I largely agree with your argument in this piece, but it omits certain important considerations on the partisan divide in the US and how this divide might play itself out in the quest for a transition to something else. The sources of division that I am hinting at include income/ “class,” attitudes toward globalization, technological integration, and the urban/rural dichotomy relative to consumption, cultural openness, etc., but, without any doubt, the most critical cleavage is race. In this manner, any account on how we got to where we currently are relative to the Constitutional organization of the (second republic) United States may certainly take account of the progressive breakdown of partisan institutions between the executive and legislative branches, but it must take account of how that breakdown reflects the evolution of American race relations and, secondarily, class divisions, the urban/rural divide, globalization, and technological change.
In my view, this criticism is relevant to the broader questions of where we are going in a transition from our current Constitutional scheme and what we will look like as a republic in the future if the idea of the United States, as an entity is not to assume some prefigured form, absent the sort of struggle that took place in the transition from the Articles and in the movement from Antebellum to Postbellum/post-Reconstruction America. Emphatically, with regard to race, too many issues remained unresolved in the previous two transitions to be played out (unsatisfactorily) ever since — the “civil Rights” era remains an unfinished revolution if only by virtue of its incomplete transformation of the Constitution to permanently signal complete human equality as something more profound than a de jure promise. In these terms, I think that we are invariably left with a Constitutional transformation that will be preeminently about the lingering, incomplete task of defining the equality of citizens regardless of race in a context where this remains too much for tens of millions of Americans to swallow.