CSBS News

President Joe Biden will have both houses of Congress in his corner — by some of the narrowest margins in history — but that is not a free pass, experts say.

James Curry, Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Utah, says that politicians have seemingly been using the word to mean something different than its usual meaning. “In recent years we have seen people increasingly use the term “banana republic” to describe a democracy in decline, or a government in chaos or disorder.

“The hard truth about the U.S. political system is that very little legislation gets enacted without bipartisan support,” wrote University of Utah political science associate professor James M. Curry and Princeton University politics and public affairs professor Frances E. Lee for the Deseret News.

The seeds of an idea were planted as Kristen Hawkes watched older women collecting vegetables. Hawkes, a professor of anthropology at the University of Utah, has extensively studied the Hadza, a group of hunter-gatherers in Tanzania who eat a lot of wild foods such as berries and tubers.