RELATED TERMS: Politics and the Political
That forms of governance are ‘designed’ is often acknowledged only in passing. For example, the trend towards authoritarianism in the politics of the USA is recognised by some to have accelerated under Trump rather than to have begun with him. To argue that US authoritarianism began with Trump, Abdelrahman ElGendy (cited in Roth, 2025) comments, is to assume that the USA was a healthy, functioning democracy that faltered, which ElGendy thinks is not the case. He continues,
“When a democracy is designed with this capacity for authoritarianism you’re never more than one election away from its reappearance. That’s not an accident, that’s a design flaw.” (ElGendy, cited in Roth, 2025)
The Not-Unprecedented President
Edward Stourton (2026) is also of the opinion that the 47th President of the USA is not an aberration but a continuation of certain aspects of the USA’s past. Stourton argues that a tension runs through American history between an enlightened USA and its illiberal alter ego. Stourton finds precedents in US history for almost all of Trump’s actions. Thus, Stourton makes the case that Trump is a logical outcome of US history. In this view, he stands as a modern representative of the illiberal, imperialist tendency in US politics. This position, as Charlie English (2026) comments in his review of Stourton’s book, is in stark contrast to the more familiar values of the US constitution that have been to the fore in late 20th and early 21st century history.
Although neither Stourton nor English frame this tension and its current ‘logical outcome’ in terms of design, for example, the design of the US constitution or of the USA as a complex social formation ‘afforded’ by the terms of the constitution, in narratological terms their depiction points to an ongoing dramatic conflict as a key element of the USA as a socio-historical nation-state. This conflict is capable of producing outcomes that follow the ‘logic’ of this ‘set up’ or ‘enframing’, this ‘constitution’. Within this set up as a field of possibilities, driven or animated by the proposed conflict, certain outcomes are ‘logical’, that is, they ‘make sense’ given this framing or contextualisation, although they are not inevitable.
What we might be said to have here is a complex set of relationships that inter-relate history, narrative and design: the unfolding of history, as a set of events or ‘outcomes’ and the processes that lead to them; narrative framing, as a setting up of a field of possibilities in which certain ‘outcomes’ can be ‘explained’ as ‘logical’; and design, both as a repeated pattern of events, given a set of possibilities, and as the framing of the frame, so to speak, in which the unfolding of historical events can be understood in terms of spatio-temporal narrative ‘affordances’, such as conflicts, motivations and (temporary) resolutions.
The issues that arise pertain to questions about the determinants of events and about the degree of determinism that could be said to be in play in relation to that history and its narration. That is, how deterministic or how ‘affording’ of alternative possibilities is the governance ‘set up’; and how adequate is the narration of those events to that set up and its possibilities? In short, to what extent can this set up be said to constitute a ‘design’ and in what sense of ‘designing’?
Reference
English, C. (2026). American nightmare. Guardian, 10 January, Saturday p.50-51
Roth, A. (2024) Has Trump succeeded in normalising American autocracy?, Guardian, 31 August. Available at: http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/aug/31/trump-american-autocracy-authoritarianism (Accessed: 31 August 2025).
Stourton, E. (2026). Made in America: The Dark history that led to Donald Trump. London: Transworld Publishers
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