‘We could end up with a non-constitutional system in just a matter of years, depending on how people react.’

Kennan Ferguson is a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee who studies and teaches political science. He talked with Aj Dagnon about the first months of the second Trump presidency.

Aj Dagnon: Why do you believe we’ve seen inaction from the opposing political party?

Kennan Ferguson: You’ve long had a number of people who consider themselves on the left, who want to be saved by a judge or an investigator or one person who’s going to set everything right, and that is similar to the idea that like the president should be able to do anything that he wants to. All of those are, this assumption that I am being affected as an individual, and there’s an individual who’s going to save me, as opposed to the way that politics actually works and that parties actually work, which is people working collectively toward certain ends, and doing it using different strategies.

Dagnon: How do you see the current administration playing into social divides created by different ideologies?

Ferguson: Politicians can often become popular by highlighting and intensifying polarities. Some of them do that deliberately, and some of them do it instinctually. I think when people talk about Trump as being a uniquely divisive figure, he’s certainly not unique. The United States is filled with figures who have wanted to use race, gender, sexuality, and geography to create a sense of us vs. them, of an oppressed people who are truly the majority, yearning to be free. And if we only were able to get rid of that other side, everything would be perfect again. I think if you look historically, you know, and worldwide, there’s certainly people on the left who’ve used those kinds of ideas very effectively. In fact, if you think of the union movement, it is the idea that the workers who create all the wealth, are oppressed by the capitalists, and that is taken away from them, and that led, for many decades in the United States, to a very successful political movement, was that based on resentment and division. Yes, it was resentment and division that consolidated the power of workers in that case, so I don’t think this is really a question of left and right, although political systems that want to be totalitarian, that want to reach into every aspect of someone’s life, they do profoundly depend on that in a way that liberal individualism or constitutional democracy tend not to.

Dagnon: What damage do you see being made to the US image by the new administration?

Ferguson: I would say that over the past, let’s say post-World War One era, one of the things that the United States historically was very much concerned with, regardless of party, was continuing whatever commitments it had made. And so there was an assumption that if the United States entered into an agreement, whether it was military, economic, or even political that was something that, no matter if it was Clinton or Bush or Obama, they would uphold the things the previous administrations had committed to. What’s fascinating to me right now is that Trump doesn’t even uphold his own commitments. He passed a trade agreement with Mexico and Canada that he signed, and he has not in his first term, and in his second term, he hasn’t felt bound by that. Instead, he has overtly broken it. So the idea that, like, you’re as good as your word, or that the word of America is worth something, I think that’s up for question, and I think that’s not just a question of the next four years. It would be very hard for Trump to say, ‘I promise the United States will do this’ when it’s clear that whoever comes after him, Democrat or Republican, won’t feel any obligation whatsoever to uphold that because there doesn’t seem to be any political punishment for the United States breaking its word.

Dagnon: When it comes to those who fear our democracy being thrown over by the new administration, do you think that’s a realistic possibility?

Ferguson: It is possible because of the fact that it’s happened many times before, not in the U.S., other than in the Civil War, which you could argue that that did actually fundamentally transform the American system. There are a lot of democracies out there where they’ve had military coups. They’ve gone from being a democracy to an autocracy, where the government stopped supporting free speech and started eliminating all other forms of media. Some of those are still with us, and some of those came about gradually. I think this is more of a sudden approach. I think the people who are trying to transform the country want to do it very, very quickly, in the idiom of Silicon Valley. It’s to move fast and break things because you assume you can always fix them later. The idea that it would never happen here has always been fiction. So, yeah, we could end up with a non-constitutional system in just a matter of years, depending on how people react.

Dagnon: Do you believe the American people live in a political echo chamber?

Ferguson: I think there has always been media consolidation, and the interesting historical changes are where and how that consolidation happens. So we can go back to 1898 and you had one set of newspapers, both run by William Randolph Hearst, which really decided we should go to war with Spain, and they lied about things that were happening with the Spanish Navy, and they lied about the way the Spaniards were treating people, and they told the truth about the way that the Spanish Empire was treating its colonies, and that one newspaper change ended up an entire War, which ended up with the United States controlling the Philippines and Cuba and Puerto Rico like that was a media empire.  In my more recent experience, we had a media empire that was devoted to what they thought of as a kind of centrism, whereby the Democrats and the Republicans disagreed about something, but not a lot, and most people were committed to a centrist point of view, and the extremes like overt racists or communists or even Socialists were kept out of that conversation. I think that’s a kind of media consolidation too, and that is a limitation on free speech in that if you were a socialist, you weren’t getting published in the New York Times. However, that’s a different kind of media consolidation than we see with YouTube and Twitter algorithms. That’s an entirely new form, but it’s not an unfamiliar one.