Earthquakes
Something will have to fill the void Trump leaves behind
This is the second is a series of occasional posts about rebuilding democracy after Trump. You can read an overview of the series here.
At six intervals in our history, the prevailing political arrangements stopped working. The party that had held majority status for decades could not address the needs of a changing republic. Its constituent coalitions fell into conflict with one another. Voters looked for something different. A new political alignment formed.
Three of those intervals were marked by significant crises. The arrangements that emerged from these crises looked nothing like the arrangements that had been in place before. It was as if a new republic was born.
We are at one of those moments today.
It’s natural to think of politics in terms of the present day and to assume that the rules governing our politics today will still be in place tomorrow. But history tells a different story. Every thirty to forty years or so, we have gone through a changing of the guard that, in our most extreme moments of crisis, amounted to a reinvention of democracy.
In the 1780s, a group of men assembled in Philadelphia to improve the loose affiliation of states enshrined in the Articles of Confederation. They left with a constitutional republic.
In the 1820s, members of Congress who for years had selected the president found their elite system upended by the popular election of Andrew Jackson.
In the 1860s, with the party system and the country torn apart by Civil War, a nation that seemed resigned to expanding slavery several years earlier extended citizenship and suffrage, under the auspices of a new party, to former slaves.
In the 1890s, economic depression and industrialization scattered old party allegiances and led to an era of laissez-faire Republican dominance and progressive reform.
In the 1930s, the failure of the Republican party to address the Great Depression ushered in a modern welfare state that rewired longstanding relationships between the federal government and the states, as well as between citizens and the federal government.
In the 1980s, a small-government counter-revolution took hold that didn’t actually reverse government growth but brought to a close a long era of new, expansive federal programs.
Every one of these inflection points marked the end of the power dynamics of the time that preceded it. And half of them heralded a seismic shift in the country.
The transition from a loose confederation of states to a constitutional republic was an earthquake. The transition from a nation where slavery was enshrined in the Constitution to a nation where citizenship would not be based on race was an earthquake. The transition from a small government steeped in localism to an expansive social welfare state was an earthquake.
For illustrative purposes, you might think of the period from the Constitutional Convention through the Civil War as the first American Republic, the period from the Civil War through the Great Depression as the second, and the period from the Depression through the Obama administration as the third.
If you overlay the other three periods of realignment on top of these three earthquakes, a larger pattern emerges in which a new republic is born in an explosion of nation-building which after several decades yields to a small-government backlash of limited efficacy that ends eventually in crisis and rebirth.
And now?
Right now, the earth beneath us is shaking again.
The modern state that was born in the 1930s, developed through the 1970s, and resisted in the 1980s is in crisis.
The possibility of a constitutional revolution looms large.
The Trump era, which began in 2016 and will resolve over the next few years, is an interregnum between the Reagan regime of the prior four decades and what lies ahead. It is a moment of reactionary regrouping, a way station between the America Reagan envisioned and whatever is to come.
Trump’s voters are reacting to a demography that is changing more rapidly than we may realize. Within a generation, America will be a majority minority nation, driven by the growth of Millennials and Gen Z—the most diverse generation in history. It is not a coincidence that MAGA politics emerged in 2016, the year Millennials and Gen Z voters outnumbered Baby Boomers and older voters for the first time.
Generational shifts are power shifts. The degree of resistance to them is a measure of how strong they are. These are the birth pains of a new America, one that Trump voters desperately want to stop.
Trump is leading the country through an inflection point, a time of destruction and uncertainty, of transition and drastic change.
But change to what?
Trump cannot stop demography, but he has torn apart the old order. A Republican party that once rallied voters around the rhetoric of lower taxes and smaller government has become a vehicle for the most reactionary voices in its former coalition. It is difficult to imagine ever going back.
But Trump has put nothing in its place. One of the ironies of this moment is that someone who rose to the pinnacle of power by brandishing his credentials as a builder knows only how to tear things down.
His goal, of course, is to establish an American autocracy that overwrites the constitutional arrangements that supported that prior order and every party system since 1787. He has made strides toward this goal but he has also been pushed back, and in any event, to truly succeed he will need to make it permanent.
Maybe he can. If he does, then the next party system won’t be a party system at all. It will be the sunset of the republic.
But maybe he can’t. So far he hasn't. And it does no good to operate on the assumption that he will. Our call to action is to assume he will not and to ask ourselves what avenues will open after he’s gone.
If Trump’s autocratic experiment fails but the old political order has been left in ruins, then the path should be clear for the emerging generations to take power and build a democracy that reflects their values. We don’t yet know what that will look like. It could be a more progressive America—although that will take its own concerted effort to bring about. Regardless, it will first require building new political arrangements, because (as we will discuss in our next essay) the preexisting ones favored the politics of the old guard.
It is the sort of project that rivals the changes brought by the Constitutional Convention, the Civil War and the Great Depression. It is the sort of outcome that we have seen before—rarely but emphatically—during moments that echo the present day. It will require a new explosion of nation building, setting the foundations for the fourth American republic.
It is quite possible that the America of the 30s will look nothing like the America of today and nothing like the America that came before.
That would be an earthquake.
UP NEXT: Why Democrats never realized the promise of the Obama coalition, and what that says about the changes we need to make now.
We must make sure that Trump loses the respect and compliance of most police and soldiers. We have to have as many friends and sympathizers there as possible — people who won’t attack their fellow Americans or fight against their own rights. We need to tell some progressives that language like “f*** the police” is counterproductive.
Wow, Matt! The prospects you outlined are exhilarating, frightening and daunting all at once. Much imagination, courage and determination will be needed.