This essay is cross-posted from Steady, where Democracy Americana is now mainly hosted.

I am also making it available here for those who prefer to read (and perhaps share!) the piece in the Substack app. If you want to support my work, you can head over to Steady and become a paid subscriber.

The intro to this piece is free for everyone. If you want to read more than the preview or gain access to the audio version of the newsletter, please consider becoming a paid member of Democracy Americana, which is solely funded by readers and constitutes my main source of income as an independent writer.

Being an independent writer offers a lot of autonomy, which is a privilege. But it is also precarious and comes with lots of financial uncertainty. If you can become a paid member, please do.

Without your support, I will not be able to continue this work. Please know that I am immensely grateful for your generosity!

Become a Member

If a paid membership is currently not an option, the best way to support Democracy Americana is to share this piece here on Substack as well as on social media - and recommend my work to people you think might be interested.

You can also subscribe to the free version of the newsletter here on Substack: I will transfer all new subscribers coming in here over to Democracy Americana’s new home to make sure you are not missing anything.

Subscribe now

What’s up with Donald Trump?

No, seriously: What the hell is going on with the man who is President of the United States?

Considering that Trump has dominated U.S. politics for over a decade, I don’t talk or write about him all that much. As my work often focuses on the American Right, he is always there, of course. But I tend to emphasize how he is himself the manifestation rather than the cause of long-standing anti-democratic tendencies and pathologies of the political culture; and I generally focus on the different factions on the Right, on Trump’s role in mobilizing and integrating them as opposed to the Donald himself.

That’s partially because writing about Trump seems to be such an over-saturated market. I have certainly encountered a general exasperation with all things Trump even among my own readers (more than once, people have informed me that they have canceled their subscription because I kept using photos of Trump as illustrations for my essays and they simply didn’t want to see his face anymore…).

I do find myself wondering: Do we need more analysis of Trump? What else is there to say?

Then again, I do think it might be a misperception that we all understand what’s up with Trump, that there is a consensus about what animates him. In conversations with both audiences and readers as well as with journalists and politicians, I still encounter a wide range of assumptions and interpretations – many of which I find rather misleading or even dangerously off the mark. Even among those on the (small-d) democratic political spectrum – meaning: excluding everyone who supports Trump or has devoted themselves to anti-anti-Trump obstructionism – you still get a wide range of opinions: Is Trump a bumbling fool or a master manipulator? Is he a puppet controlled by sinister interests in the background or a quasi-totalitarian leader of a devoted cult? Is he a fully committed ideologue or purely animated by greed – a dealmaker, perhaps, with no convictions or sincere commitments, really no discernable politics whatsoever?

I am not interested in writing a biography of Trump nor am I qualified to provide a comprehensive psychological profile. But the man is President and has shaped the Republican Party in his image. We need a plausible operating theory of what drives him, what motivates his actions, if we want to predict where things are going and where the greatest danger lies. That remains true even if we acknowledge – as we must! – that Trump has retreated deep into his own unreality. It is entirely unclear what information about the world Trump still receives; much of it seems to be channeled through a very narrow system of loyalists (or perhaps just one loyalist in particular). He is a disturbed authoritarian who is surrounded by people who either share his delusions, are too sycophantic to confront him, or believe the president’s warped perception of the world serves just fine as a vehicle for their own zealotry and ideological extremism.

Trump’s behavior is, euphemistically put, erratic. But I contend it is not random – in the sense that his actions, his raging, his unhinged ranting… all of it has a consistent direction, targeting his personal enemies and the many enemies of the Right.

Trump is not an ideologue in a strict sense. But he has a very clear view of how society should be ordered, how power and status should be distributed, and who should be at the top. He has, we might say, a consistent worldview that aligns him quite well with the extreme ideologues on the Right and helps explain why they have united behind him in the first place. It defines his perspective, structures how he perceives the world around him, shapes his relationships to other people and what actions he gravitates towards. We better take it seriously, because it animates the man who, even in his feeble state of mind, holds the most powerful political office in the world. Grappling in earnest with Trump’s worldview can also, at the very least, inoculate us against the many misleading, disingenuous, and frankly irresponsibly ignorant notions about him that have been floating around since the moment he entered politics, pushed by people who don’t know better themselves or hope we don’t. “Trump the dove”; Trump is secretly a “moderate”; Trump the businessman who only wants a good deal; Trump the inscrutable leader… Forget all this bollocks.

What follows may not explain every single thing about Trump or predict his every future action. But let us at least make sure we don’t get him catastrophically wrong.

The pitfalls of studying “Trumpism”

Let me try to make sure we are all on the same page here: When I say underneath the madness lies a fairly consistent worldview, I am not suggesting we should contribute to the rather bizarre attempts to intellectualize Trump and whatever comes out of his mouth.

Continue reading with a Membership

The rest of this piece is reserved for paid members of Democracy Americana.

If you are not a member, but still want to read Democracy Americana, fear not: I will keep publishing free long-form essays regularly.

But if you can, please consider becoming a paid member over on Steady: You’ll gain access to additional member-exclusive essays every week - and members also have access to the audio versions of all my writing in podcast form wherever you get your podcasts.

Most importantly, if you value this independent work, please know that it is your support and your generosity that is making it possible. Democracy Americana is entirely reader-supported and my main source of income as an independent writer.

Continue reading with a Membership

Good news: Democracy Americana is back to a normal schedule after a summer vacation and a reduced program in July. Thank you for your patience while I was recharging the batteries! Onward. Forward.

As always, the German version of this essay will be available over at Demokratie Americana soon.

This essay is cross-posted from Steady, where Democracy Americana is now mainly hosted.

I am also making it available here for those who prefer to read (and perhaps share!) the piece in the Substack app. If you want to support my work, you can head over to Steady and become a paid subscriber.

Democracy Americana is a publication solely funded by readers. If you are reading the free version of this newsletter, I sincerely appreciate your time and effort engaging with my work.

Being an independent writer offers a lot of autonomy, which is a privilege. But it is also precarious and comes with lots of financial uncertainty. If you can become a paid member, please do. As a paid member, you gain access to special benefits – including many additional essays and the chance to download the audio versions of all my pieces in podcast form.

Without your support, I will not be able to continue this work. Please know that I am immensely grateful for your generosity!

Become a Member

If a paid membership is currently not an option, the best way to support Democracy Americana is to share this piece here on Substack as well as on social media - and recommend my work to people you think might be interested.

You can also subscribe to the free version of the newsletter here on Substack: I will transfer all new subscribers coming in here over to Democracy Americana’s new home to make sure you are not missing anything.

Subscribe now

The global superpower is in the midst of an unparalleled campaign of self-sabotage, utterly without precedent historically, via the deliberate destruction of state capacity and the elimination of professional expertise. The reckless assault on the nation’s public health infrastructure is only one example – but a particularly egregious one. It will potentially harm the lives of millions. All because the government of the United States is in the hands of shameless grifters, paranoid conspiracists, and ideological extremists.

On Monday, August 10, Donald Trump issued an executive order calling for significant changes to childhood vaccine recommendations. It aims to reduce the number of vaccines children receive – down to vaccinations against 11 diseases (compared to 18 at the end of 2024). It also recommends the MMR vaccine (a combo vaccine against measles, mumps, and rubella) be split up into three different jabs, spread out over separate doctor’s visits. And it instructs the states to revise their immunization laws and schedules accordingly.

Trump and his secretary of health and human services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. have been pushing in this direction for a while. HHS released similar recommendations in January, but those were quickly blocked by a federal court. Now they are trying again – with an executive order that is likely illegal. Yet even if it is never implemented as written, only bad things can come from this: It will further fuel vaccine skepticism, animate Republican-led states to loosen or abolish vaccine mandates for schoolchildren, and make it more complicated for everyone to receive necessary protections. As a result, fewer children will get vaccinated.

In a saner, less stupid parallel universe, there could be good reason for a thorough revision of the vaccine recommendations. The scientific consensus on some of the vaccines might have changed – or the public health situation itself might have improved to the point where certain vaccinations are no longer necessary? And could it not make sense to bring the recommendations in line with what comparable countries are doing? That is, after all, what the Trumpists have been claiming: That Denmark, which indeed recommends fewer childhood vaccinations, is their role model.

In our universe, however, none of this applies. Which is why the serious part of the scientific community strongly opposes the MAGA/MAHA assault. And while it is funny for the Trumpists to claim they want to make America a little more like Denmark, a country they usually deride as a socialist hellhole, this makes zero sense either. Denmark is more of an outlier among comparable nations with a very low number of recommended vaccinations; Germany, for instance, currently recommends immunization against 14 diseases (including hepatitis B, rotavirus, and RSV that Trump’s EO cuts from the baseline recommendations). Most importantly, America is not Denmark, a country with universal healthcare that achieves extremely high vaccination rates anyway and also allows anyone who is sick to seek out medical care whenever needed.

In America, on the other hand, infectious diseases are soaring. The country is currently in the midst of the worst measles outbreak in decades. Even though the disease was officially eradicated in the United States in the year 2000, there were almost 2,300 cases last year, and America has already shot past that number in 2026. There are no mysteries as to why this is happening, and why now: Almost all of the people who contract measles are unvaccinated. Because the disease is so highly contagious, stopping the transmission requires an extremely high vaccination rate north of 95 percent. America has now fallen significantly below that threshold, as more and more people are refusing to let their kids be immunized with the MMR vaccine.

Vaccine skepticism – a euphemism for a pervasive tendency on the Right to choose conspiracy theories over science – has been on the rise. According to Gallup, fewer than 70 percent of Americans now believe it is “extremely or very important that parents get their children vaccinated,” down from 94 percent in 2001. The decline is concentrated almost entirely among Republicans: In 2001, a little over 60 percent of them declared it was “extremely important” for kids to be vaccinated – by 2024, that number was down to 26 percent. Meanwhile, over the same time period, the percentage of Republicans who believe vaccines are more dangerous than the diseases they are supposed to prevent has gone up dramatically: From only 6 percent (and very much in line with the rest of the population) to almost one third.

This is a public health disaster. And in any remotely functioning political system, it would be treated as a national emergency. For the people who are in charge of public health in the United States and the leaders of the Republican Party, however, this is not an emergency. It is the result of what they have been preaching.

Let us refuse to play dumb. Trump’s executive order has nothing to do with a sincere effort to improve public health, it is not the result of a serious process of evaluation. The people behind this push are not good-faith actors, but extremists driven by paranoid conspiracies.

Robert Kennedy Jr., the man Trump chose to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, has no real experience or expertise in public health. What “qualified” him was the fact that he is the leader of “Make America Healthy Again,” a movement he built on the basis of decades of spreading dangerous conspiracy theories, unscientific nonsense, and anti-modern grievances. RFK isn’t even on board with our fundamental understanding of how diseases spread, occasionally indulging instead in his own version of the pre-modern miasma theory that focused on “bad air” as the cause of disease. Wi-Fi causes cancer, Kennedy has claimed – which probably endeared him to a president who believes the noise of wind turbines does the same.

At the core of RFK’s engagement with public health has been his decades-long crusade against vaccinations. During the pandemic, he declared the Covid vaccine the “deadliest vaccine ever made.” Upon becoming HHS secretary, he immediately fired all the members of the CDC Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices and replaced them with people more in line with his dangerous quackery. If Kennedy Jr. has a defining belief, it is his claim that “autism is caused by vaccines.” All the scientific evidence in the world (and in this case: the complete lack of evidence, despite a mountain of studies) will not shake him. Under his leadership, U.S. public health authorities are no longer allowed to state the undisputed scientific truth that vaccines *do not* cause autism; he has been working hard to channel massive public resources into finding / manufacturing “evidence” for his conspiratorial nonsense.

Well, RFK has certainly convinced his boss. Since returning to the White House, Trump has also been obsessed with the nonexistent link between childhood vaccines and autism. Unsurprisingly, during the signing of the executive order in the oval office, Trump presented the “epidemic rates of autism” as a key reason why he was pushing for fewer vaccinations. And in proper Trump fashion, he added some absolutely deranged nonsense about how “they” (doctors, presumably) “have a vaccination thing that looks like the size of a bottle of soda and pour it into a little child’s body.”

In spite of this bizarre spectacle, the mainstream political discourse still regularly insists we approach MAHA as a movement defined by legitimate concerns that deserves credit for offering important critique. Last September, a writer in The Atlantic declared that RFK was basically “repeating Michelle Obama’s mistakes”: Good ideas, just going about it the wrong way… Imagine how strong the incentives to normalize and equivocate must be if they result in a piece that looks at a deranged, anti-science conspiracy theorist devastating public health and a first lady trying to get kids to move more and eat healthier and goes: These are the same, basically. “MAHA is a bad answer to a good question,” the New York Times’ Ezra Klein titled one of his podcasts last August. And just a few weeks ago, The Atlantic wrote: “Public Health Needs MAHA: The field must swallow its pride and admit where the insurgent movement is right.” The basic move is always the same: Go through the myriad of grievances and isolate some targets that are worthy of critique; then present those decontextualized claims as MAHA’s essence. And just like that: MAHA is portrayed as defined by good questions and legitimate concerns – while the actual political project that is being advanced is reduced to a mere footnote, as if it was an unfortunate side plot. Using this approach, it would be laughably easy to “give credit” to even the evilest, most destructive political movements in history.

But this is entirely the wrong perspective on MAHA, a dramatic case of missing the forest for the trees. Let us insist on approaching MAHA as what it really is: A form of rightwing extremism that fulfills a specific role in the larger far-right ecosystem and a political project driven by paranoid conspiracism. That story – how MAHA relates to MAGA, how it channels ambiguous anxieties and ties them to a genuinely extremist rightwing cause, how to situate it in the history of the Far Right and how it captures the defining sensibilities of today’s extremists, how its rise, just like that of Trumpism more generally, is itself the manifestation of severe pathologies of American political culture – is the one we need to investigate, the one worth telling. And that is the story that should make it abundantly clear why we must fight tooth and nail against any normalization of this insidious project and the people behind it.

This piece is free to read for everyone.

But recently, only paywalled pieces have generated new memberships and thereby revenue. I am hoping we can buck the trend so that I can keep publishing free essays like this one regularly. That is crucial for the long-term viability of this publication, as it is the only way to achieve visibility and thereby reach new readers.

Please help me by supporting Democracy Americana with a membership:

Become a Member

What is MAHA?

Initially, „Make America Healthy Again” was a slogan RFK Jr. used for his third-party campaign for the 2024 presidential election. When Kennedy suspended his hopeless campaign at the end of August, he unsurprisingly aligned behind Donald Trump. And with that, MAHA had officially become part of MAGA.

At that point, a somewhat diffuse coalition had united under the MAHA banner. There were people concerned about the food industry, additives, synthetic dyes and preservatives; those skeptical of the pharmaceutical industry and deeply involved in alternative medicine; a whole industry of fitness and wellness influencers; and a large reservoir of people skeptical towards anything they associated with a “modern” lifestyle, modern technology, and scientific expertise. It wasn’t until the pandemic that these heterogeneous groups gelled into a political movement under RFK’s leadership. Covid undoubtedly led to a significant radicalization in these circles, as a militant skepticism towards the state was rapidly spreading and many in the MAHA alliance sunk deeper into the conspiratorial fever swamp of the Right.

The objectives of the movement are as diffuse as its constituency. But there are some discernible core ideas. MAHA demands a return to what they declare is a more “natural” lifestyle and diet. In January, RFK’s Department of Health and Human Services came out with some guidelines designed to “end the war on protein”: Americans, Kennedy believes, should consume more beef and drink raw milk. MAHA supporters are concerned about environmental toxins and microplastics, they demand – against all expert advice – to end water fluoridation, which they claim, based on no evidence at all, causes all sorts of illnesses. MAHA’s political identity is, ultimately, centered around the skepticism (again, a euphemism) towards vaccines.

A far-right project

In October 2022, Fox News aired a documentary (I am using the term loosely) produced and presented by Tucker Carlson, titled “The End of Men.” An alarmed Carlson, who at that time was Fox News’ figurehead and most successful anchor, wanted to alert his audience to an acute threat to the survival of the nation: Declining testosterone levels and increasing levels of infertility among American men. The documentary had elements that, in isolation, may have seemed reasonable and sincere. Carlson affirmatively referred to an initiative by President John F. Kennedy in the 1960s that sought to improve the population’s physical fitness. RFK Jr. came on and initially talked about the problem of microplastics and the unhealthy dietary habits of too many Americans.

But from there, the “documentary” quickly slid into conspiratorial territory: Vaccinations, Tucker and Kennedy agreed, massively contributed to weakening the male body – that is still one of MAHA’s core beliefs today. And as the paragon of proper masculinity, Carlson presented a rightwing activist who went by the pseudonym “Raw Egg Nationalist”: He is a star of the extremist online scene, his writings are being published by neo-Nazi publishers. “Raw Egg Nationalist” declared that a sinister cabal of “soy globalists” was behind a nefarious assault on America, hoping to weaken the collective body of the nation (the “Volkskörper,” the Nazis called it) to the point where “the West” was ready to fall and ripe for invasion. Only an aggressive form of nationalism, built on unquestioned white supremacy, and the ruthless purging of the nation of all the intruders and the enemies within could still save America – if it was combined with a diet consisting mostly of raw eggs.

If you want to know more about this bizarre “Raw Egg Nationalist” character and where to situate him in the broader far-right alliance, I highly recommend Laura Field’s excellent book “Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right” that came out late last year. Carlson’s documentary even plays a crucial role in one of the chapters of the book. It indicates how close the ties are between MAHA and the rightwing extremist scene.

It is certainly true that MAHA is fueled by impulses that are present across the political spectrum and even pervasive in certain leftwing-alternative corners. But it channels those tendencies towards the Right. That is precisely the key role MAHA plays in the broader far-right ecosystem: It seizes upon anxieties and tendencies that aren’t necessarily tethered to a specific political agenda initially and ties them to a political project of rightwing extremism. Conversely, MAHA captures crucial sensibilities and ideas that have defined the political identity of the radical Right in the United States for decades.

MAHA channels a sense of grievance and militant nostalgia, it is characterized by an attitude of aggressive revolt. It is fueled by the idea of a mythical past that was better somehow, or “great” perhaps, before sinister forces without and within launched their assault. This overwhelming grievance is very much also directed at what the societal mainstream generally regards as the achievements of modernity – including modern science and medicine. Reflecting on why the historical profession had struggled to grasp the rise of the conservative movement since the 1960s, historian Alan Brinkley warned in a famous essay published in 1994 that the liberal center tended to vastly underestimate how much the social and political culture of the Right was shaped by such anti-modern impulses. The fact that someone like Robert Kennedy Jr. simultaneously seeks to align with the rightwing tech elite in Silicon Valley does not refute this observation. What we have here might best be described as a form of “reactionary modernism” – a term coined by historian Jeffrey Herf in the 1980s as a way to capture the particular fusion of technological futurism with anti-modern resentment and reactionary politics in Nazi Germany.

Want to support my work? Consider becoming a paid member:

Become a Member

The American Right has long understood that the pervasive anti-modern impulses across U.S. society can be mobilized in service of a rightwing project and figured out ways to tap into such resentful energies. There is a fairly direct tradition, for instance, from MAHA’s raging against the fluoridation of drinkable water, one of the movement’s unifying objectives, going all the way back to the far-right anti-fluoride campaigns of the 1950s. Back then, rightwing activists hoped to benefit from the anti-Communist hysteria of the McCarthy era by propagating the idea that a Jewish-Communist conspiracy in the highest ranks of the American government was pushing fluoridation as a way to weaken the nation’s defenses.

Throughout U.S. history, the political Right has championed a vision of “freedom” understood as the privilege of certain (white, male, Christian) groups to do as they please, unburdened by the demands of society, and curtail the freedom of others. MAHA needs to be situated in this tradition also. Collective solidarity is entirely alien to the movement. Instead, it weaponizes an idea of individual “freedom” and “choice” (to opt out of vaccination requirements, for instance) that puts the burden entirely on the most vulnerable groups of society.

