American Democracy Can’t Fix Itself
The claims this past week that high-level officials are secretly undercutting the president in an effort to restrain a commander in chief they no longer feel is fit for office has left many Americans deeply unsettled. “Just a glance at recent headlines should tell you that this moment really is different,” former President Barack Obama said on Friday. “The stakes really are higher, the consequences of any of us sitting on the sidelines are more dire.” The free press is constantly assailed by the president, pluralism faces the challenge of white nationalism, law-enforcement agencies are attacked by Donald Trump’s supporters, and electoral processes are threatened by foreign governments and their hackers. Increasing numbers of Americans are asking whether their democracy will survive.
The optimists assure us that the system will work. We are told that American democracy is resilient. We have gotten through these moments before, and we can do so again. The former White House ethics czar Norman Eisen, who has been hard-hitting in his criticism of President Trump, told CNN’s Anderson Cooper that “in every case, sooner or later, every dog gets its day. And sooner or later, democracy is more powerful.”
But this kind of faith is overblown. Unfortunately, American history is filled with periods where our democracy has failed us. The body count is immense.
Start with the Civil War, a failure unlike any other that the country has experienced. The war stemmed from a cancer that was in our democracy from the start—slavery—and then grew out of the inability of Northern politicians to find a way to end this system without the use of military force, and the intransigence of Southern leaders. Legislative debates, half-baked compromises, and incremental changes were unable to bring racial oppression to a peaceful end. The Civil War is a permanent reminder of how American institutions can fall apart.
The Civil War was followed by another catastrophic failure—the drive for racial equality. In the aftermath of the Civil War, some champions of Reconstruction believed that the nation could correct itself by guaranteeing the political and economic rights of African Americans. The first blow to this promise came with the early end of Reconstruction, an unfinished federal effort to achieve racial justice. Reconstruction was followed by the reimposition of racial hierarchies through the establishment of Jim Crow laws in Southern states, as well as through de facto segregation in the North. Legally sanctioned racial inequality lasted for more than half a century until the civil-rights movement finally pressured Congress into passing the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Fair Housing Act of 1968. But even these gains were limited. Congress did not address most forms of institutional racism. While the failure of Governor George Wallace’s presidential candidacy in 1968 offered some Americans hope that open racism would not become normalized in partisan warfare, today racist dog whistles have given way to bull horns in mainstream politics, starting at the top. In their trenchant history of the United States in the 20th century, the historians Glenda Gilmore and Thomas Sugrue argue that America has steadily become less equal and more segregated since the 1960s. ...