My first trip to the USA was in late 2000. In a cold New York and Washington DC, I was, unknowingly, watching a major political meltdown, after an era. In Washington it was still possible for a European tourist to visit Congress or the White House. And in New York I could still see the Twin Towers standing. They would be overthrown less than a year later by al-Qaeda terrorist attacks, and with them, the illusion of omnipotence of the Cold War-winning USA. There followed two decades of wars in the Greater Middle East, supposedly to defeat jihadist terrorism, but which served, above all, to reveal the frustrating limits of US military might and to feed Americans’ concerns about the security of the country, something that Trump would not fail to explore.
In Washington DC I could still see protesters protesting the Republican George W. Bush’s victory in the presidential elections despite losing the popular vote to Al Gore. Above all, I remember that he appealed to his supporters, in the name of the tradition of peaceful transition of power, to accept the result and collaborate with the new Administration.
Over the next two decades – in which I spent two seasons in Washington DC for academic work – I followed the emergence of an increasingly ideological, more extreme, more polarized American policy, and where the commitment became more and more harder. What’s wrong with that? The American constitutional system was designed by the Founding Fathers, at the end of the 18th century, to compel commitment. This is the fundamental problem of American politics today: hyperpolarized and largely paralyzed. A problem for Americans, but also for the US allies who rely on them to help meet the challenges of a rapidly changing world.
America likes to think of itself as the country of the future, but it is governed by the oldest constitution in force in the world, which dates from 1790. And despite the tendency to idealize the past in the public memory of any political community, there has always been in history North American fluctuations in the degree of confrontation and political polarization. A fundamental fact to take into account is that the 1790 Constitution corresponded to very laborious commitments. Many of the aspects that are criticized today were deliberate commitments. Like the famous method of indirect election of the President by the Electoral College that led Trump to victory in 2016, despite having lost the popular vote.
The great fear of these constituents was that demagogy was a path to tyranny, which they knew to be the main vulnerability of democracies. An open and elective political system is always vulnerable to leaders who put their interests ahead of national interests and respect for the law. In the USA, the central power is therefore deliberately very divided: between the two chambers in Congress; between him and the President; not to mention the courts or the powers of the states of the federation. This requires broad commitments and mutual concessions. But the constituents were also aware that there are no perfect systems. The choices of individuals and the chance of history always have a role to play. To a lady who asked Benjamin Franklin what regime the constituents had “given” to the country, he replied: “A Republic, if you know how to preserve it”.
But weren’t the United States much divided in the past, before Trump? Of course yes. Just remember the growing tension and division and violence around slavery that dominated the first half of the 19th century and culminated in one of the bloodiest civil wars in history, between 1861-65, causing 700,000 deaths. However, the great trauma of this bloody Civil War marked the beginning of a very long period in American history in which political consensus has been more cherished than ever.
After the defeat of the southern states, a great compromise was reached between the elites of the North and the southern elites in 1877. In this compromise, the interests and rights of many African Americans recently freed from slavery were tragically sacrificed. This should remind us that if the search for confrontation at all costs is terrible, the search for compromise at all costs can also be so. In any case, the fact is that, for the elites of the Republican and Democratic parties, the great evil to be avoided became the risk of a new Civil War. For this reason, these parties openly boasted of their absence of ideological convictions. They were “catch all” or broad-spectrum parties, with much more historical than ideological links to certain regions and different groups within the country. As the famous Senator Borah stated at the beginning of the 20th century, someone who defends disarmament, the Society of Nations or other leftist policies, if chosen as the Republican candidate, then he will be Republican. Basically, the two major political dominating parties in the United States were large coalitions of regional elites. The system had many problems, from the outset elitism and patronage, but it had the advantage of promoting a culture of commitment, within the parties themselves and, later, between different coalitions of senators or congressmen, which allowed for important reforms.
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