In 1961, in one of his Amherst College events after his return from reading his poem “The Gift Outright” at John F. Kennedy’s inauguration, Robert Frost told people — I was among them — that he urged the new president “to be more Irish than Harvard.” For JFK, the advice was probably unnecessary, but if one substitutes “Chicago” for “Irish,” Barack Obama surely could have benefited from it. But Obama, despite his political timidity and his administration’s screw-ups, doesn’t deserve the pounding he got for the Democrats’ defeats last week. A lot more blame belongs to the misconceived constitutional and institutional structure that underlies today’s partisanship, gridlock and sheer political sabotage in Washington. And that misconceived structure dates back to the very founding of our nation.

Sixty years ago, the Harvard political scientist Louis Hartz concluded that the nation’s founders created a constitutional system that, with its complicated system of checks and balances, was designed never to work too well or too fast and sometimes not at all. The framers, for all their wisdom, he said, were more than a little fearful of what the unwashed democratic masses might do with their votes. Except for the Civil War, the system usually worked. It kept the nation safe, promoted domestic tranquillity, helped build canals and railroads, provided land for small farmers and irrigation in the arid West. This success was rooted in popular agreement on most underlying matters, and because the nation, with its vast resources, enjoyed two centuries of growth, that seemed to confirm its basic beliefs. But with the loss of jobs from today’s technological revolution, with globalization and the growing economic and political competition from abroad, with the large number of new non-European immigrants and the resurgent racism that has fueled and with the way voters have sorted themselves politically and socially according to where they live — when red places get redder and the blue get bluer — the chances of its working smoothly and efficiently have become ever more tenuous. Excepting only major crises, will the next Congress and the president be able to settle any of the nation’s now familiar contentious issues — climate change, immigration, education policy, to name a few? The voters this year were said to be angry with their dysfunctional Congress, but most of their representatives in the House vote just as their constituents want. If they didn’t, the voters wouldn’t have re-elected nearly all of them. Add to that our cockamamie representation in the Senate, a necessary compromise in 1787 to coax support from the small states to get the Constitution written and ratified. Under that compromise, each voter in California, with its 38 million people, now has about 1/60th the clout of each of Wyoming’s 600,000. Is this one person, one vote? Although the final numbers aren’t in — we won’t know for sure until after the Louisiana runoff in December — even with their upcoming majority, Senate Republicans probably still won’t represent as many Americans as the Democrats. Two of the nation’s four most populous states, California and New York, are solid blue; only one, Texas, has two Republican senators. The fourth, Florida, is represented by one Democrat and one Republican.

The idea that Oklahoma Sen. James Inhofe will now chair the Committee on Environment and Public Works is by itself a measure of the defeat. What modern nation would put itself in such a position?