To the extent MAHA thinks about *public* health at all, their concern is directed at the state of the nation, imagined as an organic body that needs to be strengthened by purging impure elements within and safeguarding against “dirty” invaders from without. Such eugenicist ideology provides the framework for RFK Jr’s perspective on society: He seems entirely convinced that a body “steeled” by push-ups as well as a diet dominated by red meat and raw milk can withstand anything – while infectious diseases are a problem mostly for those who are a burden to the nation anyway.

The constant self-victimization is another core characteristic that MAHA shares with the radical Right more broadly. It exists in a state of imagined emergency, defined by an escalating siege mentality. MAHA is always searching for sinister forces in high places: A movement of people who constantly feel victimized by modern science, medicine, the “deep state,” and those evil “experts.” In 2021, for instance, Robert Kennedy warned that measles outbreaks “have been fabricated to create fear” – a cunning plot engineered by government experts to bend the American people to their will. In fact, that same year, RFK wrote a whole book about the man he and the entire Trumpified Right see as the evilest, most dangerous, and most cunning of those experts: The Real Anthony Fauci was the title of this unhinged tract in which Kennedy accused Fauci of using the pandemic for a “coup d’état against democracy” in order to impose “medical totalitarianism.”

In late July, Senate Republicans held a public hearing with Fauci as the only witness. Fauci, who has been retired for several years, was the longtime director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease and, as the pandemic hit, a key member of the White House Coronavirus Task Force. The hearing had one purpose only: A show trial that gave Republicans the chance to throw deranged insults and bizarre conspiracy theories at the man they blame for… what, exactly? The obsession with Fauci is so weird because the Right wants to present him as Covid dictator even though Donald Trump was president in 2020. But that is precisely the point: Fixating on Fauci allows the Right to invert reality. Just like that, they have created a fiction in which they were not in power, but yet again the victims of liberal elites and authoritarian expert overreach.

This isn’t just about Fauci either. Don’t trust the experts! That is basically RFK’s mantra. It’s a truly grotesque thing to say for the secretary of health and human services. But Kennedy knows he is merely expressing what has become dogma on the Right. Such agitation “works” because rightwing elites have spent decades undermining trust in the political institutions, in the state, the universities, the media. Since its inception in the middle decades of the twentieth century, Modern Conservatism has built its political identity as an insurgency against the supposed domination of “the Left” in all spheres of American life. The “deep state” and professional associations of experts: In this understanding, they are all compromised and can’t be trusted because of “liberal bias” – in fact, they are the power centers of the enemy within, hotbeds of leftist subversion intended to destroy the nation.

Faced with such overwhelming forces of “leftism,” the only chance “real Americans” have is to disavow all such institutions and instead fall back on traditional authorities: Conservative churches perhaps – and of course the patriarchal command of the man who leads the family. This is where Robert Kennedy’s cult of brute masculinity intersects with his crusade against medical experts. As the real “alpha” male he believes he is, he is in a constant struggle against both the supposed feminization of American society as well as the encroachments of “liberal” doctors.

This is also where MAHA’s quest to dethrone “the experts” and vanquish their seats of power in “the deep state” aligns perfectly with the more traditional deregulation agenda of the business right and the Republican donor class. At first glance, we might assume those moneyed interests saw RFK as a threat. But they understand the difference between faux-populist rhetoric and the essence of MAHA as a political project: The undermining of public trust and the destruction of state capacity. Once the public health infrastructure is devastated, two groups can thrive: The grifters selling miracle drugs who are such a big part of the rightwing ecosystem; and private capital maximizing profit for services the ravaged state no longer can provide.

MAHA is, finally, itself the manifestation rather than the cause of a dramatic rise of conspiratorialism in American politics and society. In the 1950s, the campaign under the slogan “Fluoride is Communism” was largely confined to the margins and failed to enter the mainstream. Today, the man who believes microplastics lead to “gender confusion” and are therefore to blame for the spread of dangerous “trans ideology” is secretary of health and human services. Nothing captures the deeper pathologies of American political culture quite like the proliferation of QAnon and QAnon-adjacent beliefs across the political spectrum and especially on the Right. QAnon supporters worship Donald Trump as a messianic figure chosen to violently crush the cabal of pedophile satanists that supposedly controls society and the government. Surveys suggest that almost one fourth of U.S. adults can be qualified as QAnon believers; among Republicans, it is almost one third.

RFK and Trump as the perfect avatars

In so many ways, Donald Trump and Robert Kennedy are both bizarre choices as political leaders. But they also perfectly embody the grievances and siege mentality that characterize their movements and fueled their rise in the first place.

Much like Trump, RFK was able to integrate the different factions of the MAHA coalition with a deranged form of charisma and by utilizing his celebrity status. As a member of the Kennedy clan and the nephew of President John F. Kennedy, he was able to tap into a wide-spread nostalgia for a “golden age” of the post-war era that never existed but nevertheless plays a mythical role in the nation’s collective imagination. His supporters view him as “authentic”: A true “alpha male” according to the Trumpist definition who, at the age of 72, constantly engages in ridiculous public displays of physical prowess and is endlessly obsessed with projecting dominance over women, political enemies, and medical experts.

Frankly, there is nothing redeemable here. This is an ugly movement led by paranoid ideologues. In an even remotely healthy democratic system and political culture, anyone associated with the deranged extremism of people like Robert Kennedy Jr. would be shunned by mainstream society and ostracized from public life - and the party that elevates such forces would no longer be considered a viable option for anyone but the fringe.

Enough with the sanitizing, the equivocating, the normalizing. People’s lives are at stake. This is not a game.

Thank you for reading - and please know that I am deeply grateful for your support and your generosity!

Democracy Americana is my main source of income as an independent writer. Want to support my work? Consider becoming a paid member:

Become a Member

A note before we get started: My apologies for the lighter publication schedule in July as I am (supposed to be) on vacation with my family. I promise I will be back to a more regular and more frequent schedule soon (and let me also tease a bunch of new ideas and formats I’d like to add in the fall, as Democracy Americana nears its first birthday!).

This essay is cross-posted from Steady, where Democracy Americana is now mainly hosted.

I am also making it available here for those who prefer to read (and perhaps share!) the piece in the Substack app. If you want to support my work, you can head over to Steady and become a paid subscriber.

The intro to this piece is free for everyone. If you want to read more than the preview or gain access to the audio version of the newsletter, please consider becoming a paid member of Democracy Americana, which is solely funded by readers and constitutes my main source of income as an independent writer.

Being an independent writer offers a lot of autonomy, which is a privilege. But it is also precarious and comes with lots of financial uncertainty. If you can become a paid member, please do.

Without your support, I will not be able to continue this work. Please know that I am immensely grateful for your generosity!

Become a Member

If a paid membership is currently not an option, the best way to support Democracy Americana is to share this piece here on Substack as well as on social media - and recommend my work to people you think might be interested.

You can also subscribe to the free version of the newsletter here on Substack: I will transfer all new subscribers coming in here over to Democracy Americana’s new home to make sure you are not missing anything.

Subscribe now

Donald Trump is outlasting the Republican establishment: The people who thought they could control him, harness the “populist” energies he was mobilizing for their own purposes; those who initially vowed to resist his temptation, but then quickly acquiesced; the people who constantly debased himself in his service and their quest for domination.

It has occurred to me that my life choices may not have been ideal if I am thinking about Lindsay Graham and Mitch McConnell while sitting on a beach during a family vacation at the Atlantic Ocean. Alas, here we are, and I will admit that Graham’s story, in particular, continues to have an effect on me. Not that I am mourning the man who should be remembered as one of Trump’s most willing enablers. Not that his case was so exceptional, in the grand scheme of things - even though few people disgraced and humiliated themselves quite as much as quite as often as Graham did in his struggle to be Donald Trump’s friend. The reason why it is worth dwelling on the last decade of Graham’s life is that it captured the core dynamics that have defined the behavior of the Republican establishment more broadly. His trajectory was precisely that of conservative elites in general: Faced with an insurgency from far-right extremists, they may have initially signaled distance and skepticism. But once it became clear that the base was enthralled with Trump, they quickly fell in line – and in the process made a mockery of every stated principle they ever claimed to follow.

Senator Lindsay Graham from South Carolina passed away on July 11, aged 71. In December 2015, when Donald Trump first rose within the GOP, Graham vowed to stand against the man he called “a race-baiting, xenophobic, religious bigot” in a CNN interview. In May 2016, when Trump was already certain to emerge from the GOP primaries as the Republican presidential nominee, he infamously posted on Ex-Twitter: “If we nominate Trump, we will get destroyed … and we will deserve it.” That tweet, remarkably, is still up. But even though his public comments suggested Graham understood who Trump was and what he represented, he quickly became a staunch defender of the MAGA president during his first term – constantly praising him and fighting for his agenda. Then January 6 happened and Graham once again seemed to change course. The night of the Insurrection, he declared on the Senate floor: “Trump and I, we had a hell of a journey. I hate it being this way. Oh my God I hate it … All I can say is count me out. Enough is enough.”

Alas, it wasn’t enough for Lindsay Graham. Just as the rest of his party quickly closed ranks behind Trump once the initial shock of the assault on the Capitol faded, Graham returned to doing whatever he could to be in Trump’s good graces.

What is there left to say about the rather pathetic case of Lindsay Graham? About his trajectory and that of his fellow Republican elites?

It has been a little over two weeks since he passed away, and I know a lot of people have weighed in. You know how we roll here at Democracy Americana (especially while I am nominally on vacation…): This is not the place for immediate commentary. It is unlikely I will ever be among the quickest to offer my take. But I believe there is value in letting the dust settle a little bit and then go deeper.

This piece is about Lindsay Graham and, more importantly, about the broader questions his case rases: About the trajectory of the Republican Party and the conditions that made Trump’s rise possible; about what made Trump attractive to conservative elites and why they are sticking with him; about the relationship between opportunism and ideology, cowardice and reactionary conviction; about the logic of escalation that is fueled by a sense of having burned all bridges; and, ultimately, about the permission structure that has governed rightwing politics for decades.

Unless we understand that, we understand nothing. Not how the Republican Party got to this point. And not where it is most likely going next.

Continue reading with a Membership

The rest of this piece is reserved for paid members of Democracy Americana.

If you are not a member, but still want to read Democracy Americana, fear not: I will keep publishing free long-form essays regularly.

But if you can, please consider becoming a paid member over on Steady: You’ll gain access to additional member-exclusive essays every week - and members also have access to the audio versions of all my writing in podcast form wherever you get your podcasts.

Most importantly, if you value this independent work, please know that it is your support and your generosity that is making it possible. Democracy Americana is entirely reader-supported and my main source of income as an independent writer.

Continue reading with a Membership

I initially published this piece as a member-exclusive essay. But I am taking down the paywall for this one, as I believe it remains relevant as a potential antidote to cynicism and declinism.

Before we start, let me remind you that I have launched a version of this newsletter in German. Same content, same analysis – only in German. If that is of interest to you, head over to Demokratie Americana (where all pieces should be available within a few hours of publication on here). Please help me spread the word!

This essay is cross-posted from Steady, where Democracy Americana is now mainly hosted.

I am also making it available here for those who prefer to read (and perhaps share!) the piece in the Substack app. If you want to support my work, you can head over to Steady and become a paid subscriber.

Democracy Americana is my main source of income as an independent writer. If you are reading the free version of this newsletter, I sincerely appreciate your time and effort engaging with my work. Please share it widely to help me reach new readers.

If you want to support my work, you can head over to Steady and become a paid member. You will gain access to special benefits – including many additional essays and the chance to download the audio versions of all my pieces in podcast form.

Most importantly, Democracy Americana is a publication solely funded by readers. I need your support to continue this work. Thank you!

Become a member

If a paid membership is currently not an option, the best way to support Democracy Americana is to share this piece here on Substack as well as on social media - and recommend my work to people you think might be interested.

You can also subscribe to the free version of the newsletter here on Substack: I will transfer all new subscribers coming in here over to Democracy Americana’s new home to make sure you are not missing anything.

Subscribe now

This moment will stick with me for a while. Last week, I was invited to give a talk at the “Academy by the Sea” on Sylt, the largest of Germany’s islands in the North Sea. The Academy is part of a network of adult education centers across the country, offering people the chance to enroll in a large variety of courses or engage with any topic imaginable via public lectures and events. My talk was scheduled as an evening lecture as part of the Academy’s summer program. Enrollees spend several days, perhaps even weeks at the Academy, which is located in the island’s northwest, far away from Sylt’s busy, overly crowded tourist hotspots; it is nestled in the dunes, feels beautifully secluded from the rest of civilization, with direct access to miles and miles of some of the most gorgeous beaches you’ll ever see.

To be honest, I almost felt bad about giving my talk – to force people who come to the island to combine vacation and education to think about Donald Trump. Or rather: Where Trump’s rise sits in the larger context of U.S. history. For 45 minutes I talked about the struggle over national identity and who gets to define “America,” who gets to belong, and who gets to be included in “We the People.” And as you might imagine, it wasn’t exactly an uplifting conversation. The discussion went long; we were about two hours in when the Academy’s director wanted to call it a night. But that’s when a woman sitting in the first row, right in front of me, spoke up. I had noticed several times throughout my talk that she was visibly wrestling with the story I was presenting, clearly affected by what I was describing. And now she insisted that we couldn’t possibly end like this – after several questions dealing with the Supreme Court, and tech elites, the extremists who will come after Trump, and the so-called liberal international order that all prompted me to emphasize that there was not going to be a return to “normalcy” anytime soon, that America was going to face the challenge to rebuild and reconstruct (rather than merely restore) if and when Trump was finally removed from power. No, I couldn’t possibly release everyone into the night like this. She demanded I give the audience something else: There had to be something people could do, something to carry us all forward?

I admit my instinct normally is to reject these kinds of questions. I try hard not to overstep and stick to my actual expertise. I am not a politician; I don’t have any experience in organizing or political activism. I offer my analysis and hope to contribute to getting the diagnosis right, for whatever that’s worth. But in this moment, perhaps because the setting was so distinct from the kinds of environments where these talks usually take place, I did feel an obligation to offer something more. Not some clearcut answers I don’t possess, or simplistic recipes dressed up as “lessons from history,” and certainly not some willfully naïve progress gospel. But a reminder that the situation is not hopeless – that there is, in fact, a glass-half-full interpretation of our moment in world history. That we could be, as dangerous as this situation is, on the brink of proving, perhaps for the first time ever, that a truly democratic society under conditions of multiracial, multi-religious, gender-egalitarian pluralism is indeed possible.

And so, I made my case: The anti-democratic radicalization of the Right has not been fueled by a sense of strength, but by a pervasive sense of weakness. They are feeling their backs against the wall. And they are reacting to something real: Our “Western” societies have indeed become more pluralistic, less white, less overwhelmingly Christian. In that sense, it was not the perfectly stable liberal democracy that suddenly fell into crisis (because such an order had never existed), but white Christian patriarchal dominance – what the Right likes to call the “natural order” – that has been coming under pressure.

The fact is that reality has been moving away from those who refuse to imagine “America” as anything other than a land defined by white Christian patriarchal domination. And no matter how loudly they insist to be representing the “will of the people” in pushing back against these developments, their reactionary ideas are opposed by a stable majority. According to the latest survey conducted by the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) and published under the title “Competing visions of America at 250,” almost two thirds of Americans prefer religious pluralism over the idea of a Christian nation; almost eight in ten Americans want the country to be a racially diverse nation with people from all over the world as opposed to a nation of and for white people “with Western European heritage.”

These are impressive numbers, from a high-quality study and confirmed over and over again in other survey data. The clear majority don’t want to live in MAGA land.

Such data needs to be contextualized, certainly. We must wrestle with what it can and cannot tell us about the political and societal conflict, with how to relate it to the MAGA regime’s brutal rollback of racial and social progress and to broader tendencies of a reactionary sentiment in matters of race and gender beyond just the MAGA Right that have shaped American society recently.

But we must not dismiss these clear indications that a strong majority of Americans is opposed to MAGA’s war on pluralism. If we do, we not only fail to understand that the key threat emanates from a radicalizing minority. We also fail to counter the ubiquitous sense of decline and the temptations of despair and cynicism by reminding ourselves that we are confronted with a world-historic chance. In a way, we have never been closer to finally realizing the promise of egalitarian democracy that is entailed in the idea that “all men are created equal.”

So, let us grapple properly with the survey data that seeks to capture the majority’s affirmation of pluralism, with the countervailing forces of reaction and resentment that are tearing America apart – and let me try to make the best possible case that the glass is actually half-full.

Reaction, retrenchment, dealignment

If you have been following my work for any length of time, I hope you won’t suspect me of being naively optimistic or unduly sanguine about the political situation in the United States. Almost every piece I write, almost every interview I do revolves around the radicalization of the American Right as the core threat to democracy and the rule of law – and about how much mainstream observers have ignored, downplayed, and underestimated it for far too long.

Unfortunately, the leaders of the political mainstream have mostly clung to the idea that the best way to handle this ongoing radicalization is to parrot the Far Right on immigration and “culture war” issues as if we didn’t have mountains of empirical evidence that adopting far-right positions and rhetoric only ever helps the Far Right.

This disastrous course of action has not only been fueled by tactical considerations, but also by reactionary impulses that transcend the Far Right. A pervasive anti-“wokeism” has taken hold of the political imagination from the Center-Right all the way to many corners of the Left. Even before Trump returned to power, it was undeniable that America had entered an anti-feminist backlash and a general moment of racial as well as cultural retrenchment.

Finally, recent election across the “West” have proven how large the reservoir of anti-system voters is, how much the electorate is defined by an anti-elite sentiment and distrust towards established political institutions – which very much includes both major parties. This provides fertile ground for those who promise to demolish the “liberal” order. Even beyond those who are ideologically attracted to such a hierarchical vision, the Right’s project appeals to a sense of discontent and disaffection – to those who may feel that *any* revolution is better than maintaining the status quo or perpetuating “the system.”

This piece is free to read for everyone.

But recently, only paywalled pieces have generated new memberships and thereby revenue. I am hoping we can buck the trend so that I can keep publishing free essays like this one regularly. That is crucial for the long-term viability of this publication, as it is the only way to achieve visibility and thereby reach new readers.

Please help me by supporting Democracy Americana with a membership:

Become a Member

Affirmation of progress and pluralism

But as much as it may often seem that way, these intersecting tendencies of reaction and discontent are not the only forces shaping America today. Two things are true at the same time. The recent reactionary retrenchment is real and eminently dangerous. The percentage of people who believe America has become “too soft and feminine,” for instance, has been on the rise (though almost exclusively among Republicans, it should be noted); according to Gallup, the support for same-sex marriage has decreased by six percentage points since 2023 (from 71 to 65 percent); and the percentage of people who, as Gallup framed it, agree that “gay or lesbian relations are morally acceptable” has gone down from 71 in 2022 to 62 today.

However, it is important to contextualize these most recent trends by widening the time horizon. For instance, in 1996, only 27 percent of people believed that “same-sex marriages should be valid” – before support rose steadily until it peaked at over 70 percent in 2022/23. We see a similar trend when it comes to lgbtq+ rights: According to Gallup, only 40 percent of people considered gay or lesbian relations to be “morally acceptable” in 2001. That number went up to 71 percent in 2022, before support started to decline slightly.

I am not trying to tell you that the recent trend isn’t deeply concerning. But let us remember that only a minority stands behind MAGA’s assault on the rights and dignity of anyone they define to be lesser somehow, anyone who deviates from what they want to impose as the “natural” order of white male Christian domination.

I hope we have all moved past the point of falling for the assertion that “real America” is with Trump. Everything about this MAGA regime is unpopular. That starts with the wannabe-tribune of the people himself. Under 40 percent of Americans approve of the job he’s doing as president, and that number is trending down. A majority of the population doesn’t just “disapprove” of Trump: According to the latest PRRI survey, almost 60 percent agree that “President Trump is a dangerous dictator whose power should be limited before he destroys American democracy.”

It is not just Trump himself the majority of Americans doesn’t like, his policy agenda is also vastly unpopular. On basically every single issue, a majority disapproves of what this government is doing – and that includes Trump’s handling of the economy and immigration, where he had strong approval ratings coming into his second term.

