Reconsidering Ike: A Thought Experiment

I came of political age (I will not say "maturity) during the Eisenhower administration.  Instructed by Herblock, I thought of him as an amiable doofus with a pretty good golf handicap.  Time and the great scholarship of Fred Greenstein have taught me different.  The doofus part was largely an act, a cover.  Meanwhile, I wonder how anybody could have thought the the man who commanded the winning armies in one of the most successful wars in human history should be dismissed so liability.  I've come round to the point of saying (with a glint of wry irony) the Ike was really the best president of my adulthood.  He was, after all, a champion of stability and good order at home.  And the man who sent the troops into Little Rock.  And the one who warned us against the military-industrial complex.

And yet, and yet.  He tolerated McCarthy for far too long.  He tolerated John Foster Dulles until the day (Dulles) died.  He gave us George Humphries, "Engine Charlie" Wilson and Ezra Taft Benson. Is that really the best we can do?

Well, he certainly wasn't perfect.  But on the "tolerate" thing.  I think it is fair to say that one essential quality in a great general is that he knows how to pick his  fights: he wants to battle on his chosen turf, and on his own terms.  Isn't it fair to say that with McCarthy, at least--yes, he did not move early, and he seemed at times almost not to notice the mischief the great ruffian was causing. But what if he had injected himself earlier?  Would he have, in fact, succeeded--or could it be that he would have damaged himself, while leaving McCarthy even stronger than he had been  before.  With Dulles, I suppose the case is harder.  Ike seemed to acquiesce in a good deal of the foreign interventionism--Iran, Guatemala--that looks so misguided today.  At the same time, one always had the sense that Dulles' most unsettling excesses were Dulles freelancing, with little or no support from the less excitable chief executive down he street.  Civil rights--complicated again, I think.  When he sent in the troops, I think the general view was the he was far more offended by the affront to federal authority than he was by the plight of black students.  Yet I don't think it is fair to call Ike racist in any modern sense.  His flaw was more that he simply didn't get it: he had known (seemingly) happy Pullman porters, officer's club waiters and such like, and he didn't understand why their fellows weren't willing to settle for their place.  A failure of imagination, surely--and a failure of imagination can be a failure. But it is not the same as active racial hostility.

And yet, and yet.  I'm very far from totally convinced of my own case.  I do think there is a lot to respect in his domestic record (and admire in his war record).  I wish he had done more, or done it better.  I suppose in the end I fall back on the first principle of modern politics: the job of every Republican president is to make the last guy look good.  By that standard, I think he looks pretty good indeed.

From the Annals of Administrative Train-wreckery: Just Sayin'

James Q. Wilson says:

Executives who want to influence policy but who define “policy” largely in terms of what outside constituencies want (or will not denounce) are in an awkward position—more awkward than they sometimes realize. To change their agency, these officials need to understand its workings, know its people, and appreciate its constraints. But the external, constituency-serving orientation of such executives, combined with their short tenure in office, reduce the time and energy they can devote to this learning process. As a result, the policy changes they make are likely to be ill-considered and inadequately managed.  Even the Social Security Administration, an agency with a tradition of strong and well-informed leaders, seriously underestimated the difficulty of implementing the Supplemental Security Income (SSI) program in the early 1970s. Top executives were busy assuring Congress and the White House that the SSA could do the job of identifying three million aged, blind, or disabled persons, verifying their eligibility for SSI benefits, and hiring fifteen thousand new employees to service these beneficiaries; meanwhile, the working-level managers were approaching a state of panic, for they knew that the agency was in deep trouble.  It could not possibly train the people and install the computer systems fast enough to meet the deadlines.  Martha Derthick concluded her study of this episode with language that could describe executive-agency relations in many bureaus: It is impossible not to be struck by the differences between the view from the top, reflected in the serene pride that valuable social ends are about to be served, and the mounting panic and frustration in the field offices as unreadiness for the concrete task becomes all too clear.

