Biden's presidency and the myth of Sisyphus

As any self-respecting urban planner knows, it is much easier and more rewarding to build a slum on new land than to rehabilitate a long-established neighbourhood. For many decades, the creation of an unprecedented political model from scratch placed the United States of America in an advantageous position compared to the Old World, which was overwhelmed by the complex and intertwined socio-political systems that synthesise the historical evolution of Europe. 

On the contrary, the United States was forged by making a "tabula rasa", as soon as the pilgrims from the Mayflower arrived, a congregation with a hard core of English fundamentalist Christians, residents of a religious commune in Leiden, Holland, which the English crown authorised in 1062 to settle in the New World as a counterweight to Spanish domination, creating a colony in Massachusetts, governed by the strictest of ways of radical moral intolerance, which gave them the name of "Puritans".  The strength of this legacy in the American political imagination is such that it is assumed that as many as eight American presidents - like the Roosevelt and Busch families - are descendants of the Pilgrims. 

Naturally, it is strange to try to deduce democratic determinism from these origins, since the United States could have ended up having a President-elect for life as much as a European-style monarch.  So much so that after the independence of the British crown, the governance of the American colonies fell into such a state of anarchy and rebellion that in 1786, Nathaniel Gorham, a resident of Massachusetts and then President of the Continental Congress, wrote, with Alexander Hamilton's consent, to Prince Henry of Prussia, a relative of King Frederick the Great, placing the American crown at his disposal, an offer that was politely declined by the interested party.

Nevertheless, Hamilton remained a strong advocate of a life presidency with broad executive powers over the Senate and a legislative veto; his idea was a republic presided over by an "elected monarch". While Madison's views prevailed over Hamilton's, constitutional discussions on elections neglected the consecutive length of presidential terms, and it was not until 1947 that a constitutional limit of eight years was imposed on presidential terms by the Twenty-Second Amendment after the death of Franklin Delano Roosevelt during his third presidential term. 

However, the 1786 Constitution explicitly reflected its framers' distrust of the popular will by establishing the Electoral College system, a filter designed to allow voters not to elect the president directly, but rather the Electoral College electors preferred by any of the White House candidates. The framers of the U.S. Constitution sought to create a republic, not a democracy ("all for the people, but without the people"), so much so that instead of stipulating the right to vote, they enumerated specific reasons why active suffrage could not be denied. As a result, 21 of the 50 EU countries prevent people in prison, and even those on parole, from voting. 

These idiosyncrasies are naturally the result of their times; each constitution is the normative reflection of the particular set of economic, social and cultural conventions that are characteristic of a given historical context. Thomas Jefferson was so aware of this that he went so far as to propose that each generation of Americans should write its own constitution according to the particularities of its time.

But no doubt because of the narrative influence of the pious founding myth, the American constitution has a reverence for the holy books, and it is very difficult to make the changes necessary to adapt it to a reality that is profoundly different from that of the 18th century. On the other hand, the high price paid by European countries in what could be interpreted as a civil war, from the beginning of the Thirty Years' War in 1618 to the end of the Second World War in 1945, led to the widespread adoption of a model of constitutional parliamentarism that offers European countries more adaptable and solid institutional frameworks than the American model, which, in order to keep pace with the times, ended up granting excessive jurisprudential power and creative interpretation to the judges of the Supreme Court, who, as if they were a Vatican curia, are appointed at discretion and for life by the Head of State.

However, the challenges Biden faces are very similar to those of the urban planner charged with modernizing an old neighborhood filled with listed buildings, and it is predictable that as a modern Sisyphus, his presidency will be marked by the frustration of unnecessary work. This is because the very design of the American constitution makes the ability of the House of Representatives to legislate a titanic task, which must be overcome not only by the majority of an unrepresentative Senate, but also by the Damocles sword of the presidential veto, which can only be overcome if 2/3 of each chamber votes to override it. Even in this case, a bill can end up being repealed by the Supreme Court, making an "originalist" reading of Article I of the Magna Carta, after having been in limbo for a few years, which has the perverse effect of encouraging the government to cease its activities by decree in order to avoid deadlock.

In any event, unlike in Western Europe, where the enactment of laws by national parliaments is generally a matter of a few months, in North America the timetable for legislative changes at federal level is unpredictable because, as in Europe in the past, the United States has become hostage to its own history and traditions, leading to dysfunctional situations such as the closure of public administrations for lack of budgetary agreement: neither the legislative nor the executive powers can govern unilaterally, but the constitution guarantees them a great capacity for annulment.   

In the original mechanistic conception of the constitution in force since 1789, this constitutional mechanism had to be fully adapted to the real conditions in which it operates, correcting dysfunctions and defects, so that it would continue to produce the expected results; as Jefferson had foreseen. Far from it, it has become an anachronistic fetish, so much so that despite all the noise and fury of the presidential interregnum, it is doubtful whether the new administration has the capacity to act to unblock radical changes in American society.