Crucially, the rejection of the core tenets of MAGA goes much deeper and extends to the broader vision of and for the country today’s Right wants to impose. This is what is so striking about the results in the “Competing visions of America at 250” report PRRI just released. If you are unfamiliar with the work of PRRI, which was founded in 2009, trust that they produce high-quality surveys that stand out because they are not so much concerned with the day-to-day political business, but aim at exploring the underlying attitudes, values, and shifts in national identity. This latest survey was conducted among a representative sample of over 5,000 adults from all 50 states; interviews were conducted online between May 1-18.

Consider the image of the country MAGA propaganda wants to present as “real America” – an image too often perpetuated by mainstream media outlets devoted to the idea that Trump somehow has a special connection to “regular folks” and channels something profound about what “the people” want: Americans are fed up with the multicultural madness that is being imposed on the nation by “globalist” elites; they desire an America that affirms its white Christian heritage rather than sacrificing it at the altar of “woke” radicalism; they don’t want the country to be overrun by strangers and foreigners from all over the world and instead demand to be living amongst people who look like them (white), pray to the same (Christian) God, and share the same cultural background… Now look at how these ideas compare to the reality that is captured in the PRRI survey – how stark the contrast is between Americans as they exist in the feverish minds of the Trumpist Right and the majority of people who call this country home.

We should all carry these numbers like a shield:

Religious pluralism or a Christian nation? 64 percent prefer “the U.S. to be a nation made up of people belonging to a wide variety of religions” – as opposed to only 34 percent who prefer “the U.S. to be a nation primarily made up of people who follow the Christian faith.”

A nation defined by racial, ethnic, and cultural pluralism or a white, “Western” country? 77 percent say they want America to be “a nation made up of people from all over the world” – as opposed to just 20 percent who “prefer the U.S. to be a nation primarily made up of people of Western European heritage.”

“What does it mean to be American?” PRRI asked all the participants. Coming in with near-unanimous support: “Believing in individual freedoms (93%), the Constitution (91%), and the Declaration of Independence (88%)” as well as “accepting diverse backgrounds (89%).” But what about being Christian? Just 43 percent. And the “Western European heritage” MAGA’s leaders are so obsessed with? Just 23 percent of people agree that it is important to “being truly American.”

No matter how you slice it and dice it: The notion that the 2024 presidential election was some kind of referendum that produced the eternal “will of the people,” or that Trump’s victory was the result of a lasting rightward realignment, that it should be interpreted as a “mandate” to remake the Republic, is utterly untenable. When Americans are asked directly about matters of national identity, about what they believe the nation is supposed to be, about the values and ideas that should define it, about who gets to belong, it becomes obvious that the country is deeply divided – but it is not a 50:50 split. Today, America is much more adequately described as a two-thirds/one-third nation, with the larger share of the population firmly in the camp of pluralism.

MAGA’s leaders are scared

MAGA America is a minority project, its core tenets vastly unpopular with a clear majority of the people.

And deep down, the Trumpist leaders know this, even if they don’t want to admit it, perhaps not even to themselves most days. Maybe there was a phase of drunken euphoria after Trump’s election victory, extending into those first few months after his return to power when resistance was slow and ineffective, when they forgot; but as societal resistance has been hardening considerably, they must have remembered that they are facing a majority that is affirming and protective of pluralism, in a society that has been pluralizing and liberalizing for decades.

Forget, for a moment, the established narrative about the inevitable rise of “rightwing populism”: These are not people who act like they are feeling strong and confident. They are constantly trying to project strength, yes: They want us to believe they represent a vital, virile alternative to anemic liberal democracy – and a cohesive vision far superior to weak, divisive pluralism.

But right underneath the propaganda surface, rightwingers are also obsessed with their own weakness. The Trumpist imagination is defined by a sense of besiegement: Powerful enemies everywhere, anti-American forces both from without and from within conspiring to destroy the nation. Relentless self-victimization – a veritable persecution complex – has been a defining feature of Modern Conservatism since its inception. The heightened version of this type of siege mentality we are seeing now points to something that is diagnostically important: Until very recently at least, the Right was indeed losing the fundamental struggle over what kind of country “America” should strive to be.

Socially, culturally, and – most importantly, perhaps – demographically, the country has moved away from the rightwing ideal since the middle of the twentieth century. It is not just a figment of the reactionary imagination that America has become less white, less religious, and more pluralistic in basically every dimension. As a result, the conservative hold on power has become tenuous. In a narrow political sense, they may be in charge right now – in the White House, in Congress, at the Supreme Court. But it is not just political power the Right seeks. They desire cultural domination and affirmation. In the cultural sphere, the public square, and across many societal dimensions like the family, the shift in power away from white male conservatives has been more pronounced.

The Right has engaged in a comprehensive countermobilization in response – a radicalization fueled by an escalating siege mentality that was the reason why the Right united behind Trump in the first place. The reactionary intellectual sphere expressed this sense of panic and besiegement most clearly. Shortly before the 2016 election, for instance, Michael Anton, who rose to the position of Director of Policy Planning in the State Department in the second Trump administration, channeled this perception in an infamous essay published in the Claremont Institute’s online magazine, titled: “The Flight 93 Election.”

It is undoubtedly one of the core texts of Trumpism. Anton called on conservatives to unite behind Donald Trump – the Right’s last best hope of defeating Democrats who, according to Anton, constituted a threat to America akin to the terrorists of 9/11. The Republican establishment had failed to stop them; far more radical measures were needed than what a “normal” conservative politician was willing to even consider. Trump, however, was different: “Trump, alone among candidates for high office in this or in the last seven (at least) cycles, has stood up to say: I want to live. I want my party to live. I want my country to live. I want my people to live. I want to end the insanity.” Since Trump, in this interpretation, wasn’t bound by norms, traditions, or precedents, he alone could be counted on to do whatever was necessary to fight back against the “wholesale cultural and political change” - to “charge the cockpit,” in Anton’s crude analogy, like the passengers of United Airlines flight 93 on September 11, 2001, one of the four planes hijacked by terrorists: It never reached its target and crashed into a field in Pennsylvania, as the passengers decided to fight back. In many ways, the “Flight 93” mentality has completely taken over the Right – it is now all “Flight 93” politics, all the time.

However, the first Trump presidency did not bring about the comprehensive undoing of all the racial and social change the Right disdains so much. Instead, it ended with millions of people protesting against racist police violence in the wake of the murder of George Floyd. On the Right, the mass mobilization of a multiracial coalition was not seen as a glimpse of a desperately needed racial reckoning, but instead as the harbinger of national doom. The summer of 2020 was yet another in a series of inflection points that further escalated the perception of imminent threat and loss, of being overrun. It has become a key element of rightwing political identity to regard the protests as irrefutable proof that radically “Un-American” forces of “woke” extremism were rising, that “the Left” had started its full-on assault.

And then Joe Biden “stole” the 2020 election. Or, if he *didn’t* steal it outright, that was even worse somehow. Because it proved, as Glen Ellmers, another Claremont-affiliated far-right thinker put it in an infamous essay published in the spring of 2021, that democracy itself subverted the will of “the people” by allowing a supposedly illegitimate coalition to pursue its fundamentally “anti-American” project. This only strengthened his conviction that the forces seeking to destroy “authentic America” were rapidly gaining ground. In his view, everyone who voted for Joe Biden and his “progressive project of narcotizing the American people and turning us into a nation of slaves” was simply not worthy of inclusion in the body politic. Ellmers declared that “most people living in the United States – certainly more than half – are not Americans in any meaningful sense of the term.” This was a desperate situation that required radical measures: “Conservatism is no longer enough,” the title of Ellmer’s essay, quickly became the rallying cry on the Right. Ellmers demanded to redraw the boundaries of citizenship and exclude over half the population. For “authentic America” to survive, he was sure, a different kind of leader had to emerge: “What is needed, of course, is a statesman who understands both the disease afflicting the nation, and the revolutionary medicine required for the cure.”

During the Biden interregnum, the notion that conservatism was obsolete in a world in which there was nothing left to conserve became fully hegemonic on the Trumpist Right. As the radical “Left” had taken over all the major institutions of American life and had already ravaged what had been good and noble, there was so little time left to for the comprehensive “counterrevolution” that was needed to save the nation.

That is exactly the sentiment that animated all the planning operations on the Right during the Biden years. As Kevin Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation, put it in his Foreword to Project 2025’s policy report: “Every hour the Left directs federal policy and elite institutions, our sovereignty, our Constitution, our families, and our freedom are a step closer to disappearing. Conservatives have just two years and one shot to get this right. With enemies at home and abroad, there is no margin for error. Time is running short. If we fail, the fight for the very idea of America may be lost.”

Paranoid in power

While the wannabe-intellectual leaders of the Trumpist Right are publishing treatise after treatise drenched with rampant anxiety, the rest of the movement delivers more evidence every day that MAGA continues to exist in a constant state of fearfulness and imagined emergency even as they are in charge of the government.

Over the weekend, for instance, far-right pastor Dale Partridge shared what he presented as a harrowing experience with his large online following: “What radicalized me today? My flight from Austin to Phoenix had a DEI female captain, two gay male flight attendants (one barely spoke English), we had insane turbulence (people clapped when we landed), and I was surrounded by foreigners.” Notice that absolutely nothing unusual or threatening happened to this grown man who calls himself an “aspiring general in the culture war” in his bio on Ex-Twitter. And yet somehow, he isn’t embarrassed to tell the world that he was frightened during a regular Southwest Airlines flight because it put him in proximity to human beings who don’t reflect his exact image back at him.

Or look at the collective freakout on the Right in reaction to the Supreme Court narrowly confirming that the Fourteenth Amendment still exists and indeed says what it plainly says, therefore refusing to let Trump nullify birthright citizenship via presidential executive order. This simple affirmation of the status quo that has existed since the late 1860s is being widely treated as a DEFCON 1 situation. Media activists, Republican elected officials and nativist agitators like Stephen Miller quickly converged on the idea that the only way to save America now was to bar pregnant foreigners from traveling to the United States. Many on the Right went much further still. Sean Davis, the CEO and co-founder of the rightwing magazine The Federalist, suggested it might be better to “deny entry to all female foreigners” – or, actually, “require sterilization of all foreign visitors prior to entry.”

If, at this point, you are wondering how any adult person in their right mind could possibly allow themselves to indulge such whiny-totalitarian nonsense, remember that to a Trumpist dude there might not be a more terrifying creature on this planet than a pregnant foreigner. When rabid misogyny and nativist rage combine, you get such dreams of eugenicist terror.

What a bunch of pathetic creeps. Theirs is an empire of white male fear, panic, and desperation.

The path forward

We find ourselves in a situation that is immensely dangerous, no doubt. But the idea of a “crisis of liberal democracy” that has dominated the political and broader public discourse since at least the double catastrophe of Brexit and Trump’s first victory in 2016, tends to miss something important about this moment. If we want to understand how we got to where we are today, and grasp the central dynamic that defines the present, it is better to turn the ubiquitous crisis discourse on its head. The reason why the Right has been radicalizing is that the traditional hierarchies of race, gender, and religion are in crisis – that order of white Christian patriarchal dominance that had been left largely untouched by a rather narrowly restricted version of democracy until quite recently. In crucial ways, it is the conception of “real America” as a white Christian patriarchal homeland that has come under enormous pressure. And that is precisely why the Right is freaking out and why they are giving themselves permission to openly embrace authoritarianism.

The stakes in this moment are so high because of the world-historic significance of the current fight: Is it possible to establish a stable liberal democracy under conditions of gender-egalitarian, multiracial, multi-religious pluralism? Such a political, social, and cultural order has never existed. There have been several stable, fairly liberal democracies – but either they have been culturally and ethnically homogeneous to begin with; or there has always been a pretty clearly defined ruling group: a white man’s democracy, a racial caste democracy, a “herrenvolk” democracy. A truly egalitarian multiracial, pluralistic democracy in which an individual’s status was not determined to a significant degree by race, gender, religion, or wealth? I don’t think that’s ever been achieved anywhere. It’s a vision that reactionaries abhor – to them, it would be the end of “Western civilization.”

Unfortunately, this doesn’t mean that the reactionary retrenchment we are experiencing right now will inevitably fail. The forces of reaction might be in charge for quite some time. But let us get out of this defensive, defeatist posture that too many who should be proudly defending a vision of democratic pluralism have adopted.

When I was – rightfully! – called out and challenged at the end of my talk on the island in the North Sea last week, this is the case I tried to outline. My glass-half-full reading of our moment. I can’t really say how much of an impact it had on the audience. But I felt relieved. It felt right to end on a note of determination. To end on the notion that we may yet prove to ourselves and all future generations that it is indeed possible to build a society worthy of that grandest and noblest of ideas: That all people are created equal. A society that finally keeps its promise.

Thank you for reading - and please know that I am deeply grateful for your support and your generosity!

Democracy Americana is my main source of income as an independent writer. Want to support my work? Consider becoming a paid member:

Become a Member

Before we start, let me remind you that I have launched a version of this newsletter in German. Same content, same analysis – only in German. If that is of interest to you, head over to Demokratie Americana (where all pieces should be available within a few hours of publication on here). Please help me spread the word!

This essay is cross-posted from Steady, where Democracy Americana is now mainly hosted.

I am also making it available here for those who prefer to read (and perhaps share!) the piece in the Substack app.

Democracy Americana is my main source of income as an independent writer. If you are reading the free version of this newsletter, I sincerely appreciate your time and effort engaging with my work. Please share it widely to help me reach new readers.

If you want to support my work, you can head over to Steady and become a paid member. You will gain access to special benefits – including many additional essays and the chance to download the audio versions of all my pieces in podcast form.

Most importantly, Democracy Americana is a publication solely funded by readers. I need your support to continue this work. Thank you!

Become a Member

You can also subscribe to the free version of the newsletter here on Substack: I will transfer all new subscribers coming in here over to Democracy Americana’s new home to make sure you are not missing anything.

Subscribe now

“American history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful, and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it.”

I have used this quote several times before in my writing. I think about it a lot. It is from a speech James Baldwin delivered in October 1963, titled “A Talk to Teachers”. Baldwin was born in Harlem in 1924. His mother had fled the Jim Crow South. Baldwin himself left America as a young man in the late 1940s to flee the racist discrimination he experienced. For most of his adult life, France would remain his base; but often he returned to the United States to take part in the Black freedom struggle. Baldwin was a novelist and a poet, but also a political intellectual and civil rights activist. And he was a forceful, magnetic speaker. His perspective on U.S. history is among the most profoundly true and insightful things anyone has ever said about the United States. Anyone who works and thinks about America’s past, present, and future should adopt it as a guiding paradigm. And I believe it can also help us navigate this acutely perilous political moment in which we find ourselves right now. More various, more beautiful, more terrible. We need to grapple with all of these conflicting dimensions.

When big anniversaries came around, Americans at various points in the country’s history were asked to do a little bit of that grappling, perhaps; but mostly, they were invited to come together and celebrate the nation and its origins. In the past, such anniversaries tended to produce an outpouring of patriotic sentiment even after moments of immense strive – or perhaps precisely because these occasions seemed to justify papering over the cracks and the crises. That was an attractive proposition at least to those who were fortunate enough not to have their lives and livelihoods acutely threatened by the conflicts that continued to shape life in America.

In 1876, for instance, the United States celebrated its centennial a little over a decade after the most devastating war in the country’s history – a war fought within, against those who had betrayed the Union in service of what they believed was their right to enslave fellow human beings. As the celebrations took off, the South was officially still under military occupation. The attempt to impose biracial democracy in the former Confederacy was met with unspeakable levels of white supremacist violence. Out west, the U.S. army was fighting a brutal war to drive Native Americans off their land. And yet, at least white people in the North and the South displayed a patriotic spirit of reconciliation – eager to look forward, excited about the future. From May through November 1876, Philadelphia hosted the world’s fair and called it the Centennial Exposition: About ten million people, roughly twenty percent of the population, came to embrace the technological marvels on display.

In 1976, the United States was coming off a period of escalating political violence and assassinations, riots, mass protest. The nation had just suffered a humiliating defeat in Vietnam, struggling to understand the destructions and war crimes America had inflicted upon a far-away land, all in the name of defending freedom, somehow – sacrificing tens of thousands of their own young men in the process. Watergate was still casting a dark shadow over American politics, Nixon’s many abuses of presidential power had shaken the belief in the political institutions and the stability of the rule of law. And yet, America’s bicentennial – perhaps the largest celebration in the nation’s history – once again sparked a spirit of reconciliation. “We have inherited a great tradition,” President Gerald Ford declared, “but it is our job - older and younger people joining together - to see to it that when our ancestors (according to the National Archives, Ford really seems to have said “ancestors” and not “descendants” here? Hm.) meet here 100 years from now, they can say that what was done here on this date was the kick-off for a new century of unity, and progress, at home as well as abroad.” History as a call to unify around the shared American project and look towards the future in optimism.

This time around, however, in 2026 it is not working. America’s semiquincentennial is a bizarre spectacle, entirely overshadowed by the delusions and the authoritarian desires of a fundamentally ridiculous and profoundly dangerous man. Trump is utterly incapable of unifying, except around shared grievances directed at some “Other.” He spent the Fourth of July raging against enemies real and imagined. Otherwise, he is mostly occupied with imposing vain projects of self-aggrandizement on the nation: His ballroom, the triumphal arch he wants to erect – a self-monumentalization fundamentally incompatible with a democratic Republic.

Most Americans don’t want to celebrate. Not with Trump, certainly. His “Great American State Fair” on the National Mall, a vehicle for deranged MAGA propaganda, has not been well attended, to put it mildly. And overall, the mood is not very patriotic, at least not by American standards. The percentage of people who say they are “extremely or very proud” to be an American has fallen, according to Gallup, from 85 twenty years ago to 53; if we isolate for people who say they are “extremely proud,” it has cratered from 59 percent in 2006 to merely 33 percent today.

And therein lies, potentially, one of the silver linings of the Trump era. What the country needs now is not some anniversary-induced nostalgia or unity based on willful ignorance. It needs a serious reckoning as the basis for what might hopefully be a new reconstruction. At the Quarter Millenium, Donald Trump is the President of the United States. And whatever else is true about the most powerful nation on earth, this fact alone forces a reckoning.

Contested ideals and the origins of a national struggle

Why does America celebrate the Fourth of July 1776 as its birthday?

It wasn’t until the Treaty of Paris in September 1783 that Britain officially recognized the United States as an independent and sovereign nation. But fair enough, no need to wait around for permission from the King of England.

Famously, John Adams initially assumed July 2 would be the day celebrated as the key moment in America’s history, as he wrote in a letter to his wife, Abigail. That day, the Second Continental Congress had adopted a “Resolution for Independence,” deciding that the American colonies would indeed break away from the British Crown and henceforth exist as “free and Independent States.”

We probably shouldn’t make too much of that difference between July 2 and 4: On the Fourth, the final version of the Declaration was adopted by the Continental Congress – and, crucially, announced to the public. Since this was all about “the people” asserting their right to independence, it makes sense to focus on July 4. But it is noteworthy that this also focuses our attention on the Declaration itself, as opposed to the mere fact of the colonies deciding to secede – and that means: on the text and the ideas expressed therein.

The Declaration of Independence, drafted by Thomas Jefferson, has three distinct parts. The most famous passage comes in the second paragraph of the opening section:

“We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness – That to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed, that whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these Ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its Foundation on such Principles, and organizing its Powers in such Form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.”

This first part of the Declaration serves to establish a general justification for why, when people are confronted with a tyrannical government, they have the right to overthrow that government by revolutionary means. In this context, we must read Jefferson’s assertion of a “self-evident” truth that “all men are created equal” as the affirmation of an abstract principle: He is referring to some imagined natural state that predated government. This was not intended as a radical call for political and social equality in the here and now, but as a theoretical argument for why, based on that natural state, only certain forms of government should be considered legitimate, while others are in violation of that abstract principle. Once he had established that framework, Jefferson proceeded to make the case, in part two of the Declaration, that the American colonists were indeed facing such a form of illegitimate tyranny. And since he felt the need to provide evidence, he listed 27 grievances against the King.

Having established that tyranny is illegitimate, and that the colonists were facing tyranny, Jefferson comes to what is presented as an inevitable conclusion in part three. He declares independence:

“We, therefore, the Representatives of the united States of America, in General Congress, Assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the Name, and by Authority of the good People of these Colonies, solemnly publish and declare, That these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States.”