Wilson, James (1991-01-29). Bureaucracy: What Government Agencies Do And Why They Do It (Basic Books Classics) (p. 206).  The Derthick reference goes to Martha Derthick, Agency Under Stress: The Social Security Administration and American Government (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, forthcoming), chap. 5.

Wilson on Bureaucracy: A Belated Review

The big book I spoke of the other day--it's James Q. Wilson's Bureaucracy which has been languishing unattended on myself for years, I now cannot imagine why.  It's a delight--not a grand theory but an almost illimitable number of individual anecdotes with instructive commentary.  I have only one disappointment which I will save for a moment.  First, let me see if I can lay out a few general assertions:

One, "bureaucracy" is not just about "government"  Private entities have bureaucracies just like the government. The difference is in the structure of incentives: Private entities--say, MacDonald's--can orchestrate pay and perks so as to get the most out of its people.  Government bureaucracies operate under the hawk eye of the legislature, often hampered by the  constraint of amorphous and conflicting demands, such as to make you think they are almost defined to fail.

But two, there are  bureaucracies and bureaucracies.   Some have well-defined and achievable missions.  Given good enough leadership, you can almost forget they are there.  Think the Social Security Administration.   Have you ever heard of them  mismailing a check?

And the institution may be the shadow of the man.  Gifford Pinchot at the Forest Service, J. Edgar Hoover at the FBI: love them or hate them, each  defined and instilled an institutional ethos so strong that it has long outlasted its creator.

There's a lot more good stuff here and I may come back and write about some particular topics later. But for the moment, let me go back and drill down on that  matter of "amorphous and conflicting demands."  Wilson argues that if the goals are uncertain, we may end up judging (in default of a good alternative) on procedures.  Thus he says:

Police administrators rarely lose their jobs because the crime rate has gone up or win promotions because it has gone down. They can easily lose their jobs if somebody persuasively argues that the police department has abused a citizen, beaten a prisoner, or failed to answer a call for service.  School administrators rarely lose their jobs when their pupils’ reading scores go down or win promotions when scores go up. But they can lose their jobs or suffer other career-impeding consequences if students are punished, controversial textbooks assigned, or parents treated impolitely. 

So James Q. Wilson Bureaucracy: What Government Agencies Do And Why They Do It (Basic Books Classics) (pp. 132-133).  (Kindle ed.).

This is tempting but wait--is this really so?  And here I come to my one real difficulty with this book: it was published back in 1991.  The more fool I for not reading it at the time.  But a lot has changed since 1991, and speculate he might write it differently today.  How much differently?   I'm not at all sure, but my tentative guess is that cops are a lot more likely to get judged today on the crime write, just as teachers are more likely to get judged on student performance.  "More likely," I'd venture, at least in part because of what Wilson wrote.

Which brings me to my real beef: Wilson had the bad grace to die before he could do a second edition (in 2012, at 79).  How inconsiderate of him to leave us with the the mere abundance of his original insights, unequipped by whatever second thoughts or revisions might have come to him in the busy decades after his first publication.

But If That's The Purpose, then Maybe Government Really Works

It's always seemed to me that the first requisite of a design for small government is that you want a small government that works:  you want to make sure you can hire the best people to put the money in the most cost-effective places.  Sometimes we get that: agencies, cadres, programs that do the job and come in on time and under budget.

Of course at least in our time, that has been just the opposite of the standard strategy.  In the Age of Reagan Norquist, the trick has been to make government so ugly and disgusting that people will beg to get rid of it.  You can recognize the strategy in a hundred guises.  Make civil service employment so shameful that anybody who accepts it will have to bear the mark of the beast.    Encourage private school so as to reduce political support for a public school system. Limit access to retirement benefits so as to reduce support for the scheme as a whole.

Here's a particular variant that you'll probably recognize in substance, but I never before saw it so clearly expressed:

Sir Alan Budd, chief economic adviser to British prime minister Margaret Thatcher, wrote: “The Thatcher government never believed for a moment that [monetarism] was the correct way to bring down inflation. They did, however, see that this would be a very good way to raise unemployment. And raising unemployment was an extremely desirable way of reducing the strength of the working classes. . .  . What was engineered— in Marxist terms— was a crisis of capitalism which re-created the reserve army of labour, and has allowed the capitalists to make high profits ever since.”

