Political scientist and author of the book ‘Por qué se rompió Estados Unidos: populismo y polarización en la era Trump’.
Photography: Victoria Locke
By Marc Amat
When Donald Trump became president of the United States on January 20, 2017, political scientists corroborated the extent to which populism and polarization had taken root in American society. The country was about to begin one of the most intense periods in its recent history, with chaotic episodes such as the Capitol attack in 2021. This year, the country is once again called to the polls. On Tuesday, November 5, Americans will again have to choose between the Democratic candidate for the presidency, Joe Biden, or the Republican candidate, Donald Trump on the ballot. This time, the election will also coincide with that of the Senate and the House of Representatives, which are elected every two years.
The president who is elected will be in charge of leading a country in a complex situation with unprecedented ideological division, an increasingly fragile political system and a constitution that, in large part, was completed in 1787. Against this background, this month we interviewed Roger Senserrich, a political scientist with more than two decades of experience in North American politics and author of the book ¿Por qué se rompió Estados Unidos? Populismo y polarización en la era Trump, published this month by Debate.
You live in the United States. The November presidential elections are approaching. What is the general climate like?
The majority of voters are still not paying much attention. In fact, polls even indicate that a very large percentage of people eligible to vote did not know that Trump will be the Republican candidate. Since Joe Biden’s victory in 2020, most Americans have largely disconnected from current political events. This contrasts with the previous legislature, when Trump entered the White House in 2017. Then, interest skyrocketed. Now politics is once again background noise, except for the usual zealots and blowhards.
In the book you talk, above all, about the Trump era and analyze where populism comes from in the United States.
Exactly. Reading it in this pre-electoral context allows us to understand how a candidate like Donald Trump managed to become president of the country. Readers will find the keys to understanding the peculiar way the American political system functions. You will see that it is a much less reactionary country than it seems from the outside, but it also has an authoritarian drive that we do not find in Europe. Oh, and with a relatively new democracy, although it may not seem like it.
In fact, the constitution is from the 18th century. To what extent does it still condition the country?
American politics is very archaic in several ways. The constitutional system is quite outdated. The Constitution is from 1787 and has barely been updated. There are aspects that, through trial and error, we have already seen do not work and that have not been incorporated into modern European constitutions yet are maintained in the United States. There are ideas that, theoretically, should work, but in practice do not work. The result is a system with a balance of powers that constantly block each other. American politics is much more byzantine, convoluted and complicated than that of European countries.
What do these blockages consist of?
In most European countries, whoever is president has a parliamentary majority. In some cases, to approve things, you need to negotiate with coalition partners but that’s it. In the United States, issues are only put to vote when it’s expected that they’ll move forward. Normally, proposals don’t get rejected by Congress, because no proposals are put to vote that could be at risk of losing. It’s very predictable. They have a chaotic and archaic system, like that of the Roman Republic. In fact, they consider themselves the new Rome, although the country is very different.
In American elections, rural states are of peculiar importance.
Yes. The electoral system is very old and overrepresents rural states. This means that, sometimes, the person with the most votes in an election is not the candidate who wins. The current median voter is someone who lives in rural Georgia, but if it were a simple, territorially balanced legal system it would be someone from Pennsylvania. This tilts the political system greatly to the right. Furthermore, we must also remember that it is a two-chamber system, in which the Senate overrepresents small states completely disproportionately. This makes America’s legislative majorities much further to the right than the actual median voter.
This November 5, three different votes will coincide. What are your thoughts?
This demonstrates how the constitution creates competing legitimate powers: the president, the Senate and the House of Representatives are elected in three different elections. All three can say that they represent the people, because it is true, but they do so with different rules. It is paradoxical: everyone has legitimacy to govern, but no one has a majority to do so. In a modern constitution, usually we attempt to avoid this.
In the book you dedicate a chapter to political parties. Is the United States designed with these parties in mind?
When the U.S. Constitution was written, it was not done with the idea that these types of political actors would exist. It is probably the great basic error that the Magna Carta has. Understandably, because it’s a text from before the French Revolution. The current idea of the left-right ideological axis was something completely foreign to the drafters of the constitution. They believed that political conflict would be regional. For this reason, they designed a system with institutions that represented the interests of different territories, but not different parties. Until the beginning of the 20th century, senators were not democratically chosen, but represented the interests of their state governments. In short, that a constitution as old and dysfunctional as that of the United States has worked is almost a miracle.
Why don’t they update it?
The Constitution is irreformable. To make changes, they need supermajorities of both chambers and three-quarters of the States to ratify them. Furthermore, making changes to reduce the power of rural states, which are the majority, is practically impossible. The constitutional system is fossilized. For example, there is a 1924 amendment that allows the federal government to regulate child labor that has not yet been ratified by enough states.
To what extent is the constitution the origin of the country’s polarization?
The Constitution by itself does not generate polarization, but it does provide incentives for politicians to polarize society. With the political system that the text creates, rural states are overrepresented so normally parties adapt their policies to win votes in these states. We must be clear that Donald Trump is not the origin of the polarization that the country is experiencing, but rather a consequence. He is the culmination of a series of trends, born in the 1960s and strengthened in the 1970s within the Republican Party. The system of institutional incentives allowed the party to win elections while being to the right of the center. Normally, when a party loses an election, they learn that they must become more moderate. The Republican Party realized the opposite and decided to give voice to a specific group of its members. Within the party are big business, the religious right, anti-communists, and southern reactionaries. The latter, marked by strong racial resentment. No one paid much attention to them until Trump arrived.
¿Por qué se rompió Estados Unidos?
Populismo y polarización en la era Trump
Roger Senserrich