It’s a fine piece of political writing and argument. But whatever Jefferson’s exact intention may have been, once the Declaration was published, the meaning of these words and assertions was immediately contested. It turns out there was little that was “self-evident” about the ideas in the Declaration – at least not when it came to the question of what role, exactly, they should play in shaping the political and social reality of this young nation, who they should apply to and who would remain excluded. It is one of the key characteristics in U.S. history: Since the moment the country was founded, these questions – and thereby: the idea of “America” itself – has been endlessly, relentlessly contested. 250 years of continuous conflict. And for two-and-a-half centuries, all political movements of consequence in the United States – those fighting for emancipation and equality as well as those devoted to upholding white domination – have claimed the mantel of the Revolution, have insisted to be striving to realize America’s founding ideals.

This piece is free to read for everyone.

But recently, only paywalled pieces have generated new memberships and thereby revenue. I am hoping we can buck the trend so that I can keep publishing free essays like this one regularly. That is crucial for the long-term viability of this publication, as it is the only way to achieve visibility and thereby reach new readers.

Please help me by supporting Democracy Americana with a membership:

Become a Member

Emancipation and equality now!

When I say the meaning of the ideas and ideals contained within the Declaration, and the role they should play in American life, was endlessly and immediately contested, I am not just talking about abstract debates between intellectuals and political elites. Those excluded from the promise of equal status and participation read Jefferson’s words not just as a statement of lofty principles, but as a call to action, an emancipatory agenda to be enacted.

Last week, Jamelle Bouie, America’s most incisive columnist, wrote about how Black Americans – free and enslaved - immediately seized upon the emancipatory potential of the Declaration. In a piece that I found incredibly moving and inspiring, Bouie demonstrated how Black people used the language of the Declaration, presented their cause in the idiom of the Revolution; how they referred to these ideas, invoked and wielded them as an instrument. As Bouie puts it: “The Declaration worked as both an indictment and a promise.”

The Declaration as indictment and promise: Throughout U.S. history, we find exactly this dynamic in the freedom struggle of any group for which American democracy existed as a promise only, but not as a reality. “When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence,” Martin Luther Kind declared in what came to be known as his “I have a dream” speech, delivered in August 1963 in front of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC, “they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the ‘unalienable Rights’ of ‘Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.’” It was finally time, King insisted, for America to make good on that noble promise:

“It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note, insofar as her citizens of color are concerned. But we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt. We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation. And so, we’ve come to cash this check, a check that will give us upon demand the riches of freedom and the security of justice.”

Martin Luther King spoke almost exactly one hundred years after Abraham Lincoln had codified this reading of the Declaration’s most famous passage – a call to action, and not merely some abstract principle of government – in his Gettysburg address. On November 19, 1863, Lincoln delivered his speech on the fields where the largest battle of the Civil War had been fought from July 1-3, 1863 – a major turning point, as it ended Robert E. Lee’s second invasion of the North. “Four score and seven years ago,” the President famously declared, “our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”

Lincoln demanded “that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom.” That is exactly what the Reconstruction amendments to the Constitution after the end of the Civil War were supposed to achieve. The 13^th Amendment, ratified in December 1865, abolished slavery. The 14^th Amendment, adopted in July 1868, established birthright citizenship, formal equality before the law, and the principal of nondiscrimination. The 15^th Amendment, ratified in February 1870, barred the federal government and the states from denying a citizen’s right to vote “on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.”

It is hard to overstate the significance of what happened here. The nation was fundamentally reconceptualized. The Reconstruction Amendments changed the nature of the constitution – the document itself, but also the political and social regime it prescribed – so profoundly that the historian Eric Foner has called it a “Second Founding.” This attempt to transform a nation built on racial hierarchy into a biracial democracy was nothing short of revolutionary. And that is exactly how the framers behind these amendments saw it. They explicitly intended regime change: From a regime grounded in slavery to a regime grounded in equality.

White male freedom vs “all men are created equal”

Thomas Jefferson, who wrote the revolutionary egalitarian promise into what quickly became one of the nation’s sacred texts, did not himself live up to these ideals. During his life, he enslaved more than 600 people. Some of his fellow Founding Fathers were committed abolitionists. He was very much not. While he felt conflicted about the institution of slavery and believed it should eventually be abolished, he did not take any significant steps towards that end as one of America’s most powerful political leaders, nor did he free the people he himself held in bondage. The contrast between ideal and reality was always stark.

Against those who invoked the Declaration as a promise of emancipation, those who were devoted to upholding white domination also claimed the Founding, interpreting and weaponizing it in opposition to the idea of equality. In Dred Scott v. Sandford, for instance, the Supreme Court ruled in 1857 that Black people, whether free or enslaved, were not and could never be citizens because they were inferior and they didn’t have the necessary hereditary connection. But what about “all men are created equal”? As Chief Justice Roger Taney declared in his decision:

“The general words above quoted would seem to embrace the whole human family, and if they were used in a similar instrument at this day would be so understood. But it is too clear for dispute, that the enslaved African race were not intended to be included, and formed no part of the people who framed and adopted this declaration.”

Just a few years after Taney’s shameful ruling, those who committed treason against the nation and seceded from the Union to defend what they believed to be their “right” to enslave others also claimed to represent the true legacy of the American Revolution. Had the Declaration not clearly established the right to overthrow tyranny – the tyranny of the North, in this case? According to Southern secessionists, it was Lincoln’s government that lacked the “consent of the governed” and had therefore lost all legitimacy; the Confederacy would therefore carry on the revolutionary heritage!

The Confederacy was vanquished on the battlefield – but the ideas that animated it, the quest to order society along strict hierarchies, was unfortunately not. After a little more than a decade, America’s first attempt at biracial democracy during the Reconstruction era was drowned in ostensibly “race-neutral” laws and almost unimaginable excesses of white reactionary violence.

The level of biracial equality and democratic participation the South experienced during Reconstruction would not be reached again until almost a full century later.

Throughout U.S. history, any attempt at leveling existing hierarchies of race, gender, religion, and wealth has inevitably led to a massive countermobilization orchestrated by the forces of reaction. And those who spearheaded that countermobilization have often claimed that it was not their refusal to accept egalitarian democracy that was a betrayal of the founding ideals. It was those who pledged to take the idea that “alle men are created equal” seriously who supposedly defied real American values. Some even went so far as to assert that Abraham Lincoln, because he attempted to recenter the American experiment around the idea of equality, was the big bad guy in U.S. history. In 1966, for instance, Frank S. Meyer, a prominent conservative intellectual, explained why he believed it was this exact moment at the end of the Civil War when the nation took the wrong turn, away from “freedom,” as he defined it, and towards “equality”: “The freedom of the individual person from government, not the equality of individual persons, is the central theme of our constitutional arrangements.” Meyer had been instrumental in bringing together self-declared libertarians, traditionalists, and reactionaries in a new Conservative Movement, uniting them all under the banner of anti-liberalism. He continued to explain in National Review, the flagship publication of the Conservative Movement: “Freedom and equality are opposites; the freer men are the freer they are to demonstrate their inequality, and any political or social attempt – like those so frequent in the twentieth century – to enforce equality – leads inevitably to the restrictions and the eventual destruction of freedom.” Meyer’s concern for “freedom of the individual person from government” obviously did not extent to the millions of people who had to endure slavery. Just like Roger Taney a century earlier, he simply didn’t regard them as citizens or members of the body politic.

To be fair, Meyer’s hostility towards Lincoln was far from the consensual position among mainstream conservative intellectuals at the time. However, there certainly is a very strong tradition on the Right of conceptualizing liberty/freedom on the one hand and equality on the other as ideas that are inherently in tension with each other – and of siding decisively against equality. There is a fairly straight line from such ideas to venture capitalist Peter Thiel in early 2009, shortly after Barack Obama had entered the White House, proclaiming: “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.” He meant his own freedom and that of his fellow tech barons to do as they please.

Proponents of an ethno-religious nationalism that was unwilling to conceive of “America” as anything but a land dominated by white Christians have always claimed to be defending freedom and liberty. Their overriding concern was the liberty of certain “deserving” or “virtuous” individuals to be more, have more; their allegiance was to a particular form of “freedom” – the white male freedom to take the land and curtail the liberties of others.

Every form of domination in American history has been justified in the name of this “freedom.” The loudest and most influential defenders of Native American dispossession, slavery, and racial segregation have always presented themselves as champions of freedom from government tyranny or federal overreach.

Those who fought against de-segregation and civil rights in the 1950s and 60s made the same claims. In his inaugural address as governor of Alabama in January 1963, George Wallace vowed to defend “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, and segregation forever” not because of racism, no! But to defend the “freedom” of the South and its true people. “Let us rise to the call of freedom-loving blood that is in us,” Wallace declared, “and send our answer to the tyranny that clanks its chains upon the South.” Yet again it was time to take a stand and “sound the drum for freedom.” It is a particular kind of freedom Wallace was concerned with: The freedom of white people to dominate and rule, and to curtail the freedom of others.

Just a few days after returning to power in January 2025, Donald Trump established, per executive order, the White House Task Force on Celebrating America’s 250th Birthday. It is separate from the non-partisan Semiquincentennial Commission that Congress set up in 2016. The task force is entirely a vehicle for Trump’s MAGA delusions - he insists it be called “Freedom 250.” Considering that it stands in that long tradition of white freedom to dominate, the name actually fits.

Without your support, I will not be able to continue this work. Please know that I am immensely grateful for your generosity!

Become a Member

Blood and soil nationalism

MAGA is entirely opposed to the egalitarian aspiration. That is what defines Trumpism as a political project: The promise to roll back the achievements of the Second Reconstruction that was codified in the civil rights legislation of the 1960s; to undo whatever racial and social progress towards a fairer, more egalitarian America has been achieved over the past century, to reconceptualize national identity and drastically narrow the boundaries of who gets to belong. This is the Right’s defining project: To vanquish the very idea that America should aspire to be a nation defined by equal citizenship in a pluralistic, multiracial society.

In fact, MAGA is not content with merely interpreting the founding ideas in a decidedly anti-egalitarian way – they reject the notion of America as a credal nation entirely, fully embracing an aggressive form of blood-and-soil nationalism instead.

Frankly, to their credit, they couldn’t possibly be more open and explicit about it either. Remember when JD Vance introduced himself to the Republican convention as the vice-presidential nominee in July 2024 with a speech that had exactly this as its central claim: That America was *not* defined by ideas. It was the “homeland,” as Vance called it repeatedly, for those who are bound to it by ancestry, across many generations, whose blood and bones, quite literally, are tied to the soil. While Vance agreed that “America was indeed founded on brilliant ideas,” he only counted the rule of law and religious liberty amongst those – while not mentioning equality at all. In fact, he specifically rejected the notion of America as defined by a unifying creed: “America is not just an idea. It is a group of people with a shared history and a common future.”

Who is part of this group of people? That is decided by the right kind of ancestry and blood, as determined by the Right. Vance traced his own history back many generations to the mid-nineteenth century as proof that he belonged among those who are one with the “homeland” they inherited. “They love this country,” Vance proclaimed, “not only because it’s a good idea, but because in their bones they know that this is their home.” These “real Americans” have become one with the land – a Volk inseparable from their homeland.

What, to MAGA, is the American Revolution?

Their rejection of America’s civic, credal nationalism notwithstanding, the MAGA Right still very much claims the legacy of the Founding for themselves. To the extent there is more behind this than just a kind of rah-rah patriotism that demands to dominate all the national symbols, what they find attractive is the revolutionary gesture. They no longer consider themselves “conservatives”: There is nothing left to conserve, the Trumpist Right is convinced, as “leftist,” “woke,” “globalist” forces have long taken over all the institutions and power centers of America life and destroyed whatever was good and noble about the nation. In this situation, only a comprehensive “counterrevolution” may suffice. “We are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be,” Heritage Foundation president Kevin Robert infamously threatened two years ago, on July 4, 2024. The MAGA Right views the legacy of the Revolution as license to rage against their enemies.

Furthermore, MAGA leaders are engaged in a concerted effort to mandate a retelling of U.S. history in which the Revolution is celebrated as the origin point of white Christian conquest. Last September, for instance, Eric Schmitt, the Republican Senator from Missouri, delivered a remarkable speech at the National Conservatism conference, titled: “What is an American?” These annual “NatCons” serve as a gathering of all the different intellectual factions and self-proclaimed thinkers on the Right who share an ethno-nationalist vision for America as well as a commitment to intellectualize Trumpism. Schmitt opened by raging against the “fundamentally post-American ruling class” that had been in charge of the country for too long and, as Schmitt saw it, included the Republican establishment as well neoconservative circles with a misguided devotion to spreading democracy abroad. They were all, the senator explained, engaged in a project to destroy the nation from within. What had facilitated their assault was the notion that America was just an idea which, according to Schmitt, turned America into “a vehicle for global liberalism”:

“We were told that the entire meaning of America boiled down to a few lines in a poem on the Statue of Liberty, and five words about equality in the Declaration of Independence. Any other aspect of American identity was deemed to be illegitimate and immoral, poisoned by the evils of our ancestors. The true meaning of America, they said, was liberalism, multiculturalism and endless immigration.”

Against such insidious notions, Schmitt presented a definition of America based on “Western heritage” – and a very narrow conception of who gets to claim it:

“The Continental Army soldiers dying of frostbite at Valley Forge, the Pilgrims struggling to survive in the hard winter soil of Plymouth, the pioneers striking out from Missouri for the wild and dangerous frontier, the outnumbered Kentucky settlers repelling wave after wave of Indian war band attacks from behind their stockade walls … They fought, they bled, they struggled, they died for us. They built this country for us. America, in all its glory, is their gift to us, handed down across the generations. It belongs to us. It’s our birthright, our heritage, our destiny.”

Go through all the groups Schmitt lists who “built this country for us” and think about who is not included, whose descendants are therefore not among “Us” and do not belong in this version of America: Native Americans, who Schmitt explicitly names as the savage enemy; enslaved Blacks, struggling for freedom; immigrants of color from all over the world, believing in the dream that if they worked hard, they might build a better life for themselves and their children.

This is not particularly subtle, is it?

Who gets to be a patriot?

What is the correct response to such aggressive, retrograde, violent, exclusionary “patriotism”? Should all those who want better for America renounce the aspirational tradition of egalitarian pluralism as pointless, superficial, and purely hypocritical? I believe that would be wrong and counterproductive. The MAGA Right claims that “real America” was only ever intended to be, only ever existed, and therefore must continue to exist as a white Christian ethno-state. Let us not help them perpetuate the idea that the injustices of the past and present, which they idolize as a manifestation of the “natural order,” represent the one true essence of the nation.

Too long have rightwingers been allowed to drape their grievances and bigotries in the nation’s collective symbols, to call on the patriotic mythology of the nation in order to pretend that their desire to dominate is somehow an expression of the timeless essence of the nation. The American “Left,” very broadly defined, has struggled to contest this terrain. I count myself among those who are – rightfully, I believe! – wary of any political project that wraps itself in the flag, of anything that could, perhaps even unwittingly, help sanitize the nation’s history and legitimize the destructive forces of nationalism. But this reluctance, the tendency to abdicate and surrender the field of patriotism to the Right has allowed a bunch of ethno-nationalist extremists to present themselves as the guardians of the national mythos.

Their claim to be the sole representatives of “authentic” Americanism has no historical basis. There is indeed an American tradition of egalitarian pluralism that puts their vicious, exclusionary domination fantasies to shame.

More various, more beautiful, and more terrible

Sometimes, when the situation seems particularly bleak and frustrating, I’m trying to cling to the idea that perhaps this is at least clarifying. Trump, because he is so outrageous, has made it obvious beyond serious contestation that there is no – nor has there ever been – a democratic consensus in the United States, that we must discard whatever vestiges of a triumphalist exceptionalism may still exist in our minds, that there is no reason whatsoever to indulge the complacency that comes with assuming we are on some inevitable trajectory towards progress.

Trump is, in this sense only, doing us a favor: He has pushed the door towards a more sincere reckoning wide open. The goal should not be to go from a willfully naïve exceptionalism that glorifies American history as 250 years of stable democratic consensus to denouncing every invocation of democracy and equality as an insidious lie. The goal should be to understand U.S. history as defined by a continuity of conflict over the nation’s identity, ideals, and boundaries. That doesn’t just allow for a much more plausible interpretation. It also generates a far more inspiring story, as it shifts our focus to those who fought and struggled, often at great personal sacrifice, to finally achieve a land that is truly dedicated to the proposition that all people are created equal.

“American history,” remember, “is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful, and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it.”

Thank you for reading - and please know that I am deeply grateful for your support and your generosity!

Democracy Americana is my main source of income as an independent writer. Want to support my work? Consider becoming a paid member:

Become a Member

Before we start, let me remind you that I have launched a version of this newsletter in German. Same content, same analysis – only in German. If that is of interest to you, head over to Demokratie Americana (where all pieces should be available within a few hours of publication on here). Please help me spread the word!

This essay is cross-posted from Steady, where Democracy Americana is now mainly hosted.

I am also making it available here for those who prefer to read (and perhaps share!) the piece in the Substack app. If you want to support my work, you can head over to Steady and become a paid subscriber.

The intro to this piece is free for everyone. If you want to read more than the preview or gain access to the audio version of the newsletter, please consider becoming a paid member of Democracy Americana, which is solely funded by readers and constitutes my main source of income as an independent writer.

Without your support, I will not be able to continue this work. Please know that I am immensely grateful for your generosity!

Become a Member

If a paid membership is currently not an option, the best way to support Democracy Americana is to share this piece here on Substack as well as on social media - and recommend my work to people you think might be interested.

You can also subscribe to the free version of the newsletter here on Substack: I will transfer all new subscribers coming in here over to Democracy Americana’s new home to make sure you are not missing anything.

Subscribe now

The old world is dying. Defending the status quo is no longer an option: It is neither an adequate response to the challenge we face nor is it viable electorally. We live in a profoundly disruptive moment. Restoration won’t do. A credible transformation is the only way forward.

I have not been able to do much work lately. Most of Europe has been suffering under an unprecedented heatwave. Friday broke the record for the hottest day ever recorded in German history: 41.3 degrees Celsius (a little over 106 degrees Fahrenheit) near Saarbrücken in the country’s southwest. It took just 24 hours for the record to be broken again: 41.5 degrees Celsius (106.7 Fahrenheit) were measured on Saturday in Saxony-Anhalt in eastern Germany.

I live in Hamburg, up north, which sits at the same latitude as Dublin, Ireland, Liverpool, UK, and Edmonton, Canada. It is a port city, close to the North Sea, shaped by a maritime climate. Extreme heat is supposed to be rare up here. We had 39.4 degrees Celsius (103 Fahrenheit) on Saturday, smashing the previous record for the month of June.

Most of my readers live in the United States. Depending on where you are, you may look at these temperatures and think: It’s not *that* bad, is it? But remember, the vast majority of people here have to make it through the punishing heat without air conditioning. Schools and daycares, hospitals, public transportation… AC is rare. In private households, you will almost never find it. I am writing this after spending most of the past 72 hours in our little basement with my family. The rest of the house is basically uninhabitable. We are among the lucky ones: We have a basement.

Why does no one have AC, you may ask? Well, there are many reasons, I suppose – but the most profound one is that our homes and cities were built for a world that is no more. It’s simply not supposed to be this hot so early in the summer and for such a long period of time. But that’s the thing: The old rules don’t apply anymore.

I don’t want to push the symbolic significance of this heatwave too far. But it should serve as a reminder that we are facing major disruptions – politically, socially, technologically, economically, environmentally. And unless we come up with transformative answers that are commensurate with these challenges, we will suffer.

I had planned to write about the bizarre spectacle of America’s semiquincentennial last week – asking what, exactly, it is that we are asked to commemorate at the 250^th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. That piece will be coming soon, hopefully still before the Fourth of July weekend. But today, I want to offer something else – a broader reflection on where this moment sits in history. If I have a core message, it might be this: We are not witnessing some accidental departure - but we are living through a profound disruption nevertheless, one that makes any attempt at “politics as usual” largely obsolete.