Lind, Michael (2012-04-17). Land of Promise: An Economic History of the United States (Kindle Locations 6289-6294). Harper. Kindle Edition. Lind's footnote reads: Quoted in Nick Cohen, “Gambling with Our Future,” New Statesman, January 13, 2003; Robert Wade, “The Economy Has Not Solved Its Problems,” Challenge (March/ April 2011): 34.

Anderson on the Market

Arresting defense of market liberalism, here, with sophisticated commenary.

Constitution? Who Needs It?

I can't pretend I've read all the stuff about the export of the US Constitution and Justice Ginsberg's "controversial" comment on same, but are people picking up on two important qualifications:

• Of course it is archaic; it's over 200 years old.  Nobody would write it the same way today.  This is not an argument for abandoning it: continuity has its claims, and the prescribed process of amendment is probably the best available response  to change in an imperfect world (but a constitutional convention dominated by Newt Gingrich and Donald Trump--that would be a sight to see, eh?).

• But more important: don't you suspect that over the whole  life of state-making, most constitutions have been a fraud?  No, not including ours: ours is perhaps an exception-that-proves-the-rule in the respect that there may be at least a passing resemblance between the document to which it refers.   But if you're an upstart hustler with a bit of scrambled egg on your hat, what's the first thing you do when you capture government house?  Why, you promulgate a constitution, and pack it with every scrap of pious nonsense you can muster for the further abuse of a harried populace.  By corollary, if you really want to know how things work in a country, about the last thing you look at is "the constitution" (except, possibly, as a proxy for the chasm of falsehood that might separate ruler and world).   And keep reminding yourself: the Brits never did write theirs down.

More broadly: it's amazing how easy it is to miss, but a "constitution," is merely the social fact of how the government is constituted.  Every society has to have one, it's definitional; if you aren't constituted, you aren't a society.  The piece of paper (parchment, vellum, foolscap, whatever) is only evidence of the social fact, and damn poor evidence most of the time.  Now, get back to something serious.  

Government as Value-Reducer

The end of government?--I asked.   A cherished commentator responds: "Two words: Italy, Japan."

Ah, I suppose the point is that these are nations that run pretty well even though government is irrelevant--or worse a drag on-- ordinary life?  He's got a point--I might add China, where the state (=party) run economic establishment almost certainly sucks wealth out of the nation.  Purists will argue that all governments such wealth out of the nation; I'm, not willing to go nearly that far but the assertion does suggest an interesting research agenda: measuring how much government adds (positive or negative) by way of value.

Japan and Italy certainly are not DNA twins, but they do have some similarities.  In each case you've got a governing class that lies like an incubus on a society, and a society that does well in its own way anyway.  But there are differences.  In Japan the bureaucracy does play an inescapable role in organizing economic activity.  And whatever its shortcomings (many), I'd be willing to speculate that it still contributes something worthwhile to the national life.   Italy is in some ways more remarkable.  Italians from the Risorgimento to the Lateran Accord were taught (so it is said) that it wasn't a sin to evade their taxes.  Presumably those days ended, but apparently some Italians haven't yet got the memo.    The amazing thing has always been how well Italy works while carrying the government as a pesky but expensive irrelevance.  "And yet it moves," said Gallileo, under his breath: Eppur si muove.  I once read a book on Italian government bearing that title.

China is rather more of a special case because the "state" if you can call it that appears to function more and more as as business conglomerate of, by and for the princelings.  Just how this sort of thing could add wealth to the larger society is far from clear   Yet the larger society does seem to make amazing strides despite the drag.

So yes: societies may function, sometimes extraordinarily well, even in the teeth of governments that seem bent on doing everything they can to make good living impossible.

Anecdote: I had a student a few years back whose father was Italian.  "Does he ever go back?" I asked.  "Nah," I was told, "he hates the place.  He was there during World War II.   He was drafted into three different armies."

