in Congress. I think we should limit presidentialism and juristocracy. I think we should invest in public administrative. We have all sorts of ideas. These aren't just my ideas. And then there are whole lists of other ideas. So we're awash in ideas. In some sense, the configuration of power generated through think tanks as part of the configuration of power we have generating ideas. The problem is not ideas. The problem is that we don't have a vehicle that recaptures a sense of whatever. People in the United States always say, oh, there's more that unites us than divides us. Now, that may be true. That may be true. But there is no vehicle that articulates what it is that unites us. And that's what elites were able to do before they were able to create these new vehicles, party and administration, that captured what we agreed on. Right. And excluded the rest. Right and elites. In our time, we have not been able to create such a vehicle. So I think that before we get to a to do list, what we should do, we have to create a vehicle for recapturing whatever it is that unites us.

[Ursula Hackett]

Wonderful. Thank you so much. Stephen, I have one final question for you, if I may, and that is what's next for you in terms of your projects? Where are you going next with this project or perhaps with others that are related?

[Professor Stephen Skronik]

Well, I'm thinking about, and this is another spin off from these ideas that I've been grappling with. I'm thinking about a study of American nationalism and thinking about different strands of nationalist thinking. And so one would be so the liberal universalism that America is sort of beacon of the liberal idea in the world. And this liberal idea is developing and elaborating itself. Another is that America is a place pluralism, that America is a place where different ways of life persist and coexist, and that the purpose of America is not to impose this liberal idea, but to allow different ways of life to flourish. So I'm interested in these different ideas about American nationalism and their origins.

[Ursula Hackett]

Fantastic. Thank you so much, Stephen. I've really enjoyed speaking to you, everybody. The book is the Adaptability Paradox, Political Inclusion and Constitutional. Stephen, thank you so much for coming on the show.

[Professor Stephen Skronik]

Thanks so much for having me. It was fun.