I am not just talking about Trump, who is himself more a manifestation than the cause of a long-standing anti-democratic radicalization of the American Right. Nor am I merely referring to the political situation in the United States more broadly, which is best understood as the latest iteration of a struggle that stretches back all the way to the Founding. I believe we are at an inflection point not just in the history of the American Republic, but indeed in recent global history.

I know this all sounds rather abstract: A grand reflection on historical continuity and disruption... And I understand this may seem frustratingly removed from the more immediate, more pressing tasks of the day. But bear with me: I believe it is precisely because the challenges ahead are so profound that we better come up with a good answer to the question of where this moment sits in history. What are the broader historical forces that got us here, that are tearing the present apart and shaping a future whose contours we cannot yet grasp?

Unless we get that diagnosis right, we are doomed to fumble about in the dark. Unless we grasp the assignment, our response is destined to fall woefully short of the task ahead.

The more I talk to journalists, politicians, and diplomats the more I realize how much work there is still to be done. Understanding why the old world is truly dying, acknowledging that there will not be a return to the status quo ante, that any political project built around the idea of restoration must inevitably fail… it is a massive challenge, both politically and intellectually. But there is simply no way around it.

So, here, in an attempt to convey the stakes of our moment, are eight propositions about this inflection point in history: About how the political, economic, technological, and environmental crises intersect and why they are escalating now – and about the political implications of recognizing the profound disruption we are witnessing.

Continue reading with a Membership

The rest of this piece is reserved for paid members of Democracy Americana.

If you are not a member, but still want to read Democracy Americana, fear not: I will keep publishing free long-form essays regularly.

But if you can, please consider becoming a paid member over on Steady: You’ll gain access to additional member-exclusive essays every week - and members also have access to the audio versions of all my writing in podcast form wherever you get your podcasts.

Most importantly, if you value this independent work, please know that it is your support and your generosity that is making it possible. Democracy Americana is entirely reader-supported and my main source of income as an independent writer.

Continue reading with a Membership

Before you start, let me remind you that I have launched a version of this newsletter in German. Same content, same analysis – only in German. If that is of interest to you, head over to Demokratie Americana (where all pieces should be available within a few hours of publication on here). Please help me spread the word!

This essay is cross-posted from Steady, where Democracy Americana is now mainly hosted.

I am also making it available here for those who prefer to read (and perhaps share!) the piece in the Substack app.

Democracy Americana is my main source of income as an independent writer. If you are reading the free version of this newsletter, I sincerely appreciate your time and effort engaging with my work. Please share it widely to help me reach new readers.

If you want to support my work, you can head over to Steady and become a paid member. You will gain access to special benefits – including many additional essays and the chance to download the audio versions of all my pieces in podcast form.

Most importantly, Democracy Americana is a publication solely funded by readers. I need your support to continue this work. Thank you!

Become a Member

You can also subscribe to the free version of the newsletter here on Substack: I will transfer all new subscribers coming in here over to Democracy Americana’s new home to make sure you are not missing anything.

Subscribe now

The day after Donald Trump subjected the nation to his deranged birthday party spectacle of violence, the New York Times, on Monday, dropped new reporting that sheds light on how the MAGA government internally contemplated radical steps that would have potentially ended the American Republic.

The reporting focuses on two key moments: First, in late April 2025, White House deputy chief of staff and leading white nationalist ideologue Stephen Miller pushed for the president to suspend habeas corpus for unauthorized immigrants in order to speed up the regime’s mass deportation efforts. Secondly, in late January, Miller and Vice-President JD Vance were urging for Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act and deploy federal troops to suppress the protests against the ongoing paramilitary occupation of Minneapolis carried out by ICE and Border Patrol.

There are no earth-shattering pieces of news in the reporting – the new information generally aligns with how the regime was acting publicly. But we gain a significantly clearer and more detailed picture. And there is also value in having confirmed, with loads of testimony and written evidence, what we reasonably suspected.

(As an aside: The New York Times, with its access and unmatched resources, can produce such reporting – and that is tremendously valuable. It is also, at the same time, tremendously shameful for star reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan to *not* report this information immediately and instead sit on it until it is time to juice sales for their upcoming book, which will be published next week…)

The reporting, crucially, provides us with an opportunity to take stock and reflect on three broader questions that determine our understanding of this regime and the state of American democracy:

1) The timeline: When, exactly, did the Trumpists come closest to instituting despotism – and why did they ultimately fail to implement and/or decided against taking the extreme steps they were debating?

2) Internal dynamics and fault lines: What does the reporting tell us about the different factions within the MAGA government, the exact fault lines between them, and the role of Trump himself in the decision-making process?

3) The future of the MAGA government and movement: What are the implications of this internal strive for what comes after Trump?

What’s in the reporting?

Two camps emerge from the New York Times reporting. On one side, there are those who constantly demanded escalation, led by Stephen Miller and JD Vance. On the other, a group of people centered around White House chief of staff Susie Wiles.

As a kind of smoking gun, the Times presents the secret memos written by a lawyer named Will Scharf who is serving as the White House staff secretary. Scharf seems to have addressed these memos to Wiles, outlining the arguments against suspending habeas corpus and invoking the Insurrection Act.

The internal debates over taking more radical measures that would have, in a very real sense, instituted despotism culminated in two separate moments. First, Miller’s attempt to get Trump to suspend habeas corpus for unauthorized immigrants seems to have peaked in late April 2025. Anyone who has been detained by the government has the right to challenge their detention in court – they must have the chance to petition a court to order their release. That is what habeas corpus means: It is the bedrock principle of the rule of law, enshrined in Article I of the U.S. Constitution. But when you are trying to “purge” millions of people from the “homeland” as quickly as possible, due process is really annoying – and so Stephen Miller wanted to get rid of it.

However, in one of his memos, White House lawyer Scharf reminded his fellow Trumpists that the Constitution permits the suspension of habeas corpus only in times of war, armed rebellion, and invasion – and only when authorized by Congress. And even then, Scharf argued, the courts had made it clear that some measure of due process needed to be available to defendants even while habeas was suspended. The key concern Scharf tried to convey was that the courts were guaranteed to step in; the administration would be tangled up in legal battles, with little chance of success. Lots of self-inflicted damage for no plausible gain.

What role, exactly, the Scharf memos played in thwarting Miller’s plans is not clear from the reporting. Did they actually convince others to change their stance – or mostly serve to strengthen the position of those who had always been opposed? In any case, as the Times, puts it: “After weeks of uproar, and disagreement between government officials on whether it could be done, the proposal eventually faded from view.”

The internal conflict over whether or not to invoke the Insurrection Act, which allows the president to deploy troops domestically for law enforcement purposes, lingered throughout the year 2025 before coming to a head in late January 2026, just days after masked Customs and Border Protection officers had killed Alex Pretty on January 24, and within weeks of an ICE agent murdering Renée Good in the streets of Minneapolis.

Once again, Miller was pushing for Trump to escalate further, and this time he had JD Vance by his side who lead the charge during a meeting in Susie Wiles’ office. As the New York Times puts it: “Mr. Vance got to the point. They needed to invoke the Insurrection Act, swiftly, to crush the unrest in Minnesota. It would be painful in the short term, he said, but the message it would send - that paid agitators could not get away with disrupting ICE operations - would make sure no one tried it again.”

However, Miller and Vance failed to convince the rest of the administration. Scharf and others in the Wiles camp argued that the situation in Minneapolis was already a public relations disaster for the Trump government – “the public was recoiling,” as deputy chief of staff James Blair put it, according to the Times –, and escalating further was only going to cost them more support from the public. The meeting ended without a firm decision. But Miller and Vance had effectively failed to achieve their goal of getting Trump to use the military to suppress protests.

This piece is free to read for everyone.

But recently, only paywalled pieces have generated new memberships and thereby revenue. I am hoping we can buck the trend so that I can keep publishing free essays like this one regularly. That is crucial for the long-term viability of this publication, as it is the only way to achieve visibility and thereby reach new readers.

Please help me by supporting Democracy Americana with a membership:

Become a Member

Not ready yet for a paid membership? You can subscribe to the free version of the newsletter:

Subscribe now

The timeline: When the Republic almost ended

What are we to make of all this? How should this insight into the internal debates of the Trump government impact our understanding of the MAGA regime and the state of American democracy?

Let’s start with the timeline. The New York Times reporting has, understandably, generated a lot of attention – and much of it seems to be focused on the moment in late January when JD Vance called for Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act. The prospect of troops being deployed against American citizens in the streets of their hometown is indeed scary. And yet, I believe the key inflection point in this story came earlier, in the spring of 2025, when the regime was deliberating the suspension of habeas corpus.

If you have been reading or following my work in recent months, you will have heard me confess that I was never more pessimistic than in that very moment. The reporting, to me, confirms that this was indeed the most dangerous moment for the Republic.

I know it feels ages ago. But let us remember where the country stood. In the first three months after returning to power, the Trumpists managed to turn America from a democratic system – albeit one with significant flaws – into one that no longer deserved to be counted among the world’s democracies. The speed and the scope of the early assault on the constitutional order, on the foundations of democratic self-government was unprecedented. There was, unsurprisingly, zero pushback from Republicans in Congress. The leadership of the Democratic Party was shell-shocked and mostly occupied with figuring out whether or not it wanted to accept the role of an opposition party at all. The utter devastation of government brought about by Musk’s DOGE hordes, who had been given free rein to wipe away the system, was breathtaking. And a pervasive tendency to acquiesce kept America’s civic institutions from deploying their enormous financial resources to resist Trump’s attacks; U.S. civil society seemed to prove a lot less democratically resilient than it should have been on paper. More than anything else, my number one takeaway from the first two to three months of Trumpism in power was: The constitution doesn’t mean anything if no one enforces and defends it. If those tasked with upholding the constitutional order and defending democratic self-government aren’t actually able or willing to even put up a proper fight, then how much does it really take to bring the system down?

It was in this situation that the regime was escalating its mass deportation plans more quickly and more forcefully than most observers had expected. And in their attempt to purge “alien enemies” and the “enemy within,” they were suspending constitutional protections left and right. Despotism seemed to be rising fast.

The one immediate source of resistance in this early phase was the court system. Federal judges across the country were deciding against the administration almost on a daily basis. The were, at the very least, slowing the regime down – giving the rest of the system time to shake off the initial shock and, crucially, giving the American people time to organize on the ground.

With hindsight, we can see more clearly that time was working against the Trumpists. They had risen to power with a short-term strategy aimed at quickly overwhelming the system, hoping to neutralize all meaningful political and societal resistance within just a few months, forcing a comprehensive regime change before anyone could really react. They had an initial strategy to quickly overwhelm the liberal enemy – and nothing else. Any delay was threatening the whole project.

People like Stephen Miller understood this. That is why he pushed so hard for the suspension of habeas corpus: Mass deportation had been central to the Trumpist promise, it formed the core of the ideological vision of restoring national greatness by purging enemies without and within; the regime needed to produce results in this area – and it needed to find a way to handle the courts as the major hurdle that stood in their way.

I am recapitulating the events of last spring in such detail because I believe it’s impossible to overstate the significance of that moment. In the quickly escalating conflict between the Trump regime and the courts, the disappearing of Venezuelan migrants and the illegal deportation of Kilmar Abrego Garcia turned into major focal points.

In mid-March, the Trump administration had rounded up hundreds of migrants from Venezuela, declared them members of the Tren de Aragua criminal organization based on no credible evidence whatsoever, then declared Tren de Aragua a terrorist organization and invoked the Alien Enemies Act to remove them all from the country without due process. They were flown out to El Salvador on March 15 and dumped in what is best described as a labor camp, to be incarcerated indefinitely in one of the most brutal, most inhumane environments imaginable, subjected to physical and mental torture. Kilmar Abrego Garcia was on one of those planes with them (although in his case, the administration did not invoke the Alien Enemies Act, specifically).

The courts intervened immediately. In fact, when the Executive Order invoking the Alien Enemies Act came out and news broke that hundreds of Venezuelans were being flown out of the country, hearings were already ongoing before the federal district court for the District of Columbia in Washington, DC, because the ACLU had filed a lawsuit in anticipation of exactly these actions. And the presiding judge James Boasberg ruled that all these people from Venezuela needed to remain in the country so that the process that immigration law dictates could actually play out: He ordered the planes that were already in the air to turn around.

Would the Trumpists dare to ignore explicit court orders?

Publicly, they adopted a maximally aggressive posture. Trump called judge Boasberg a “radical left lunatic” and called for his impeachment. Speaker of the House Mike Johnson even brought up the idea that maybe the Republican-led Congress should “eliminate” those federal courts that proved unruly. And hardly a day went by without Stephen Miller ranting against the “tyranny” those “rogue Marxist judges” were imposing on America, and his desire to quash what he called a “far-left judicial riot.”

But in court, the government’s lawyers had, in the first two months after Trump’s return to the White House, pursued a different strategy, oscillating between open acts of defiance on the one hand and an attitude of obscuring and evading without openly defying on the other. This incoherence was the result of different MAGA factions pushing competing ideas for how to handle the courts: Some wanted to preserve plausible deniability and preferred a strategy of autocratic legalism, remaining within the confines of the law, at least nominally; others, like Miller, desired to properly go to war with the courts.

In late March, it seemed pretty clear that the overall trajectory pointed towards escalation. Even in court filings, the Department of Justice increasingly adopted an aggressive language towards judges. And on March 24, the DoJ informed the district court in Washington, DC that the government would not provide any further information regarding the deportation of the Venezuelan migrants and instead declared that the regime’s authority, because it derived from the “mandate of the electorate,” superseded and nullified any right of the court to intervene.

In this immensely dangerous situation, the Supreme Court got involved. First, on April 7, the rightwing majority (minus Amy Coney Barrett) ruled largely in favor of the administration, vacating a Temporary Restraining Order from a lower court, thereby allowing the government to continue the deportation and disappearing of migrants while invoking the authority of the Alien Enemies Act. Yet the Court also decided that detainees still had some due process rights and, specifically, needed to be given a chance to file a habeas claim. That part of the ruling the Trump administration completely ignored, however – prompting the Court to issue a late-night order on April 19 to stop removal under the Alien Enemies Act of anyone in custody at a particular detention center in Texas, because it was so utterly obvious that none of the people detained there had been given any meaningful chance to bring a claim. So egregious was the conduct of the administration that only Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas dissented from this decision. The whole thing was very typical for the Roberts Court: Chief Justice John Roberts really wants to help the Trump government – but he doesn’t like it when the Trumpists make him look like a fool for doing so. You can have your mass deportation, Roberts had basically told the government, but can we please make it so that we can keep pretending we are upholding the rule of law? Stephen Miller, however, did not want to pretend.

And now Miller had a problem, as several of the conservative justices had made clear there was *some* line they weren’t willing to cross on this issue. That is why Miller wanted to keep pushing – and to eliminate habeas corpus entirely. Allow no legal recourse whatsoever, so that no court ever gets to intervene and slow down the purge.

Why this would have ended the Republic

I know it sounds dramatic, but had Trump actually suspended habeas corpus unilaterally, without authorization from Congress, it would have been a potentially lethal blow to the American Republic as an experiment in democratic self-government.

First of all, this would have been a radically unconstitutional step. Habeas corpus is the most foundational principles on which the rule of law is built. It goes back centuries, to at least the Magna Carta in 1215. Some legal principles are hard to grasp – this one is not. If the government can arbitrarily detain you, all other rights you may possess on paper are null and void. The Framers of the U.S. Constitution understood this clearly, which is why they enshrined it in Article I, Section 9, Clause 2: “The Privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it.”

Anyone who has been detained by the government has the right to challenge their detention in court. They must have the chance to petition a court to order their release. The burden of proof is on the government: It must convince the court that an individual’s detention is indeed lawful. Otherwise, that individual must be freed.

Secondly, suspending habeas corpus unilaterally would have taken the conflict between the Trump administration and the courts to a whole different level. The courts would have undoubtedly intervened and ruled against the government. At that point, the Trumpists would have been forced to either retreat in shame – or make good on their threats that Trump, as the embodiment of the “will of the people,” was no longer bound by the law or the constitution.

Finally, the Trumpists would have inevitably extended the suspension of habeas corpus beyond just unauthorized immigrants sooner or later. This regime, after all, is centered around the promise of purging not only the “illegal aliens” and “alien enemies” but also the “enemy within” who is supposedly in cahoots with those nefarious outside forces. There is no way around the escalatory logic built into these foundational claims.

Before you continue, can I bother you one more time?

Today, you are reading a free article that I am making available to everyone. I would love to continue to offer these essays for a broad audience. However, long-form pieces like this take a ton of time and effort to research, write, and edit.

As an independent writer, I rely on the revenue generated by paid memberships as my main source of income. If you are a frequent reader of Democracy Americana, I am certain you will benefit greatly from a paid membership. I publish member-exclusive essays every week - and members can also download the audio versions of all my writing in podcast form wherever you get your podcasts.

Most importantly, if you value this independent work, please know that it is your support and your generosity that is making it possible.

And if a paid membership is currently not an option for you, there are other ways to help: Word-of-mouth is essential, and personal recommendations have an enormous impact. So, please share this piece on social media or tell a family member, a friend, a neighbor, a colleague about Democracy Americana. Thank you!

Become a Member

They deliberated ending the Republic… but then didn’t dare to do it

It is crucial we grapple honestly with how seriously the Trumpists deliberated despotism – and with the fact that those who demanded it are still very much part of the inner core of this regime.

However, we also need to acknowledge that they ultimately decided against taking that step. They didn’t dare to suspend habeas corpus. And despite all the aggressive “will of the people” posturing: They didn’t start entirely ignoring the courts either.

For instance, the Department of Justice did return Kilmar Abrego Garcia to the United States on June 6. Twice the regime detained him afterwards – twice a court ordered him released again. And release him they did. What he and the Venezuelan migrants who suffered torture in CECOT had to endure has certainly nothing to do with justice. But it is also not the case that the Trumpists went ahead and simply abolished the whole “liberal” court system.

And this is where we still are, over a year later. No matter how many times Stephen Miller may declare all dissident judges to be insurrectionists and domestic terrorists: The federal courts continue to act as the most effective bulwark in defense of democratic self-government and the rule of law. Hundreds of lawsuits have been filed against the administration, and in the vast majority of those, federal district courts have sided against the government, with federal judges issuing injunctions or restrictions that have undoubtedly slowed down the authoritarian assault. Yet the administration is still participating in the judicial system. They are still sending lawyers to argue in court, they are appealing to the Supreme Court, thereby acknowledging some legitimacy of the process. Despite all the posturing, the threats, the authoritarian propaganda about the “will of the people” prohibiting the courts from intervening: They haven’t really pulled the trigger.

Several inflection points – and regime retreats

Understanding what happened here, in that moment in the spring of 2025, is so important because it was the first of several times since Trump returned to power that the regime pushed the country right up to the edge of the kind of authoritarian escalation that would have taken America across the line into full-blown autocratic territory… but then failed and/or proved unwilling to actually go there.

There is a pattern here that stands in contrast to the idea of a relentless, unstoppable authoritarian advancement. Several times the Trumpists seemed poised to vanquish the democratic opposition, break through whatever obstacles the constitutional order was still placing in their path, and wipe away the system entirely – but then were either unable or didn’t dare to force that next step.

It happened again in the early summer, when the deployment of National Guard troops to Los Angeles seemed to suggest the regime was ready to use emergency powers to quash the resistance in urban centers – but then pulled back from several major cities at the end of 2025; it happened after the murder of Charlie Kirk in September, when the Trumpists laid the pseudo-legal groundwork for a sweeping criminalization of all political and societal opposition – but then didn’t actually implement the type of comprehensive oppression the Right has been clamoring for. It happened, finally, in January, when the regime pondered invoking the Insurrection Act, but ultimately did not – and was instead handed a massive defeat at the hands of the good people of Minnesota who decided they were not going to acquiesce as their neighbors were being terrorized in the streets by masked agents of the state.

Among all these inflection points, the ultimately aborted push to suspend habeas corpus last spring stands out to me as particularly dangerous and significant because at that moment, the Trump regime was overall in a much stronger position than at any point since.