"Needless to say," he added, "he ran away from all three.

More on un-Failed States

Fresh from yesterday's rant on things that are not failed states, I ran across this and thought: Damn!  I forgot Lord of the Flies!   The while piece is fascinating, and deserves a careful read.  H/T MR.

The End of Governance as We Know it

What with the great crumbling sound emerging from Tripoli, we hear more talk about how we are marking the end of despotism in our world. It's easy to dismiss this kind of jabber as  euphoria; I'm willing to venture that the euphorics just might be onto something although they may not be saying what they saying.

Consider: what with Mabarak and Ben Ali gone, and Gaddafi in undisclosed location and the Great Ophthalmologist quaking in his contacts, we certainly are seeing something like a more-than-random decline in repressive authoritarianism.  But then take a look at the non-Arab granted that plenty of other governments are noto inimical to human well-being as the realms of the fallen dictators, still the evidence on governance even in benign countries stands, at least at the  moment, depressing.  Face it: Lula is gone; Singh has grown old; Merkel is a disappointment, Cameron is a lightweight and Ob--well, you can see where this is going.   Whoever we have in the spotlight, we don't have a Roosevelt of a Churchill or a deGaulle.  Hell, we don't even have an Eisennhower or an Adenauer. Could it be, in short, that we are entering into an age of entropic limbo where the elites can't repress like they did in the old days but they can't do much of anything else either?It's certainly the lament of so many in the first world who want Washington or Brussels (or maybe Tokyo, etc.) to just do something instead of just wandering around tripping over each other's coattails. But   what if tripping over each other's coattails is the New Normal, as both autocrats and democrats find themselves both descending into the same twilight blur?

Even if I am onto something here, I concede I've still got only the dimmest idea whence and whither.  I don't want to scream "it's the internet!" but it does seem that at least for the time being, new technology has taken trump cards out of the hands of traditional leadership, for good or ill.  My pessimistic self says--bah, any day now the powers will learn out to turn technology into their own weapon and lock us all down again.  My even more pessimistic self says--maybe they won't.  Maybe will wind up all subsisting in a kind of freedom, but perhaps the freedom last seen in the reign of Pepin the Short.

I'm probably back on another of my favorite themes here: good government is a luxury, in some sense a superior good.  Grant that mob rule is a perfect horror, still a society that has lost the capacity to make informed and rational collective decisions is a society that has lost something virtually beyond price. So if this is the dawning of a dark age--if indeed  the forces of barbarism really do surround us all--then I sure hope somebody is out there pulling that sword from that stone.

Turchin on Asabiyyah, and Precontractual Presuppositions

Another thing I could have added to last night's patchy survey of literature on the disintegration of government: Peter Turchin's War and Peace and War, subtitled, "The Rise and Fall of Empires," more accurately understood as his quirky-but-elegant exploration of Asabiyyah, "social solidarity," as Wiki puts it "with an emphasis on unity, group consciousness, and social cohesion." The term is, perhaps obviously, Arabic.  I ran across it for the first time just a couple of years ago when I discovered Ibn Khaldun's Muqaddimah, an account of history through the eyes of a 14th-Century Muslim scholar trying to understand the human wave that had swept over so much of the known world in the aftermath of Mohammed. Turchin also loves stories of mass action, but also its opposite, social decay. It's big-picture history in from a perspective scarcely anybody dares touch any more.

I must say I touch it only gingerly. Growing up in the aftermath of Naziism and in the shadow of the Cold War, I developed an instinctive horror of mass action, sufficiently sensitive as to distrust social action of any sort. Yet I concede that any functioning society, however decentralized, however "libertarian" must operate on some set of shared presuppositions--even if they be no more than the presuppositions of decentralization. It was the irony that Durkheim was asserting (with, I suspect, conscious mischief) that "in a contract, not everything is contractual."  "Contract" exists, as modern sociologist would say, only "embedded" in a pattern of presuppositions, without which the system would never get into gear.


