1.1: Introduction

Supporters of President Donald Trump storm the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, to protest the results of the 2020 presidential election.

On January 6, 2021, two weeks before Joe Biden was scheduled to become the 46th President of the United States, thousands of supporters of outgoing President Donald Trump amassed at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., overwhelmed Capitol Police officers attempting to secure the building, and forced their way inside. Egged on by the president himself at a rally earlier that day, the protesters were trying to prevent Congress from certifying Biden as the winner of the 2020 presidential election. Biden’s victory, they claimed, was illegitimate: the election had been “stolen” from Trump through massive voter fraud.

Four years later, though, Donald Trump was sworn in as the 47th President of the United States. Trump overcame a second impeachment (for his role in encouraging the Capitol storming), a felony conviction, three other criminal indictments, over a dozen primary challengers, and two assassination attempts on his way to a second term. No angry mob breached the Capitol to stop him, but many opposed him nonetheless. His Democratic opponents—first Joe Biden, then Kamala Harris after Biden dropped out—denounced him as not just a candidate with bad policies but a threat to American democracy itself. Their arguments were different from those of the protesters in 2020, but their underlying message was the same: “This man has no right to be president, and the fact that he has been elected proves something is seriously wrong with the American political system.”

Anyone who regularly reads, watches, or listens to the news in the United States has encountered sentiments like this. As Figure 1.1 below, at least a quarter (and usually more than half) of Americans have been dissatisfied with the way things are going in their country since pollsters began asking the question, and they blame government for their dissatisfaction. Skim the headlines and you’ll find countless claims that something about American government—Congress, the Electoral College, the two-party system, the Constitution—is “broken,” desperately in need of repair or replacement. Not everyone agrees on which parts are broken or how they should be fixed, but you would have a hard time finding someone who thought everything about government and politics in the United States was working perfectly.

And yet, paradoxically, America trundles along in spite of this “brokenness.” For almost a quarter of a millennium, the United States has operated under the same basic political system, even as many other countries have repeatedly overhauled theirs. Overall, Americans enjoy a degree of prosperity and security of which most of the world can only dream. In many other countries, an event like the attack on the Capitol would be taken as a sign of an imminent coup. Yet most Americans who saw the siege on the news went about their daily lives as usual, confident that their democratic institutions would still be intact when the dust settled. More than four years later, their confidence seems justified: politics in America proceeds much the same as it has for a long time.

Why is it so easy for people to agree that America’s government is broken and yet so hard for them to agree on exactly how it is broken? And, if it is in fact broken, how has it managed to overcome so many obstacles for hundreds of years?

Figure 1.1: Percentage of Americans dissatisfied with "the way things are going in the United States," 1979-2023 (Source: Gallup)