With every passing month since, Trump has lost public support. The myth of a foundational rightward realignment faded, as did the idea of Trump as the tribune of the people. Especially working-class voters, young people, and Latinos, whose larger-than-expected support had fueled Trump’s 2024 victory, quickly moved away from the president. Meanwhile, societal resistance has hardened. Whoever is still clinging to the idea that Trump’s agenda, his broader vision for the country, is supported by anything close to a majority of Americans is either not paying attention at all – or simply not arguing in good faith.

That doesn’t mean that these later inflection points weren’t immensely dangerous, or that there is no more cause for concern. The outcome of this struggle is not determined. But in the spring of 2025, before the massive decline in public support, before the tremendous mental decline the president has evidently been experiencing, the Trumpists were in a stronger position to end the Republic than they have been at any point since.

Internal dynamics, factions, fault lines – and the role of Trump

Why and how did the Trump government decide to *not* suspend habeas corpus or invoke the Insurrection Act? Who was responsible for those decisions? What was the role of Trump in all of this? The New York Times reporting provides a window into the internal dynamics, the factionalism, and the decision-making process that is shaping the actions of this regime.

It was always obvious that the MAGA government – just like the broader MAGA movement – doesn’t exist as a monolith. There are different factions and there is real friction between them. The reporting reminds us that there are not only different ideological camps, pursuing overlapping, but distinct visions of what America should look like. There are also, for lack of a better word, fault lines defined by temperament. The different factions aren’t entirely in agreement about how far they should escalate – they differ in terms of appetite for radicalism. Those two dimensions, ideological extremism and temperamental radicalism, are certainly correlated. It is not a coincidence that Stephen Miller, a full-on white nationalist ideologue, has consistently been pushing for escalation. But there are evidently other factors playing a part.

The overriding concern among those who argued against the kind of escalation Miller and Vance demanded was to avoid self-inflicted damage. That doesn’t mean they might not also have substantively disagreed. But what they feared, first and foremost, was a high-stakes battle with the courts they believed the administration would lose – leading to an ongoing public relations disaster and the further loss of public support.

The fact that public opinion so clearly factored into these decisions is unequivocally good news. It means there are still people in the White House and around Trump who follow “normal” political incentives – like: If what you are doing is vastly unpopular, maybe try to correct course. Their influence must be limited, as this regime has so far been largely incapable of adapting to the changing political and public environment. Instead of acting strategically, they keep overreaching, thereby continuously undermining their standing with the vast majority of Americans. These are the actions of people who are perceiving the world almost exclusively through the prism of the far-right media landscape, they have their delusions constantly reflected back at them and thereby confirmed. It often seems like this regime follows its own metrics, consisting mostly of a chorus of online extremists. Any sign that public opinion can still act as a moderating, restraining influence is therefore welcome.

And what about the man who holds the most powerful political office in the world? What is the role of Donald Trump himself in all of this?

Interestingly, the New York Times reporting dropped the day after Trump’s deranged cage match spectacle. In recent months, his attention seems to have been increasingly focused on such matters of monumental self-aggrandizement: The White House ballroom, the Triumphal Arch he wants to build… All of these projects are of great significance symbolically and politically, as they are manifestations of a worldview that is fundamentally incompatible with democracy. Trump evidently does not consider himself an elected official, but a sovereign – the embodiment of the nation. There is therefore, in his view, no difference between celebrating his birthday and that of the country, no public good he isn’t entitled to abuse.

But obsessing over these projects is also not the same as governing. The day-to-day operation of governing Trump is clearly not very interested in. It is a weird form of personalism we are confronted with. Personalism is the type of authoritarian regime where control is centralized in the hands of a leader figure, the center of gravity is one person at the top (rather than a party apparatus, or perhaps the military), power and influence are entirely dependent on the relationship with the regime’s leader. What we have here is personalism with a lazy, increasingly delusional leader at the top who doesn’t want to be bothered with the actual work of governing and a bunch of sycophants and zealots around him.

In the spring of 2025, the Times reporting suggests, Trump was at least somewhat involved in the deliberations over whether or not to suspend habeas corpus. But even then, he was not willing to fully side with one camp or the other. In January 2026, as his vice-president and chief white nationalist were pushing for him to invoke the Insurrection Act, Trump seems to have been largely absent. For that crucial meeting in late January the Times describes in great detail, Trump was not in the room. In key moments, when different factions within his government were engaged in a struggle for supremacy that would define the trajectory of his regime, Trump either hesitated – or simply couldn’t be bothered to pay attention, participate, and make a decision either way.

Who and what comes after Trump?

I don’t want to get too much into speculative territory, but I do believe this all has some interesting – albeit contradictory – implications for the question of who and what comes after Trump.

JD Vance is Trump’s designated successor. His position is anything but ironclad: His level of support from the base is uncertain; he is likely to face opposition from others like Tucker Carlson who may hope to pick up the mantle of MAGA “populism.” But Vance has the institutional support from the party. As of right now, he must be seen as the favorite to emerge as the GOP’s presidential candidate in 2028.

The question of what to expect from a Vance-led GOP and MAGA government is therefore hard to avoid. Would Vance be more or less dangerous than Trump? If at all possible, we should probably avoid such narrow, binary logic, when the correct answer is probably: “It depends.” In general, having an increasingly incoherent, delusional man like Trump occupy the most powerful political office brings a level of unpredictability and chaos that is unfathomably dangerous. Let us never underestimate how outrageous that situation is.

However, the New York Times reporting is a reminder that JD Vance is a proper extremist who believes his right to rule and impose a reactionary order transcends the law and the constitution. Had he been president in the spring of 2025, he might have gone along with Miller’s fever dream of suspending habeas corpus; in January, a President Vance might have escalated the paramilitary occupation of an American city even further. That he derided the protesters in Minneapolis as “paid agitators” is more evidence of his conspiracism: Vance exists in an information environment shaped entirely by rightwing media and an extremist online scene that has warped his perception of the political conflict for so long that anyone who dares to disagree looks like some acutely dangerous “enemy within.”

As an electoral strategy, it might be difficult for Vance to make Trumpism without Trump work: Trump’s celebrity, the fact that so many Americans mainly associate fame and wealth with him, played a big role in making MAGA’s ideological extremism more palatable for people (or lulling them into a false sense of “He doesn’t mean it anyway”). Vance doesn’t have that. Perhaps that counts as good news? But if Vance were to emerge victorious from what is likely to be a prolonged, chaotic, and dirty struggle between several radical factions for the leadership of post-Trump MAGA, we might also be looking at a more coherently extreme and more ideologically disciplined movement.

Where does it all leave us?

Should we feel more or less optimistic about the fate of the American Republic and the chances of defeating the Trumpist assault on democratic self-government after grappling with the broader implications of what the New York Times reported?

Frankly, if you are left feeling mostly ambivalent upon reading what I have outlined here, we have probably landed in the same place.

Not that it was really needed, but we now possess even more direct evidence that there are powerful people inside this government who are jumping on every chance they get to push for the imposition of despotism. And those people aren’t going anywhere. In fact, Stephen Miller has remained remarkably close to Trump and continues to make sure his white nationalist crusade is a top priority for this regime. His unquenchable desire for escalation has been rebuffed in crucial moments. But the internal dynamics are unpredictable, power may shift his way in just the wrong situation.

Miller, Vance, and the many extremists in this government will continue to look for opportunities to end the Republic. Yet overall, the regime is in a much weaker position to succeed than last spring.

Then again, even if the Trumpists are, as I believe, more likely to fail in their quest to consolidate authoritarian rule across all spheres of American life, they will continue to cause so much damage that by the time they are done, the country will face the daunting challenge of a proper reconstruction. There is no reason to settle back and relax here. There won’t be for a long time.

Thank you for reading - and please know that I am deeply grateful for your support and your generosity!

Democracy Americana is my main source of income as an independent writer. Want to support my work? Consider becoming a paid member:

Become a Member

This essay is cross-posted from Steady, where Democracy Americana is now mainly hosted.

I am also making it available here for those who prefer to read (and perhaps share!) the piece in the Substack app.

Democracy Americana is my main source of income as an independent writer. If you are reading the free version of this newsletter, I sincerely appreciate your time and effort engaging with my work. Please share it widely to help me reach new readers.

If you want to support my work, you can head over to Steady and become a paid member. You will gain access to special benefits – including many additional essays and the chance to download the audio versions of all my pieces in podcast form.

Most importantly, Democracy Americana is a publication solely funded by readers. I need your support to continue this work. Thank you!

Become a Member

You can also subscribe to the free version of the newsletter here on Substack: I will transfer all new subscribers coming in here over to Democracy Americana’s new home to make sure you are not missing anything.

Subscribe now

A little over one month ago the Roberts majority on the Supreme Court gutted what was left of the 1965 Voting Rights Act and functionally ended the civil rights era. Since the moment the decision came down, Republicans have been furiously attempting to undo whatever democratizing progress has been achieved since the 1960s, curtail minority political power, and extinguish multiracial pluralism wherever they are in charge.

With so much at stake in the upcoming Congressional elections, it is understandable that much of the discussion has centered around the question of what this all means for the midterms. As they are frantically redrawing the maps across the South to gerrymander majority-minority districts out of existence, Republicans have suddenly gained six to eight additional seats that were guaranteed go to the Democratic Party. The GOP now goes into the elections with a more significant structural advantage than before the Supreme Court’s Callais decision, the margin Democrats need to get to a majority in the House has gone up to probably around four percentage points. Because Trump and his party are so disastrously unpopular, Democrats remain favored to win at least the House. But this is now more likely to be a narrow election result. And that is dangerous. Much like after the 2020 election, Trump’s attempts to manipulate his way to victory will depend on whether or not he can get enough people in enough positions of influence to go along with his schemes. If the election is not really close, and the chances of getting away with nullifying the results are therefore low, people are less likely to accept the personal risk involved in helping Trump; if it’s tight, the calculus might change for people who believe in the “Big Lie” or simply don’t accept that Democratic governance could ever be legitimate.

All of this is important. And yet, the significance of what is now happening – of what is being done to whatever is left of American democracy – goes so far beyond the midterms, far beyond the partisan struggle in a narrow sense. The intention behind what Republicans are doing is not just to win in November. They are trying to transform the country’s political landscape and remake the face of the Republic.

Let’s make sure we fully understand the political, economic, and social consequences of this annihilation of minority representation; how it further undermines the trust in the country’s political system; how it deepens an ongoing crisis of legitimacy, as the political institutions become ever less responsive and representative; how it exacerbates a process that is tearing the country apart, as the gap between “Red America” and “Blue America” is rapidly widening.

If we want to have any chance of coming up with a response that is commensurate with this challenge, we must first grapple in earnest with the true impact of the end of the civil rights era – and with what the second white reactionary “Redemption” will do to America.

Where things stand

Perhaps it’s useful, as a start, to outline what we already know and where uncertainty lies one month into this new post-civil rights reality in American history. The situation is dynamic, the extent to which Republicans will succeed at curtailing minority influence across the South is yet to be determined.

Some Republican-led states have already managed to significantly roll back minority political representation.

Florida pounced early, passing a new Congressional map two days before the Supreme Court announced its decision in Louisiana v Callais, obviously expecting the Roberts Majority to nullify the Voting Rights Act. Republicans targeted a district in south Florida that was almost 50 percent Black and over 75 percent people of color; they also made sure to split Hispanic voters in central Florida into several districts. Overall, the gerrymander Governor Ron DeSantis signed into law could net the GOP four additional seats. Remarkably, Republicans are doing all this even though Florida voters passed a state ban on partisan gerrymandering in 2010. As always, they act as if the narrowly defined “will of the people” only the GOP gets to represent stands above the actually articulated preference of a majority of Americans.

In Louisiana, Republicans passed a gerrymander that eliminated one of the state’s two majority-minority districts, effectively going from a 4-2 to 5-1 map. To make that happen, they decided to pack all the Black people they could find in the New Orleans/Baton Rouge area in the southeast of the state into a bizarrely shaped new district, so that the other five districts are overwhelmingly white.

Similarly, in Tennessee, Republicans have already enacted a new map that carves up the ninth district – the one around Memphis: 60 percent of the population is Black, about 9 percent Hispanic – distributing minorities across three districts in a way that leaves only white-dominated ones. One of the new districts stretches about 200 miles northeast all the way to the outskirts of Nashville: That’s how far they had to go to find enough white people to make sure Black voting power was sufficiently diluted.

(As an aside: Some fifteen years ago, I remember talking to a former colleague who was working on international human rights politics in the 1970s and had just spent some time investigating the Pinochet regime’s torture campaign in Chile. He was – understandably! – shaken by what he described as the relentless creativity that went into inventing new ways of hurting and humiliating people. When I am looking at these bizarre new maps, I am reminded of that conversation. I guess coming up with ways to disenfranchise and exclude people from political representation is another example of such entirely misplaced creative energy unleashed by the desire to subjugate other human beings. What a marvelous and horrifying species we are…)

Other Southern states have run into more difficulties in their attempt to pass a racial gerrymander in time for the November midterms. Republicans in Alabama sought to gerrymander one of the two majority-minority districts out of existence by re-instituting a map that a federal court had previously blocked because it was so obviously racially discriminatory. I guess they thought no one would dare to object after Callais. But last week, the same federal court did, in fact, issue another injunction, declaring that “We reject in the strongest possible terms the State’s attempt to finish its intentional decision to dilute minority votes with a veneer of legislative regularity.” Alabama will, of course, take this to the Supreme Court. And even if they won’t have the new maps ready for the midterms, there is little doubt they will go back to the drawing board to come up with an even more extreme 7-0 map by 2028.

The same day a court stopped Republicans in Alabama, South Carolina also ran into difficulties. The state house had already passed a 7-0 map, targeting the sole majority-minority seat held by Democrat Jim Clyburn. However, the measure failed in the state senate, where enough Republicans joined Democrats in blocking it. Not that they objected to the general goal of eliminating minority representation: They had reservations because early voting in the primaries had already started and feared a backlash from South Carolina voters if they rushed this through regardless. No doubt, therefore, that the state will have a 7-0 map ready in time for 2028.

The same is, finally, true for Mississippi and Georgia: In both states, Republican governors have stated their intentions to redraw the maps before upcoming elections in 2027 and 2028 – just not in time for this year’s midterms.

Overall, while there is some uncertainty regarding the exact timeline, the overall trajectory and the intention behind it are clear. Currently, Black members make up 14 percent of the House of Representatives, which is about the same as the share of Black Americans in the overall population. But Republicans are determined to change that. About half of the 31 seats currently held by Democrats of color in the South could be eliminated; the Congressional Black caucus could lose about one third of its seats. Even now, Congress overall is significantly whiter than the population, as 74 percent of elected officials in Congress are white, but only about 58 percent of the population. That representation gap is almost definitely going to get bigger.

Before you continue, can I bother you for a minute?

Today, you are reading a free article that I am making available to everyone. I would love to continue to offer these essays for a broad audience. However, long-form pieces like this take a ton of time and effort to research, write, and edit.

As an independent writer, I rely on the revenue generated by paid memberships as my main source of income. If you are a frequent reader of Democracy Americana, I am certain you will benefit greatly from a paid membership. I publish member-exclusive essays every week - and members can also download the audio versions of all my writing in podcast form wherever you get your podcasts.

Most importantly, if you value this independent work, please know that it is your support and your generosity that is making it possible.

And if a paid membership is currently not an option for you, there are other ways to help: Word-of-mouth is essential, and personal recommendations have an enormous impact. So, please share this piece on social media or tell a family member, a friend, a neighbor, a colleague about Democracy Americana. Thank you!

Become a Member

Not ready yet for a paid membership? You can subscribe to the free version of the newsletter:

Subscribe now

How the curtailing of Black and minority representation impacts life in America

One crucial reason why we need to widen our horizon beyond the effect on the midterm elections is the fact that the end of the voting rights order does not just impact the Congressional level. It is in state legislatures, county commissions, city councils, and school boards across large swaths of the country where the effects will be most immediately felt. And they won’t be adequately captured by counting seats either.

If you have read my previous piece, you know that I tried to detail the many ways in which the 1965 Voting Rights Act was a game changer far beyond voter registration and turnout rates. And most of those tremendous achievements are now in danger of being rolled back by a raging reactionary countermobilization.

One crucial effect of the dramatic influx of previously disenfranchised voters after 1965 was the return of actual political competition to the South. The time of unquestioned one-party rule by segregationist Southern Democrats was coming to an end. Republicans today can’t keep people of color from casting their votes to the same extent (although they are certainly working hard to make it more difficult for them); but they can dramatically dilute their voting power and thereby blunt their influence. After 1965, increased political competition and Black representation also led to different policy outcomes. African Americans and other minorities finally became a constituency that politicians had to reckon with; their needs and preferences needed to be factored in – and they finally had a fair chance to elect representatives of their choice who would make sure that these disadvantaged communities could no longer be fully discarded, ignored, and actively punished. As a result, counties and communities with a large Black population received a much larger share of public goods and state funding. Overall, Black economic power increased as this kind of fiscal redistribution combined with improved employment opportunities especially in the public sector, due to anti-discrimination laws and affirmative action. These achievements may not be lost instantly; but all of this is now in danger.

I have found it helpful to read reporting from the local level to get a clearer sense of what this all means in practice, how this all affects the lives of people on the ground in immediate and concrete ways. Late last year, Bolts magazine, which consistently provides excellent independent journalism, had a great story on Fayette County in rural Tennessee, which is about one quarter Black, according to the 2020 census. In December 2023, the county mayor and the 19 members of the all-white county board of commissioners shut down Bernard Community Center, in the small town of Mason. The center had been used for family celebrations, senior breakfasts, communal movie nights, and more events of that kind; it significantly benefited the local Black population. Alas, their concerns and interests were evidently not all that important to local authorities. “If we had different representation on the county commission board, we would have had someone to stand up and fight for us,” a local Black resident told Bolts. So, why does a county that is 25 percent Black have all-white local political authorities? The answer, as almost always, is: By design. In 2021, the country drew a map that eliminated all majority-Black districts and aggressively diluted the Black vote. Local residents, with help from the NAACP, sued the county, alleging that the map violated the Voting Rights Act. And before the Callais decision came down, it seemed like they had achieved a massive victory: Last summer, the county gave in and agreed to draw a new map that includes three majority-Black districts. This revised map would almost certainly provide significant Black representation on the county board. But now the Roberts Court has completely changed the situation. And the hard-fought victory of Black voters in Fayette County, Tennessee, is exactly the kind of political influence that Republicans are now going to extinguish across the South in the wake of Callais.

Republicans want to turn the clock back to a time when politicians could entirely ignore the interests and needs of communities they considered somehow lesser, not part of “real America.” Once they have sufficiently diluted minority voting power, I’m afraid these communities might find it harder to make their voices heard in the Democratic Party also. Even though they may not be on board with the goal of curtailing minority influence, Democrats – certainly in the South – might still be tempted or even forced to focus more of their energy on the white constituencies that still properly count under the warped rules Republicans are now re-creating. A similar dynamic certainly contributed to Republicans abandoning Black people in the South after the end of Reconstruction in the nineteenth century: Once they were fully disenfranchised and therefore couldn’t deliver votes or put pressure on politicians, it became a lot harder to justify advocating for them – or perhaps: a lot easier to legitimize ignoring them. We are, fortunately, not in the exact same situation today: Black people in the South will still be able to influence statewide elections; minority communities are also a much more important part of the Democratic coalition today. But still, the curtailing of minority political representation will have negative ripple effects far beyond the immediate loss of seats in parliamentary chambers.

Descriptive representation and crumbling trust

One concept that is helpful in deciphering and thinking through the deeper effects of the annihilation of minority representation across the South is “descriptive representation.” The basic idea is to describe and measure the extent to which the demographics of elected officials and thus the parliamentary chambers correspond to the demographic makeup of the electorate. The idea is that there is value in having political leaders who reflect the characteristics and demographics of the electorate they represent – especially those that have traditionally shaped the distribution of power like race, ethnicity, gender, and sexual orientation –, as the shared identity and life experience will enable them to do a better job of representing. In a proper democracy, the diversity of the population should be present and reflected in its political institutions and decision-making chambers.