How could we so completely miss such a point?  I suppose there are a lot of suspects, but I'd point a finger at the "public choice" crowd--the "theorists" (if they deserve the name) who have refashioned Jevonian economics into an acccount, both descriptive and normative, of public life (and, not incidentally, conquered and colonized the political science faculties).  Once again, I'm ambivalent: I've read Buchanan&Tullock, Mancur Olson and the lot; there were times when I read little else.  There is still so much here that is compelling; yet what a cramped and distorted a vision it is, not least because it fails to grasp that it is a vision, and that it works, if at all, only in an aggregate that shares its vision with all (or most) of its contradictions and its blind fair.

I haven't the least notion of where sets of shared presuppositions come from, how they come into being--who could have anticipated Islam?  I'm reasonably certain that you can't simply impose them top-down--and that the utter failure of Leninism in our (parents') time has done much to discredit the idea that there are any sets of shared presuppositions at all.  Pity.  It leaves us with a theory of society which, however plausible, seems so often to walk the earth like a zombie with all the sap squeezed out.

Afterthought:  For a curiously hostile view of asabiyyah from a Muslim source (in Raleigh, NC) go here. See also:

We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he to-day that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne'er so vile,
This day shall gentle his condition:
And gentlemen in England now a-bed
Shall think themselves accursed they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
That fought with us upon Saint Crispin's day.

--William Shakespeare, Henry V, Act IV, sc. 3

Janine Wedel Makes My Head Rattle and Hiss

I think I'm in a state of near head-explosion from reading Janine Wedel's Shadow Elite, such is the mix of shrewd insight, salty anecdote and intolerable internal contradiction that she seems to have thrown together.

Start with the title which seems (like so many titles these days) a mismatch.  Okay granted, it is about "elites" and they are in "shadows," but this is not a general sketch of such elites (for that, you might better turn to David Rothkopf's Superclass.  It is rather better described as a about the dissolution of government and the kidnapping of government powers and responsibilities by private persons for the private purposes.

I think she is definitely onto something here and some parts of her book serve admirably to understand the nature and progress of this dissolution.  The trouble is, she gets tangled up in half a dozen stories which, even if they overlap, do not match each other and in some ways do not serve her purpose at all.

Perhaps the best part of the book is her study of the rise of contracting-out, and the attendant "revolving door"--but really not so much a revolving door as a system of apprenticeship whereby the aspirant learns his trade on the government dime and then takes his accumulated skill and knowledge off to greener pastures. If you have read this far into this note, you are probably the kind of person who thinks you know a good bit about this process (and perhaps you have participated).  But I'd say Wedel does a commendable job of showing just how pervasive the process has become--not just in the defense department, but around virtually every service the government purports to provide.   And Wedel does an excellent job of some of the important ways in which (whatever its virtues) this process of conracting-out can do harn.  A diffusion of responsibility for one--nobody knows quite who is in charge of what.  And perhaps most important, the privatization of information--perhaps the one resource that a responsible government in a market economy can help to provide.

So far so good, but none of the rest of her main stories fit nearly so well into her framework.  Perhaps her favorite, for example,  is the story of what one might-call think-tank government, and in particular, the spectacular chronicle of the neocons, running back to their birth in the manger outside the office of Senator Henry Jackson.  She tells the story well although not obviously better than it has been told before.  But I think it may prove just the opposite of what she wants to prove.  Here we have a crowd who, after all, very far from wanting to privatize government power are seeking to take it over for a highly specific public agenda.  They may use think tanks and such for r&r, but their highly explicit goal is to take over the White House, thankyouverymuch, and rule the world.

I think the problem here may be that Wedel hasn't made up her own mind what a proper government should look like. The giveaway is an early chapter where she offers up as personal narrative that I suppose is intended to show us how she came to understand the world as she does.  The story is an account of her time as a young person in Poland Before the Fall, in the company of two women, mother and daughter.  who had to make lives from themselves under constraints that were at best highly inhospitable.  It's a wonderful yarn about people who had long since come to understand that the Government was Not Their Friend; rather it was an obstacle to be got round, and get round it they do, with energy and imagination and wit and guile.

