People around the world watching the debacle that was the second presidential debate may not realize how profoundly irrelevant virtually everything both candidates say is when it comes to implementing change.
The US political system is broken, divided, and nearly incapable of forcing national change in a country spiraling out of control.
The federal government does not have the power to improve American society in the ways presidential candidates claim they will if elected.
Real power lies in the states, and American states are not equal as they are in many other federations around the world.
For example, in Australia we have something called “horizontal fiscal equalization” which ensures that poorer states receive subsidies so that they do not fall behind naturally richer states.
That’s not the case in the United States, so there is a huge disparity in wealth between states in the United States, just as there is between individuals.
Think of all the obstacles that prevent a president from achieving anything.
The big lie is that it is extremely difficult for a US president to accomplish much at the domestic level, even if he has both houses of Congress.
For starters, there is little discipline among the major parties, so a president will have a hard time convincing his own party to support any initiative he commits to implementing, let alone the other side of the political spectrum.
This means they may not be able to get their ideas through the House of Representatives, one of the two chambers of Congress, even if their political faction controls it, which is often not the case.
Being elected speaker in no way guarantees that your party has the numbers in the House. Even if it did, the lack of party discipline means you can’t rely on those numbers.
Furthermore, elections to the House of Representatives are held every two years, so the numbers change so often that difficult long-term reforms cannot keep pace and are therefore rarely implemented.
That’s before reaching the Senate, which is necessary to approve legislation for it to become law. The partisan makeup of the Senate is typically different than that of the House of Representatives.
Even if a President somehow manages to win over both houses of Congress, the original idea will likely have been reduced to a shadow of what it originally seemed.
However, this is interpreted differently by a partisanally divided Supreme Court, a group of justices who are far more politically motivated than the high courts of other nations.
And at the end of this long and difficult-to-navigate system, federal government decisions are, in most cases, subordinated to state laws, because the American federation preserves strong power among the 50 states.
That was the only way to unite the Union and keep it together.
So what power does the President really have?
They may appear powerful internationally, but that power abroad has no equivalent at home, where policy decisions really matter: where they affect the American people.
Calls to end all negativity in presidential campaigns are understandable, but the only real internal power an American president has is a negative power: the veto power he has over anything Congress tries to legislate without him.
This increases the inertia and perception that politics in the United States is always negative and always seems broken.
A power as negative as the dominant power of the Presidency clashes with the mantra of hope so often falsely touted by next-generation candidates and the progressives they hope to inspire in order to reach the White House.
So when you hear Trump and Harris claim that if elected they will change this, that and the other, know this: it’s all rhetoric, no substance.
Because they can’t really do much. American presidents are not as powerful as they seem, at least not domestically.
Peter van Onselen is the political editor of the Daily Mail Australia.