Descriptive representation is not a panacea. In recent years, for instance, the percentage of Black Representatives and Senators in Congress has been roughly proportionate to the percentage of Black people in the overall population. And yet, racism has not been solved; while descriptive representation has increased over the same period, the wealth gap between Black and white in America has exploded since the 1980s.

That being said, we do know that a lack of descriptive representation has corrosive effects on a democratic system. For instance, descriptive representation significantly increases the legitimacy of political institutions among minority and traditionally marginalized groups. Simply put, the proportionate presence of Black people in parliamentary chambers increases the institutional legitimacy among African Americans. The same is also true for other demographics. Citizens generally associate descriptive representation with fairness.

There are, as always, some important caveats. The legitimacy-inducing impact of descriptive representation varies depending on the specific demographic group we are looking at, and also across specific topics. But the general tendency is clear: Descriptive representation strengthens the credibility and legitimacy of institutions. There is nothing specifically American about these findings either: The same effect can be found in survey data from Scandinavian countries, for instance.

Conversely, the lack of descriptive representation – and we might add: the aggressive annihilation of representation – undermines trust, destroys the perception of fairness. America is already facing significant discontent across the political spectrum and a widespread resentment towards political elites. Trust in established institutions more generally has been declining massively. These trends are only going to be exacerbated now, as disadvantaged groups – who have good reason to be skeptical of America’s political system to begin with! – are faced with institutions that are deliberately excluding people who share their identities and can relate to their life experiences.

And you know what, forget all the studies and fancy academic concepts for a second. The basic point is this: As long as our political leaders don’t look anything like the people they are supposed to represent, we cannot pretend to be living in a fair, truly democratic society. As long as one particular demographic – white men – is vastly overrepresented in the halls of power (and not just in politics, but across all spheres of life), we cannot pretend to be living in a fair, truly democratic society. As long as a raging countermobilization against the extension of democratic participation beyond one particular demographic is powerful enough to take over a major party and promptly extinguish minority representation in significant parts of the country, we cannot pretend to be living in a fair, truly democratic society.

For anyone who believes in the promise of egalitarian pluralism, the goal should be to create a society where the status of the individual is not massively determined by race, gender, religion, or wealth. America is now aggressively moving in the opposite direction.

Without your support, I will not be able to continue this work. Please know that I am immensely grateful for your generosity!

Become a Member

A spiraling crisis of legitimacy

Many Americans realize that what is happening around them is incompatible with the democratic promise. This is where the aggravated assault on minority political representation in the wake of the Callais decision intersects with and exacerbates the ongoing crisis of legitimacy America’s political institutions – and American democracy as a whole! – have been suffering for quite some time. It will make America’s political institutions even less responsive, insulate the country’s political leadership even further from the people they are ostensibly representing.

Many of the un- / anti-democratic elements of the American political system are brutally obvious – yet I believe it is worth emphasizing some of the lowlights.

Twice in the twenty-first century, a president came into office despite having lost the popular vote.

Less well-understood than the distorting effects of the Electoral College, perhaps, is the role of the Senate. It is evidently not a representative body – or, rather: it represents states, not people, resulting in a small-state bias that consistently favors the Republican coalition of white conservatives. Throughout the twenty-first century, Democratic senators have represented a larger share of the electorate. But Republicans have won or held a majority of seats in the Senate in 7 out of 13 election cycles. In fact, the last time GOP senators represented more people than their Democratic counterparts was after the 1996 election. Similarly, if we create a popular vote for the Senate and look at the number of votes cast for all 100 seats by combining three two-year cycles, Democratic senate candidates have received more votes for almost thirty years (the last time they didn’t was in the three-cycle stretch from 1994-1998).

Remarkably, five of the six Supreme Court Justices who gutted the Voting Rights Act were nominated by a president who first came into office having lost the popular vote. Three of the six justices that make up the Roberts majority were chosen by Trump in hist first term, after he had received almost three million fewer votes than his opponent.

As a result, a president initially lifted into office by a minority, backed by a Senate elected by and representing a minority, created a hard-right majority on the Supreme Court that has just nullified the most important law ever passed in U.S. history – a law that was backed by a clear majority of Americans.

Amidst the many deliberately undemocratic elements in the architecture that was created for the American Republic, the Founders intended the House of Representatives to be the responsive branch. And comparatively speaking, it still is. In 2024, for instance, the House closely tracked the result of the presidential election: Republicans won a narrow majority of seats – Trump won the popular vote by a similarly narrow margin.

But the House has been on a trajectory to becoming less responsive and less representative for a long time. As Elliott Morris has outlined recently in a comprehensive piece that I strongly recommend you all read, the number of competitive seats in the House has been going down for decades. There were around 100 competitive district in the 1970s – meaning they only had a relatively mild partisan lean, allowing either party a realistic shot at winning. Even before the latest escalation of mid-cycle gerrymandering, that number was down to a little over 40 seats. Unsurprisingly, a big drop came after 2010, when Republicans first escalated gerrymandering in reaction to Obama’s victory. Now, as majority-minority districts are being extinguished, we’ll be left with something like 33 competitive districts, of which only about 15 qualify as a proper toss-up. 15 out of 435.

If we put it all together, the picture that emerges is not pretty: Encroaching minoritarianism; a lack of meaningful political competition in most parts of the country; and political institutions that are increasingly unresponsive and unrepresentative. This is not good. Not good at all.

Red America vs Blue America

Trying to justify their outrageous attempts to gerrymander Black political representation out of existence, Republicans in the South have spent the past month arguing that it is not only their right, but actually their duty to vanquish Democratic elected officials – because only (white) Republicans can represent “our state.”

That’s how Alabama Governor Kay Ivey, for instance, celebrated the chance to dilute and obliterate Black voting power because “Alabama knows our state, our people and our districts best,” and this “win for Alabamians,” as she put it, “enables our values to be best represented in Congress.”

“Right now, we have one congressman that’s Democrat,” GOP Representative Sheri Biggs from South Carolina said last week. She was referring to Jim Clyburn, the state’s sole Black delegate, who won his seat with almost 60 percent of the vote. It doesn’t matter to Biggs, who simply refuses to accept that Clyburn is a legitimate representative: “I think a 7 and 0 map,” she continued, “would definitely reflect our values.”

This sort of ideological “real Americanism” is not surprising – in fact, it has become dogma on the Right to regard Democratic governance as fundamentally illegitimate. But the kind of state essentialism that is on display here is nevertheless striking and dangerous. It proclaims a kind of white conservative essence that supposedly defines these states and is beyond democratic contestation. In this interpretation, this “red” essence then necessitates monopolizing all power, on all levels of government, in the hands of the Republican Party; anything else is considered an affront to the state’s very nature, its immutable gestalt.

The efforts to put this sort of anti-democratic essentialism into practice by creating de-facto one-party states have been supercharged by the Supreme Court’s Callais decision. Not only does it functionally remove all hurdles against racial discrimination in voting, which allows Republicans to properly subjugate the minority populations across the South. Samuel Alito, in his decision, even explicitly blessed such efforts by declaring partisan gerrymandering a legitimate state interest. This is the reality of American politics now: Whoever holds a trifecta on the state level can quickly enshrine one-party rule on all levels by aggressively redrawing all the maps. Republicans are certainly all in on that proposition. And even if Democrats do not buy into the underlying state essentialism: Until there is a chance to pass a new, robust Voting Rights Act and ban partisan gerrymandering everywhere, they must retaliate. Unilateral disarmament must not be an option in the face of this Republican Party. It would simply allow them to end democracy for good.

The scenario we are looking at is red states turning much redder and blue states having to turn bluer in response. In recent years, the country has been falling apart into a multiracial, pluralistic “blue” part that accepts the changing social, cultural, and demographic realities vs. a “red” part that is led by patriarchal white nationalists entirely devoted to rolling back those changes. This constitutes a significant departure from a general trend that had characterized the country from about the 1930s onwards, when the political, social, legal, and cultural reality across the nation had become more similar. It was a process of nationalization, for which the civil rights legislation of the 1960s, imposed by the federal government across the country and against state resistance, acted as a key catalyst. There were always strong forces working in the opposite direction, of course: The liberalization of urban areas everywhere was countered by a “southernification” of rural America in the north. That created a political geography defined by an urban-rural divide that transcends state borders and was never quite captured by the “red states” / “blue states” binary.

But if America keeps going down the path it is on right now, “red states” and “blue states” will become much more of a reality than they already are, at least in terms of how political power is distributed. As a result, large constituencies will go entirely unrepresented – not just in Congress, but on all levels, from local politics up. Black Americans in the South, of course; but also conservative rural communities in New York or California. They won’t just be represented by fewer elected officials – they’ll have no meaningful political representation at all.

America is facing a crisis of legitimacy that threatens the very existence of the country. At what point does it spiral out of control?

This is not the end

None of this is guaranteed to happen. Let me end there. America is not doomed. The anti-democratic reshaping of the Republic; the escalation of this crisis of legitimacy to the point where it can no longer be resolved within the confines of a single nation-state: None of this is pre-ordained.

The solutions, it seems to me, are both relatively clear and also incredibly hard to realize. America needs a new Voting Rights Act that guarantees robust protection against discrimination in voting. Partisan gerrymandering must be outlawed. Better yet: A structural reform that implements some form of proportional representation (which would make partisan gerrymandering useless or at least vastly less potent). But, of course, none of that would make it past the Roberts Court – and so this rogue rightwing majority on the Court, which has acted as the spearhead of the reactionary countermobilization, must first be reined in.

America needs transformational change. And transformational change needs preparation. That is, ultimately, the reason why it is important to spell out how dire the situation is. Only if we understand the threat can we come up with a response that is commensurate with the challenge. And ideally, we should seek to come up with such a transformative response before a violent breakup forces us to remake the country while the Republic lies in ruins beneath our feet.

Thank you for reading - and please know that I am deeply grateful for your support and your generosity!

Democracy Americana is my main source of income as an independent writer. Want to support my work? Consider becoming a paid member:

Become a Member

This is Part II of my history of multiracial democracy in America. In last week’s Part I, which you find here, I focused on the fate of the first attempt at biracial democracy after the Civil War, and on the political implications of the Reconstruction era for today.

In this Part II, I look at America’s Second Reconstruction that was codified in the civil rights legislation of the 1960s, reflect on why this had such a transformative impact on politics and society – and examine why this current moment really marks a profound cesura in U.S. history: The end of the civil rights era.

This is coming out a little later than I had hoped or anticipated – and for that, I want to apologize. But I really wanted to do this story justice. It is fitting, therefore, that this is by far the longest essay I have ever published on Democracy Americana. An attempt to really put into perspective what a profoundly important – and disturbing - moment in U.S. history we are currently witnessing.

This essay is cross-posted from Steady, where Democracy Americana is now mainly hosted.

I am also making it available here for those who prefer to read (and perhaps share!) the piece in the Substack app. If you want to support my work, you can head over to Steady and become a paid subscriber.

The intro to this piece is free for everyone. If you want to read more than the preview or gain access to the audio version of the newsletter, please consider becoming a paid member of Democracy Americana, which is solely funded by readers and constitutes my main source of income as an independent writer.

Without your support, I will not be able to continue this work. Please know that I am immensely grateful for your generosity!

Become a Member

If a paid membership is currently not an option, the best way to support Democracy Americana is to share this piece here on Substack as well as on social media - and recommend my work to people you think might be interested.

You can also subscribe to the free version of the newsletter here on Substack: I will transfer all new subscribers coming in here over to Democracy Americana’s new home to make sure you are not missing anything.

Subscribe now

It has been a horrifying, yet entirely predictable spectacle. Since the Supreme Court functionally nullified the 1965 Voting Rights Act on April 29, Republicans have rushed to gerrymander majority-minority districts out of existence. The euphoric zeal they are displaying while extinguishing Black political representation across the South reveals precisely what is going on here.

Finally, Bennie Thompson’s “reign of terror” over Mississippi’s second congressional district was coming to an end, Mississippi Governor Tate Reeves declared on May 13. Thompson is the sole Black person and the only Democrat among the state’s congressional delegation. He has represented his majority-Black district in Congress since 1993, regularly receiving two thirds of the vote. But that doesn’t matter to Governor Reeves: Thompson’s “reign” is illegitimate because the people who vote for him don’t count, or they shouldn’t, and now that the Roberts Court has opened the door for that, Republicans in Mississippi will make sure they won’t.

In Alabama, Governor Kay Ivey celebrated the chance to dilute and obliterate Black voting power because “Alabama knows our state, our people and our districts best,” and this “win for Alabamians,” as she put it, “enables our values to be best represented in Congress.” It is certainly not a “win” for the 27 percent of the population that are Black – but those simply don’t count among the “Alabamians” Ivey cares about. Two out of the state’s seven congressional districts are currently represented by Black Democratic lawmakers. That will now change. “Our state.” “Our people.” “Our values.” People of color not included.

“For too long,” Tennessee Representative Andy Ogles raged on May 7, “Tennessee politics has been dominated by cosmopolitan communists and race hustlers imposing their corrupt will on a deeply rural and conservative state.” Tennessee is about 77 percent white and 17 percent Black. Eight out of its nine Congressional districts are represented by white Republicans. It is Tennessee’s ninth district that Ogles was enraged about, the one around Memphis: 60 percent of the population is Black, about 9 percent Hispanic. Kamala Harris received around 70 percent of the vote here in 2024. And over 70 percent sent Stephen Ira Cohen to Washington, a white Democratic progressive, the first Jewish person to represent Tennessee in Congress. That’s who Ogles refers to when he bemoans “cosmopolitan communists”; and the “race hustlers,” that’s just people of color. Their numbers are irrelevant; majorities built on their votes don’t count. And so they won’t: Republicans have already enacted a new map that carves up the ninth district, distributing minorities across three districts in a way that leaves only white-dominated ones. One of the new districts stretches about 200 miles northeast all the way to the outskirts of Nashville: That’s how far they had to go to find enough white people to make sure Black voting power was sufficiently diluted.

None of this is subtle. None of it is new. And even the rhetoric has always been the same. White supremacists presented exactly these arguments to justify their struggle to undo Reconstruction after the Civil War: They were fighting against an evil imposition of Northern tyranny, against outsiders and intruders illegitimately put in charge of the South. Those who fought against de-segregation and civil rights in the 1950s and 60s made the same claims. In his inaugural address as governor of Alabama in January 1963, George Wallace vowed to defend “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, and segregation forever” not because of racism, no! But to defend the “freedom” of the South and its true people. “Let us rise to the call of freedom-loving blood that is in us,” Wallace declared, “and send our answer to the tyranny that clanks its chains upon the South.” Yet again, just like after the Civil War, when “the South was set upon by the vulturous carpetbagger and federal troops,” it was time to take a stand and “sound the drum for freedom.” It is a particular kind of freedom, Wallace was concerned with – the same “freedom” Reeves, Ivey, and Ogles are defending now: The freedom of white people to dominate and rule, and to curtail the freedom of others.

The first task for observers, analysts, and citizens alike is to understand, acknowledge, and describe clearly and honestly what is happening around us. And here I will allow myself to write angry…

Continue reading with a Membership

The rest of this piece is reserved for paid members of Democracy Americana.

If you are not a member, but still want to read Democracy Americana, fear not: I will keep publishing free long-form essays regularly.

But if you can, please consider becoming a paid member over on Steady: You’ll gain access to additional member-exclusive essays every week - and members also have access to the audio versions of all my writing in podcast form wherever you get your podcasts.

Most importantly, if you value this independent work, please know that it is your support and your generosity that is making it possible. Democracy Americana is entirely reader-supported and my main source of income as an independent writer.

Continue reading with a Membership

This essay is cross-posted from Steady, where Democracy Americana is now mainly hosted.

I am also making it available here for those who prefer to read (and perhaps share!) the piece in the Substack app.

Democracy Americana is my main source of income as an independent writer. If you are reading the free version of this newsletter, I sincerely appreciate your time and effort engaging with my work. Please share it widely to help me reach new readers.

If you want to support my work, you can head over to Steady and become a paid member. You will gain access to special benefits – including many additional essays and the chance to download the audio versions of all my pieces in podcast form.

Most importantly, Democracy Americana is a publication solely funded by readers. I need your support to continue this work. Thank you!

Become a Member

You can also subscribe to the free version of the newsletter here on Substack: I will transfer all new subscribers coming in here over to Democracy Americana’s new home to make sure you are not missing anything.

Subscribe now

This is Part I of a two-part series on the history of multiracial democracy in America. Not a total history, of course, but something that can serve as a framework for how to think about this long struggle over how much democracy, and for whom, there should be in this country, the core dynamics that have shaped it, and the various stages and eras is has experienced.

Before the Voting Rights Act of 1965, America was not a democracy. It was certainly not what we, in widely accepted parlance today, call “democracy.” It absolutely had no reasonable claim to be considered a *multiracial* democracy.

I know this may all sound awfully “political,” in the sense that it comes with a fairly straightforward partisan valence. But that is entirely a function of the fact that democracy itself has become a partisan issue, as the Republican Party is fully at war with pluralistic society and the principle of equal citizenship.

The Voting Rights Act set the United States on a path to becoming something that it had not been until the civil rights revolution of the 1960s: A multiracial, pluralistic democracy. And because the staunchly anti-egalitarian, anti-pluralistic forces that have always shaped the American story didn’t just vanish into thin air but instead engaged in a comprehensive countermobilization against modern democracy, the conflict over whether or not it should be allowed to endure and prosper has been the central fault line in U.S. politics ever since.

In that sense, and in that sense only, last week’s Supreme Court decision to essentially nullify what remained of the Voting Rights Act is helpful: It clarifies both the nature and the stakes of the political conflict. The question at the core of this struggle is this: Can a society built on racial hierarchy be transformed into a multiracial democracy? Or, put differently: Must America be forever defined by strict hierarchies of race, gender, religion, and wealth – or can the nation finally realize its promise of egalitarian pluralism?

The Roberts Court ends the Second Reconstruction

On April 29, with its decision in Louisiana v Callais, the rightwing majority on the Supreme Court made the Voting Rights Act useless as an instrument to protect minority representation. It opened the door wide for even the most brutal racial gerrymander, the complete erasure of minority-majority districts across Republican-led states, a dramatic rollback of Black political representation not just in Congress, but on the state and local levels as well. In practice, the ban on racial discrimination on voting is no more.

It is an obscene decision, using a weaponized understanding of “colorblindness” that deliberately obscures the distinction between considering race in order to uphold a racially discriminatory system vs. doing it to dismantle that system. It completely inverts the intention of the Reconstruction Amendments. You cannot use the Constitution to remedy anti-Black racism, the Roberts Court says – in fact, if you do, you are the real racist; but you can totally engage in racial discrimination against non-white minorities as long as you pretend it’s all about partisanship. This decision returns the country to the situation before the Second Reconstruction that was codified in the 1960s civil rights legislation by allowing for systematic racial discrimination intended to entrench white dominance based on facially neutral laws.

That is why you have heard historians and political scientists unequivocally call this an era-defining – or, rather: era-ending – decision. Because Louisiana v Callais is, in many ways, the culmination of a “backlash” against multiracial democracy, and because it will in turn fuel the escalating reactionary countermobilization, it signifies the end of a distinct phase in U.S. history. The Second Reconstruction is over; we are into the second “Redemption” now.

A lot of observers have been using those terms, and rightfully so! But I believe they deserve some explanation and reflection. They come with the weight of history, they transport a sense of decline, of potential doom. And they entail a responsibility to act in response.

What can I contribute in this situation? I want to offer an attempt to situate our moment in the long struggle for Black voting rights and minority representation. To grasp the historical significance of what the Roberts Court has done, we must understand what America was prior to the civil rights revolution of the 1960s and the transformative impact of the Voting Rights Act. We must also understand the historical references that ought to shape our response: Reconstruction and “Redemption,” Second Reconstruction and why it has ended. And we must grapple with the concepts we use to make sense of what is happening around us, perhaps without fully grasping their implications: What do we mean when we say “democracy”? What is a *multiracial, pluralistic* democracy? How has our understanding of those terms evolved – and more importantly: How has “democracy” changed over time as a historical reality that shaped the lives of generations of Americans?