On its own terms it's a great read but it is not all clear what Wedel wants us to learn from it--or, indeed, what she learns from it herself.  With  background like this, what would we expect people like her hostesses to do when freedom broke out--start acting like Danes?  Not likely; civic virtue is one of those achievements like an English garden,where you have to start hundreds of years ago.  To run an effective modern state on the basis of citizens like this will take prodigies of statesmanship and massive doses of good luck.

But the point is--who can blame them?  I'm remembering Bertholt Brecht again--if the government has lost the confidence of the people, why doesn't the government just elect a new people and start over?

It is this background that helps to illuminate the the third and I think most ambiguous of her major stories--her account of the shock-therapy privatization of Russia, administered by a gang of true-believer technocrats under the auspices of Harvard University.  Once again, her account is dynamic and readable; once again it is not exactly news.   And on any account, the privatizers have a lot to answer for--not least because of a couple of the principals entangled themselves in a massively bone-headed scheme of self-dealing.  Surely anybody looking back form the resource/gangsterism of the Putinocracy will have to ask?  Wasn't there a better way?

In the imagination, sure there was a better way--in the imagination there  is always a better way.  But let's remember this is the old Soviet Union we are talking about here--as massive and repressive as (almost) any state in recent memory, in all of history.  Almost any self-regarding private person is going to know that he damn well wants to work for its collapse.  The chief, perhaps the only, irony, is in the end, how easy it was--how the Soviet Union, when it was good and ready, lurched and groaned and fell down in a heap.  "Privatization" in this perspective is not a dirty word.

None of this is to say that Wedel is exactly wrong about anything she says, big or small.  Her individual stories are well told; her general point is inarguable.  What it does mean is that we've got a whole lot more work to do in thinking through the question of just what is the proper role of government in the post-apocalyptic era,  and how (not at all less important) we can persuade ourselves and each other that we have--or can--build a structure worth serving.  Will we bring it off?  Probably not. The complications are great enough that the best of intentions won't be sufficient to save us.  Meanwhile Wedel offers a bit of a flashlight into the dark, but if we are going to go further, we will need a lot more illumination.

Ezra Klein Explains Our Government

Ezra Klein is getting a lot of buzz for having said:

Literally. If you look at how the federal government spends our money, it’s an insurance conglomerate protected by a large, standing army.

Link.  Ir's a clever line and it has the added merit of being true.  David A. Moss' When All Else Fails, subtitled "Government as the Ultimate Risk Manager," is a superb exegesis on exactly that point.  It is tempting --but pretty clearly inaccuraate--to try to apply this label to all governments.  More tempting still is to try to figure what sort of label applies to which.  Dutch Republic?  Joint stock company.  Venice?  Gang of pirates.  And so forth.

Some Bowles-Simpson Stuff I Liked

Trying to ignore the shrill and predictable:

E. D. Kahn:  Simplifying the tax code, while reducing overall income tax rates makes sense. Lowering income-tax rates would not only be good in terms of stimulus, it would be good for the American economy years into the future. Meanwhile, wiping out all the pernicious deductions and loopholes would make the tax system more fair and efficient, and would make up for lost revenue from lower rates. The mortgage-rate tax deduction would go, creating a level playing field for home-owners and renters. For those of us who mourned the short life and death of Wyden/Bennett, the removal of the employer tax exemption for health insurance is most welcome. 

San Collender:  Bowles-Simpson seems to have been put together backwards.  Instead of starting with a plan about what the federal government should no longer do and then determining the savings from the smaller number of employees that would be needed to do what's left to be done, with limited exceptions the plan focuses on the reduced workforce but makes few assumptions, suggestions, or recommendations about what services the government should no longer provide.  The assumptions it does make don't appear to justify the cuts in the number of employees and contractors.

The type of proposals that are needed are whether the government should no longer be involved in education.  Should it stop prosecuting and jailing as many criminals and should the sentences be shorter for those it convicts?  Should it fund less or no research on cancer and similar diseases?  Should the FBI no longer investigate white collar crime?  Should the military not be prepared to conduct as many operations?  Should veterans health care be eliminated?

