Academic dissertations are a very peculiar genre of text. Written to be primarily read only by yourself, your committee, and some members of your own family who are extraordinarily proud of your achievement. This also implies that they commonly lack some features of ordinary scientific books, such as an afterword.
I do believe that an afterword to my dissertation is in order, and since it is uncommon to add one to a PhD thesis, I am writing one here, as an article. I do not believe that my thesis itself merits an afterword, but current circumstances do.
I embarked on my PhD journey to the day exactly five years ago, on November 1st, 2020. Just two days into my PhD, Joe Biden was elected President of the United States, and the reign of Donald Trump was coming to an end.
However, nobody believed that it was going to be a smooth transition. Too often, Trump had threatened to just continue living in the White House, half jokingly, half seriously. And indeed, on January 6th, 2021, in an unprecedented act of domestic terrorism, a mob of several hundred Trump-supporters invaded the U.S. Capitol in an attempt to bring U.S. democracy to an abrupt end. Only a few capitol police officers stood between the angry mob and the machine room of democracy. Representatives had to be evacuated via tunnels below the building.
After a few, gruesome hours, the horror ended, and two weeks later, Biden was inaugurated as planned. For the next four years, U.S. democracy was “back on track.”
For me, this was a sign of hope. I decided to dedicate my thesis to U.S. Congress. To understand how U.S. democracy works beyond the president. To understand how powerful Congress exactly is, and how it performs its role as the machine room of democracy. For the next four years, I spent countless hours reading Congressional speeches, extracting information from it, and understanding how laws are being made. I was convinced that understanding Congress was a useful and fruitful endeavor to help researchers and the public at large have a better understanding of the mechanisms of lawmaking.
When the next election cycle started, and Joe Biden announced his new bid on the presidency, it was apparent that this might not go well. Only after about three and a half years, maybe a little less, it was clear that democracy in the U.S. was back in crisis. And indeed, on November 5, 2024, Donald Trump was once again elected President of the United States.
For me, this was a shock. Not because I desperately wanted Biden back in the White House (Harris would have been the better choice), but because I knew that this time around, Trump and his entourage had a plan, provided by the Heritage Foundation: Project 2025. It was serious. We couldn’t hope for Trump to doodle his way through a second presidency until the electorate would put an actual president in power again. No, this time, his administration would have much more capable personnel, and a dedicated plan to reshape the U.S. government according to a deeply authoritarian and Christian-fundamentalist worldview, including what is known as the “Unitary Executive Theory.”
But still, I retained hope. After all, the U.S. Constitution clearly outlines a separation of powers and implements checks and balances. The president can’t introduce new laws, Congress has a broad range of leeway and the “power of the purse,” and the courts can always rule against the administration. So, when Biden waved goodbye for a final time, and Trump moved back into the White House, I remained as optimistic as possible.
I was able to keep this feeling for about two weeks. By January 31st, I couldn’t sugarcoat the developments in the administration anymore. “DOGE” wreaked havoc among Congressionally appointed agencies and ripped apart the fabric of the regulatory government. In addition, “Schedule F” was reinstated, court orders violated, innocent people were deported to random countries, and Trump started to make laws — not via Congress, but via executive order. And all of it with impunity. There is little the Trump administration had to fear from Congress, which is fully under control of the Republican Party. And thanks to a conservative stacking of the supreme court, not even from the constitutional court. SCOTUS even decided to give the president full immunity during his presidency in an unprecedented ruling. And, as if to kick someone who’s already on the ground, Trump recently demolished the entire East Wing of the White House for a ballroom that is not just architecturally reminiscent of a certain, bygone era.
Today, just nine short months after Trump’s inauguration, it is almost impossible to recount all the violations of the Constitution, court orders, and social norms of the rule of law. The administration’s strategy of maximalism, to flood the ether with outrage to incapacitate media and the public alike, has worked. These days, Trump violating a court order is just a regular Tuesday. Gutting an entire agency is a Wednesday afternoon. And withholding funds for SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program) despite the existence of emergency funds, thus putting 12% (!) of the U.S. population in danger of severe malnutrition (!) is just another political fight.
How can I justify having worked on U.S. Congress for five years, if it all doesn’t seem to matter anymore? What help is it that we now know how responsive representatives are to economic crises, if they do not enact legislation anymore? Why bother understanding the party pressure that influences representatives in their vote decisions, if there are no more votes?
Since February of this year, I have struggled not to lose hope in the relevancy of my thesis. I lived through the five stages of denial; believed that, if Congress stops being relevant, then maybe my work has historical worth; or maybe one could archive the thesis for the future, when Congress may be operational again. But right now, I do not feel that my thesis has any worth for contemporary observers of U.S. policy. It seems to me even less worth than a regular PhD thesis that is only read by you, your committee, and your overexcited aunt.
I believed that, after decades of the public almost forgetting about Congress, it was in order to shed a light onto the not-so-photogenic parts of U.S. government, to highlight the grunt work of lawmaking. And for what? For a government shutdown? For Mike Johnson completely locking down the entire House? Refusing to swear in a newly elected representative? For a president simply bypassing Congress via executive order?
In 2018, U.S. political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt have written an instructive book on democratic backsliding in the U.S., “How Democracies die.” They revisit a century of authoritarian rule around the world and try to come up with a benchmark for how well the U.S. is doing. The book was written in the middle of the first Trump presidency, and they outline three potential scenarios for the future: A swift democratic recovery (“unlikely”), a second Trump term leading to white-national autocracy (what they call an unlikely “nightmare-scenario”), or a continuing polarization and vile political fights between the two parties (what they deem likely).
It turns out, the nightmare-scenario might have become true. But I believe that even this scenario appears almost benign to the political developments we are now witnessing in the U.S.
I really hope that none of that persists in the long term. I really hope that the U.S. can find back a way to democracy, and that it does not devolve into bleak authoritarianism. Even if it is not relevant to lawmaking in the U.S. right now, I really do hope that my thesis will not remain irrelevant to understanding the current “State of the Union” for too long.
I truly believe that understanding how parliaments work is a worthwhile endeavor. But for the time being, I will probably focus more on European democracies. None of these are resistant to autocracy either, but the constitutional settings at least make it appear less likely to see an authoritarian takeover anytime soon. But democratic backsliding is in full throttle. And we need to understand how it unfolds before it is too late.