In this year’s midterm elections, I voted absentee from Prague, and I voted for the Democrats. That is not a sentence I expected to write when I left for the United States some 20 years ago on a scholarship from the free-market Earhart Foundation. Yet here I am, back in Prague in a self-imposed exile of sorts—in no small part because of what has become of the Republican and conservative politics I once looked up to.

I am far from the only European in America who has ended up worrying about the future of its democracy. The political scientist Juan Linz spent his career asking why democracies collapse. His essay “The Perils of Presidentialism,” published in the very first issue of the Journal of Democracy in 1990, was decidedly out of sync with the optimism of that year.

Linz’s concern was that, in a presidential system, both the president and the legislature claim a direct mandate from the voters—a “dual democratic legitimacy.” What happens when the two collide? In a country like the United States, there is no mechanism for resolving a deadlock between, say, a failing president and an antagonistic Congress. The bar for impeachment and removal from office is high, and it ought to remedy “high crimes and misdemeanors,” not ordinary political conflict.

Without the possibility of an early election or a no-confidence vote, constitutions modeled after the United States lack an important release valve built into parliamentary systems. This increases the risk of democratic breakdowns—self-coups, military takeovers, the hollowing out of unfriendly legislatures, and unresolved constitutional crises.

For Linz in 1990, the United States was an exception, which he credited to the loose, non-ideological nature of America’s parties, making bargaining across the aisle a routine part of governing. Today, those conditions are gone. As the legal scholar Miguel Schor observed, American presidentialism worked from the 1930s through the 1990s because its parties were moderate and willing to deal with each other.

Today, polarization, gridlock, and governance by executive order are the norm.

Yesterday’s vote was a sizable repudiation of the first two years of Donald Trump’s second term. Sixty-one percent disapprove of the president’s performance. A plurality say their vote for Congress is a vote against him. Democrats have taken a large majority in the House and have flipped the Senate, too.

So what happens next?

The United States will soon have a Democratic House that will attempt to use the power of the purse to roll back Trump’s agenda and will likely try to impeach Trump as well as individual cabinet members. All of that is welcome and indeed overdue.

Here’s the problem. A president who retains the fervent loyalty of at least a third of the country—as Trump does—is not going to go quietly. He is bound to treat the new congressional majority as an illegitimate obstacle, keeping him from his work on behalf of “the people.”

For this reason, the flurry of executive orders and lawsuits that have characterized Trump’s second term is unlikely to give way to a more orderly form of governance over the next two years. The president isn’t surrounded by figures who will restrain his worst impulses, or stand in his way, as Vice President Mike Pence did on January 6. Vice President Vance infamously argued back in 2021 that if the Supreme Court blocked a purge of the civil service, Trump should simply say: “The chief justice has made his ruling, now let him enforce it.” If Trump wants to do something and Congress votes to stop him, he may do it anyway—reprogramming money Congress refused to appropriate, ignoring subpoenas, and complying with court orders only selectively.

Some critics of Linz argued, fairly, that the problem with presidential systems is not inherent to their design, but rather a result of their disproportionate presence in countries with legacies of military rule. If that is the case, presidential systems would be expected to work much better in the United States than in, say, Latin American countries where military coup is a much greater threat.

But military rule is not the most likely source of damage to America’s democratic institutions. The bigger risk is that the system becomes unable to resolve political conflicts, resulting in a slow-burning, and possibly permanent, constitutional crisis.

Poland, with its recent episode of unrest surrounding its Constitutional Tribunal, is a case in point. When it came to power in late 2015, the populist Law and Justice (PiS) government took many illiberal steps, including refusing to accept judges appointed to the Tribunal by its predecessor. Over the following years, it simply ignored the Tribunal’s rulings.

More than a decade later, despite the election of Donald Tusk and his Civic Platform government in 2023, the system is still broken. The current government still does not recognize the Tribunal’s rulings, on the grounds that some of its judges were illegitimately seated. Meanwhile, the PiS-friendly president, Karol Nawrocki, agreed to swear in only two justices to the court’s six vacant seats. There is no institutional way out of the impasse, and Poland now effectively has no judicial review of legislation.

The Latin American example should give us pause, too. In Argentina, as part of his effort to cut government spending, President Javier Milei responded to Congress’ overrides of his vetoes on disability benefits and university funding by… suspending them by decree. Courts struck the suspensions down, but the government simply rewrote them.

This shows that simply getting through the immediate post-election period is the easy part. Keeping America’s democratic institutions in good working order will take much more than that. Imagine a scenario in the coming weeks in which Justice Samuel Alito retires from the Supreme Court, and a lame-duck session of Congress confirms a Trump-picked successor before the new Congress is seated in January. That would be perfectly legal, but it could easily set in motion a dynamic that would delegitimize the Court or render it dysfunctional, just like in Poland. It is possible to imagine many other such scenarios over the next two years.

Beyond domestic dysfunction, the rest of the world should not expect much to change after today, either. Foreign policy is the domain in which presidents are least constrained by Congress. Trump’s diplomatic improvisations, including the war in Iran, are unlikely to be meaningfully tempered by a Democratic House or Senate. The United States will continue to be an unreliable ally, led by a divided political class in disagreement over America’s role in the world.

A Nordic diplomat here in Prague recently told me that Europe just needs to wait out “two more years.” But that fundamentally misreads the nature of the challenge that the United States and its political institutions face.

Dysfunctional presidential systems can recover only if both parties are committed to liberal democracy, and ideally share a vision of the nation’s role in the world. Right now, that is far from the case. In his article, Linz coined a term that perfectly describes what drove me away from the Republican Party: “semi-loyal,” referring to actors who are nominally committed to democratic principles but ignore them in practice.

For as long as that remains true, and the nature of the presidential system makes it impossible to resolve deadlock between various political actors and an entrenched president, alternation of power will mean only that the crisis changes hands. Yes, Trump’s party just lost control of Congress. And yes, in two years, Trump will leave office. But the damage is bound to outlast him—perhaps permanently.

Dalibor Rohac is the Director of Research at GLOBSEC and a contributing editor at American Purpose.

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