 Mark Kleiman: Why didn't Simpson and Bowles propose legalizing and taxing cannabis? That's $5-$10 billion a year.

CRFB: (a fairly detailed walk-through of the tax proposals). 

Charles Blahous:  The Simpson-Bowles proposal was clearly designed to pre-empt some of the attacks made on the commission. They make a point, for example, of saying that Social Security must be balanced for its own sake and is not being asked to contribute positively to the balance of the unified federal budget. The commission’s critics would do well to show equal concern for Social Security’s sound financing by offering their own alternatives for sustaining the program.

Roman Fever

They say that Henry Laurens, the American Revolutionary leader, so admired Roman freedoms that he used Tully, Valerius and Claudius as names for his slaves. He wasn't alone in his tastes. Almost unversally, the Founders admired classical models, and in particular, models drawn from the Roman Republic, via Plutarch, Cicero or Livy, perhaps filtered through Montesquieu.

I wonder just when it was that this taste for Roman virtus fell out of the political landscape. Contrast the Empire--that comes later, and we still cite it from time to time as a judgment or a warning, But the Republic seems to have vanished from history: "nowadays," says William R. Everdell, "all anyone seems to know about Rome is that it fell."

Everdell thinks this a pity--"a real pity," he says

that [the history of the Republic] is so little known, for the analogies--the true analogies--between the Roman Republic and our own remain striking. Their hatred of monarchy was enduring, dating form the time they expelled their kings, and their belief in constitutional checks and balances was the product of years of practical experience.

Maybe. Or it may just be that we've discovered that the Roman Republic--like so many others before and since--was not so much a model of ordered liberty as a barely stable detente between competing factions at home, and a calamity for its neighbors abroad. So Samuel Finer:

More than any polity so far looked at except the Assyrians, the Republic was shot through and through with militarism. It is unlikely that there are more than perhaps ten individual years over its entire span when Roman armies were not waging war somewhere or another, and in few previous societies was military glory so central an ambition to members of the ruling class. And discipline in the field was of the harshest kind. ... [But] if Roman soldiers suffered ... the enemy suffered worse. ... [L]ike the Assyrians but unlike the Persians, the Republic (not the empire) gave the conquered next to nothing in return. .. Whatever their original motivation, these campaigns were gigantic wars of plunder. ...

Finer returns to his central theme: "The Republican constitution and its political processe":

The first was bad; the second in its final phase, lethal. The Republican constitution was preposterous. Stripped down to the legal provisions only, this constitution was unworkable. Yet it did work and until 133 BC, to be just, it worked very well, but in spite of itself, not because of it. It worked because of unwritten conventions that its provisions should, effectively, be side-stepped. This is a great compliment to the men--both populus and nobilitas--who had to accept the conventions. But it is no compliment to the constitution itself.

After 133 and even worse after 82 BC, it is no longer possible to praise the men who operated it. On the contrary, the practice of politics in Rome was thoroughly degenerate. ... If you strip the personalities away--if you forget that what was st stake was the 'wide arch of the ranged Empire', if in fact you put away the drama and look at nothing but the political process itself--you will find no more sophistication, disinterestedness, or nobility than in a Latin-American banana republic. ...[Y]ou will find clientelist factions, personalist parties, private armies, and military struggle for the presidency ...

Sources: "Finer" is Samuel E. Finer, The History of Government I, 439-40 (1999)--a monument of modern scholarship that seems to be vanishing into obscurity almost more quickly than it was brought into being. "Everdell" is William R. Everdell, The End of Kings 45 (1983), a totally "reactionary" work in the narrow and technical sense that it retells the old stories in a style to suggest that the 20th Century never happened (update: apparently there is a second edition, and a forthcoming third (link)). The story of Henry Laurens and his slaves comes from Carl J. Richard, The Founders and the Classics (1994), a superb backgrounder on what the Founders knew (or thought they knew) about the Greek and Roman world. Richard's Greeks and Romans Bearing Gifts (2009) looks promising, although it might be a rework of the same topic.