As I see it | Trump makes everything worse but he didn’t start it

While cleaning my basement, I found an old copy of Foreign Affairs dated September/October 2014. If you didn’t look at the publication date but only its table of contents, you would have thought it was a recent edition.

Titled “See America: Land of Decay & Dysfunction”, the edition’s front cover is a painting of a crumbling Capitol Building that houses the United States Congress.

Keep in mind we are talking about the second year of the second term of Barack Obama, whose presidency is now fondly remembered by many Americans as the high point of US democracy and prestige in the 21st century.

“The US political system has decayed over time because its traditional system of checks and balances has deepened and become increasingly rigid,” he wrote. “In an environment of sharp political polarisation, this decentralised system is less and less able to represent majority interests and gives excessive representation to the views of interest groups and activist organisations that collectively do not add up to a sovereign American people.”

If the system doesn’t represent the majority, it can then only represent minority interests. Who are they? “In the contemporary United States, elites speak the language of liberty but are perfectly happy to settle for privilege,” he wrote.