With those questions in mind, I want to offer a brief investigation of multiracial democracy in America. Not a total history, of course, but something that can serve as a framework for how to think about this long struggle over how much democracy, and for whom, there should be in this country, the core dynamics that have shaped it, and the various stages and eras that have structured it. In this Part I, I will focus on the fate of the first Reconstruction after the Civil War, on why it is such a crucial historical reference point, and on the lessons and implications of this story for our current moment. Part II will follow later this week and continue the story from the rise of the Second Reconstruction all the way through our very present.

(Please note: The scholarship on American democracy and its discontents that I am basing these reflections on is vast. I hope to be putting out an annotated bibliography soon, listing what I believe are the best and most useful readings on the past and present of multiracial democracy. For now, let me point you specifically to the work of historians Eric Foner, Manisha Sinha, and Jefferson Cowie, whose analysis and interpretation of Reconstruction and the white countermobilization has most deeply influenced my understanding of this part of U.S. history.)

What we mean when we say “democracy”

The 1965 Voting Rights Act significantly changed the political and societal order in the United States. This observation stands in contrast to the idea of a continuous democratic tradition going all the way back to the Founding. In fact, the idea of America as the oldest democracy in the world features prominently in the collective national imaginary. And while that is not necessarily incorrect, depending on the definition of “democracy,” such a notion certainly obscures more than it illuminates about the reality of American life. It suggests a continuity of a democratic regime based on the American Constitution – when in fact the term has applied to a variety of regimes. Under the label “democracy,” they differed widely in terms of who was actually enabled to participate in the political process as equals – and even more so with regards to whether or not they extended the democratic promise to other spheres of life beyond politics: to the workplace, the family, the public square. They often existed side by side for long stretches of the nation’s history, as manifestations of competing, even incompatible ideological visions.

If we want to understand what “democracy” actually meant as a reality people experienced at different moments in time, we should explore and assess it not as a yes-or-no proposition, but on a scale – with an emphasis on change over time and on changing practical realities, on how democracy actually structures the lives and experiences of the people. Basically, whenever someone says “democracy,” we should ask: What kind of democracy, how much, and for whom?

(As an aside, I will note that there is no universally accepted definition of what constitutes a “democracy.” This question is itself part of the ongoing struggle: What counts as “democratic”? What are the minimum hurdles a system needs to clear in order to qualify? When Viktor Orbán was defeated in Hungary a few weeks ago, supposedly “reasonable” conservatives like Ross Douthat at the New York Times were quick to declare that all the talk about Orbán’s “illiberalism” had been overheated: The fact that he was ousted in an election, the argument went, somehow proved he had never been an authoritarian to begin with! Such attempts at deploying a “minimalist” definition of democracy that basically just means “elections,” no matter the circumstances, no matter how free and fair, are a good reminder of how little the term “democracy” itself means unless we pay attention to the substance of the political and social reality to which it is being applied. In the case of the “See, Orbán was never a threat to democracy!” brigade, we are just dealing with bad-faith attempts to legitimize Orbán and his political project of pseudo-democratic illiberalism for a mainstream audience.)

The fundamental reality of U.S. history is this: Before the civil rights legislation of the 1960s, the American political system was fairly democratic, at least by contemporaneous international comparison, if a person happened to be a white Christian man – but it was something else entirely if they were not. For much of U.S. history, most of the population was largely excluded from the democratic promise – from voting in elections or from participating as equals in all matters affecting the collective fate of the polity. Until relatively recently, the political system was best described as a white man’s democracy, or racial caste democracy. There is absolutely nothing old or consolidated about *multiracial, pluralistic democracy* in America. It, quite literally, only started a little over 60 years ago.

Before you continue, can I bother you for a minute?

Today, you are reading a free article that I am making available to everyone. I would love to continue to offer these essays for a broad audience. However, long-form pieces like this take a ton of time and effort to research, write, and edit.

As an independent writer, I rely on the revenue generated by paid memberships as my main source of income. If you are a frequent reader of Democracy Americana, I am certain you will benefit greatly from a paid membership. I publish member-exclusive essays every week - and members can also download the audio versions of all my writing in podcast form wherever you get your podcasts.

Most importantly, if you value this independent work, please know that it is your support and your generosity that is making it possible.

And if a paid membership is currently not an option for you, there are other ways to help: Word-of-mouth is essential, and personal recommendations have an enormous impact. So, please share this piece on social media or tell a family member, a friend, a neighbor, a colleague about Democracy Americana. Thank you!

Become a Member

Not ready yet for a paid membership? You can subscribe to the free version of the newsletter:

Subscribe now

Reconstruction: The great democratic experiment

On paper, the United States became a multiracial democracy almost exactly one hundred years earlier, with the passage of the Reconstruction amendments to the constitution after the end of the Civil War.

The 13^th Amendment, ratified in December 1865, abolished slavery. The 14^th Amendment, adopted in July 1868, established birthright citizenship, formal equality before the law, and the principal of nondiscrimination. The 15^th Amendment, ratified in February 1870, barred the federal government and the states from denying a citizen’s right to vote “on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.”

It is hard to overstate the significance of what happened here. As the Civil War ended, and those who had chosen to commit treason in defense of their right to enslave fellow human beings were defeated on the battlefield, the nation was fundamentally reconceptualized. The Reconstruction Amendments changed the nature of the constitution – the document itself, but also the political and social regime it prescribed – so profoundly that the historian Eric Foner has called it a “Second Founding.”

According to Foner, the Reconstruction Amendments “transformed the Constitution from a document primarily concerned with federal-state relations and the rights of property into a vehicle through which members of vulnerable minorities could stake a claim to substantive freedom and seek protection against misconduct by all levels of government.”

This attempt to transform a nation built on racial hierarchy into a biracial democracy was nothing short of revolutionary. And that is exactly how the framers behind these amendments saw it. They explicitly intended regime change: From a regime grounded in slavery to a regime grounded in equality.

What followed was an awe-inspiring democratic experiment. Officially, the so-called Reconstruction period lasted from 1865 through 1877. Its exact dates differed from region to region, however. Sometimes, Reconstruction started before the end of the war, when the Union Army conquered Confederate territory. In some places, whatever progress had been achieved was rolled back before 1877; in other places, the biracial experiment lasted into the 1880s, until the consolidation of Jim Crow apartheid. Regional differences notwithstanding, the overall impact of Reconstruction was brief, but breathtaking.

Amongst white Americans, there was a widespread expectation that formerly enslaved people would probably not know what to do with their newly acquired rights. But in reality, voter turnout among Black people was extremely high. The Black population constituted an outright majority in Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina; a near majority in Alabama, Florida, and Georgia; and around 40 percent in Virginia and North Carolina. By 1867, well over 80 percent of Black men registered to vote across the South – more than half a million African Americans had joined the electorate by the early 1870s, meaning they outnumbered white voters across the former Confederacy.

Black political representation exploded basically overnight. About 2,000 Black men were elected to public office at the local, state, and federal levels. That included 600 African Americans who were elected to state legislatures, and 16 who were elected to serve in Congress. Mississippi sent two Black senators to Washington. South Carolina, the heart of the former Confederacy, elected a majority Black state legislature in 1868.

And beyond just politics in a narrow sense, African American social and cultural life soared in those years. Here was the glimpse of what a society that extended the democratic promise beyond just the white population might look like. The country achieved a level of biracial democracy it wouldn’t reach again until a century later.

White supremacist “Redemption”

It did not last. America’s first attempt at biracial democracy was toppled in different places at different moments. But across the South, it was drowned in ostensibly “race-neutral” laws and almost unimaginable levels of white reactionary violence.

The “backlash,” or rather countermobilization, started immediately, long before the official end of Reconstruction. It was led by people who called themselves “redeemers” – engaged in a project to “redeem” the South. In practice, that meant restoring white supremacy and racial segregation, initially via a series of laws called Black Codes that state legislatures passed in 1865/66. “Redemption” was orchestrated by the white supremacist wing of the Democratic Party – and by organized terrorist groups like the Ku Klux Klan serving as “Redemption’s” paramilitary arm. They assaulted Black lawmakers and Black voters, targeted biracial local governments and legislatures. At least 2,000 African Americans were killed between 1865 and 1877; that is just the number of documented victims – thousands more may have been murdered, with tens of thousands being attacked, beaten, raped, and forced to flee.

In 1867, Republicans in Congress passed a series of statues enacted over the vetoes of President Andrew Johnson. These so-called Reconstruction Acts defined certain conditions for the readmission of former Confederate States into the Union, including the establishment of equality before the law and the guarantee of Black suffrage. Crucially, they also established martial law. But the Union Army was quickly demobilized at the end of the war, the actual number of troops deployed to the South as part of a military occupation was only around 15,000, and many of them were busy fighting Native Americans.

However, the federal government reacted more forcefully to the astonishing level of terrorist violence in the late 1860s and early 1870s once Ulysses S. Grant entered the White House. Based on the Enforcement Acts passed by Congress in 1870 and 1871, President Grant sent federal election supervisors to the South and deployed the military to go after white vigilante groups (the third of the Enforcement Acts is better known as the Ku Klux Klan Act). These measures had a significant impact; as a result, the 1872 election was probably the freest and fairest election in the South until after the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

Alas, as the northern support for Reconstruction crumbled, federal enforcement soon ended – and multiracial democracy in the South had no chance. Broadly speaking, the political coalition behind Reconstruction consisted of Black people, Radical Republicans in Congress, and northern industrial elites who wanted to break the power of Southern oligarchs. The latter lost interest when they had achieved what they wanted – and therefore increasingly focused on the conflict between capital and labor. Once the military occupation officially ended and it became clear that the federal government would no longer interfere, yet another wave of white supremacist violence swept across the South.

Meanwhile, the Supreme Court began undermining the Reconstruction Amendments as soon as they were passed, interpreting them in a very narrow way, and constantly siding with the Southern states over federal power.

The enemies of multiracial democracy understood that they had to restrict Black political representation above all else – and therefore disenfranchise as many Black people as possible while nominally staying within the boundaries of the Constitution and the law. The Constitution does not mention an inherent right to vote, and the 15^th Amendment does not specify such a positive right either, only prohibiting discrimination in voting based on race. That left room for the states to come up with all sorts of ostensibly race-neutral restrictions that nevertheless had the intended effect of dramatically curtailing Black participation.

Starting in the late 1880s, the Southern states rewrote their constitutions to ensure complete white domination. They passed voting laws that disenfranchised Black Americans via poll taxes, literacy tests, or property requirements. As a result, voter registration rates and Black turnout plummeted from around 80 percent to somewhere in the zero to five percent range, where they would remain until at least the 1940s. Black representation was extinguished. After 1881, the South did not elect another Black person to the Senate until 2013. After 1901, no Southern State sent any Black Representatives to the House until 72 years later.

To complement the near complete disenfranchisement and pseudo-legal discrimination, the Southern states erected a brutal apartheid regime that segregated all spheres of life and was defined by pervasive white supremacist violence. One form that took were racist terror lynchings: The Equal Justice Initiative has documented around 4,400 such lynchings between 1877 and 1950, most of them occurring between 1890 and 1920.

The level of biracial equality and democratic participation the South had experienced during Reconstruction would not be reached again until almost a full century later.

Lessons and implications from the demise of Reconstruction

History doesn’t move in circles, it doesn’t exactly repeat – it is accumulative. We are not facing the exact same challenges as people in previous eras, because we live in a world that already lived through those challenges and was shaped by them. That makes it difficult to draw clear-cut lessons and apply them directly to the present. But we can still learn from history. Studying the past can equip us with a better toolkit to tackle the present. Especially if we can identify meaningful historical reference points, they can help us understand the core challenges of our moment - the interests, dynamics, and contingencies that are shaping the present.

The fate of the first Reconstruction is such a crucial reference point – especially now that we are facing the rapid dismantling of the second attempt to reconstitute the nation around the principle of equality.

One crucial implication is that democratic progress – any attempt at leveling existing hierarchies of race, gender, religion, and wealth – will inevitably lead to a massive countermobilization orchestrated by the forces of reaction. The framers of the Reconstruction Amendments understood this precisely. They sought revolutionary change. Their goal was not merely to restore a status quo ante, or to reform a system that wasn’t worth preserving; they aspired to transform the nation. Not as a project of idealistic utopianism, but as an exercise of practical realism. After what the country had been through, they saw a leap forward as the only viable option.

Such moments of transformational aspiration are rare. Too often, a timid class of political leaders makes avoiding “backlash” their overriding concern. But backlash politics, driven by a logic of defeatist appeasement and pre-emptive abandonment of justice and equality, is guaranteed to stifle egalitarian policies. The challenges and risks of pushing ahead with a democratizing agenda are real. But if “backlash” and “polarization” are inevitably the price to be paid for equality, we might as well do it right. Piecemeal reforms and half-measures will still attract the ire of those who simply will not accept egalitarian pluralism; and since they are easily dismantled, they will only leave the people who will suffer most from the countermobilization defenseless.

Multiracial democracy has never advanced through appeasement and persuasion. America’s first attempt to extend the democratic promise beyond white people was successful where and when the political coalition behind Reconstruction was willing to impose it against resistance they understood to be inevitable, against forces they recognized as enemies of democracy.

The promise of Reconstruction was left unfulfilled. The experiment didn’t last. That is another painful implication: No right, no democratic achievement is ever safe. No progress is irrevocable. History is not destined to move in a progressive direction. There is no arc, and there definitely is no ironclad law of the universe that says “We” can’t slide back.

That, however, does not mean progress is impossible. Even as the reactionary entrenchment won in the late nineteenth century, the fight was not over. Generations suffered under this regime. And it took decades of work, with uncertain outcome. But ultimately, courageous people achieved marvelous things: A Second Reconstruction, codified in the civil rights legislation of the 1960s, with the 1965 Voting Rights Act as its crown jewel. Once again, America embarked on a dramatic experiment of democratic expansion that once again resulted not only in an explosion of Black political participation and minority representation, but also in social progress and economic empowerment. It turns out that if you extend the democratic promise to people, they will gladly and enthusiastically grasp the chance you offer. There is no more insidious lie than the idea that people who are denied political participation don’t want it or wouldn’t know what to do with it anyway.

Unfortunately, the enemies of multiracial democracy understand all this precisely. That is why their countermobilization has been trying to roll back the rights revolution of the 1960s and has been targeting the Voting Rights Act, specifically, since the minute it was passed. They fear multiracial democracy – because they know it works.

About 4,000 words in – and still a long way to go until we get to our present. We will end Part I here and pick up the story in a Part II, which I will publish later this week. It will tackle, among other things: The rise of the Second Reconstruction, the impact of the Voting Rights Act, the crusade against the VRA as a crucial element of the broader reactionary countermobilization, and what America might look like as we are entering the second “Redemption.”

Thank you for reading - and please know that I am deeply grateful for your support and your generosity!

Democracy Americana is my main source of income as an independent writer. Want to support my work? Consider becoming a paid member:

Become a Member

This essay is cross-posted from Steady, where Democracy Americana is now mainly hosted.

I am also making it available here for those who prefer to read (and perhaps share!) the piece in the Substack app. If you want to support my work, you can head over to Steady and become a paid subscriber.

The intro to this piece is free for everyone. If you want to read more than the preview or gain access to the audio version of the newsletter, please consider becoming a paid member of Democracy Americana, which is solely funded by readers and constitutes my main source of income as an independent writer.

Without your support, I will not be able to continue this work. Please know that I am immensely grateful for your generosity!

Become a Member

If a paid membership is currently not an option, the best way to support Democracy Americana is to share this piece here on Substack as well as on social media - and recommend my work to people you think might be interested.

You can also subscribe to the free version of the newsletter here on Substack: I will transfer all new subscribers coming in here over to Democracy Americana’s new home to make sure you are not missing anything.

Subscribe now

Perhaps Alexander Karp, the CEO of Palantir, just wanted to remind the world how much he and the company he defines are aligned with the MAGA regime. On April 18, Palantir released a 22-point manifesto, basically the abstract version of the book “The Technological Republic” Karp and co-Palantiri Nicholas Zamiska published a year ago. “Look at us!”, it yells, “look how all in we are on America First nationalism and the Trump agenda!”

Palantir was co-founded by Karp and Peter Thiel in 2003. They named the company after the elven-made seeing-stones in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle-earth saga, magical crystal balls used for telepathic communication and information gathering across vast distances. Palantir offers data analysis software and AI-powered “operational intelligence,” as Karp puts it – especially to the military, law enforcement, and intelligence services.

Why does a publicly traded tech company need such a manifesto? Because Karp, like so many of today’s tech lords, fancies himself a philosopher-CEO. They are convinced they have some profound insight to offer, and they are determined to make the world listen. And so, we get “The Technological Republic, in brief,” a document that reeks of cultural chauvinism. “Some cultures have produced vital advances; others remain dysfunctional and regressive,” we learn. Palantir, therefore, is deeply opposed to “the shallow temptation of a vacant and hollow pluralism” – makes sense, from a Western supremacist perspective: We must not dilute the “culture”! The manifesto also sprinkles in some revanchism, demanding that “the postwar neutering of Germany and Japan must be undone,” complaining that the “defanging of Germany was an overcorrection.” Why is a company that, above all else, embraces the militant nationalism of America First concerned with such matters? Because the America First mandate includes a commitment to fighting for Western supremacy everywhere and elevating rightwing nationalists abroad. Raging against the “neutering” and “defanging” of Germany as one of history’s great injustices is just standard repertoire for the post-1945 German far right.

In any case, the manifesto calls on America to not get soft. Enough with all the “woke” self-critique and cancel culture: The nation must get back to relishing its own superiority and punish its enemies with “hard power”! And for that, it needs a global surveillance machinery that Palantir is happy to supply. Get rid of the deep state and those pesky civil servants with their outrageous attempts to sabotage that project: In Palantir’s vision, the government and the totally unaccountable tech elite become one – an all-powerful fusion in service of American supremacy and the defense of Western “culture.”

The Palantir manifesto is a stark reminder: The Silicon Valley tech billionaires are fully aligned with Trump.

Remarkably, it wasn’t all that long ago that many of them were cozying up to Obama and the liberal establishment. After the 2016 election, for instance, the Washington Post, the paper Amazon founder Jeff Bezos had purchased in 2013, famously vowed to stand against the Trumpist assault under the motto “Democracy Dies in Darkness.” Yet when Trump was inaugurated in January 2025, Bezos was right there with him – and officially declared it was time for the Post to stop all this “democracy” talk; a mass exodus of liberal voices from the Post followed quickly thereafter.

Or take Palantir CEO Alex Karp: He was seen as a liberal, a progressive, even a proper leftist until just a few years ago. In 2024, he still supported Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. But then he donated for Trump’s inauguration and is helping to pay for Trump’s bizarre ballroom plans. Karp is now calling Palantir the first company “to be completely anti-woke.”

What happened?

Considering how much power – over our politics and our private lives – these guys are amassing, we better find a proper answer to that question. This is, without a doubt, one of the defining, and most dangerous, stories of our time. Let’s tackle it step by step by investigating:

(1) Why this is not *just* a story of capitalists attempting to maximize profit by sucking up to the authoritarian regime - but also a tale of political and ideological radicalization

(2) Why it was a mistake to equate technological futurism with social progressivism, as the fundamental worldview in the tech elite circles has always had inherently anti-democratic tendencies, leading so many of them to conclude that “freedom and democracy are incompatible”

(3) The role of extremist thinkers like Curtis Yarvin in intellectualizing the anti-democratic impulses, and the spread of a staunchly authoritarian ideology that is best described as either “reactionary modernism” or tech-fascism

(4) How and why these long-standing anti-democratic impulses and reactionary tendencies are being activated *now*, and the escalating sense of elite self-victimization that fuels people like Alex Karp and Marc Andreessen who considered themselves “liberals” or even “leftists” until quite recently.

We need to understand why they are now giving themselves permission to make common cause with the rightwing extremist assault on democracy – because we will all be suffering the consequences.

Continue reading with a Membership

The rest of this piece is reserved for paid members of Democracy Americana.

If you are not a member, but still want to read Democracy Americana, fear not: I will keep publishing free long-form essays regularly.

But if you can, please consider becoming a paid member over on Steady: You’ll gain access to additional member-exclusive essays every week - and members also have access to the audio versions of all my writing in podcast form wherever you get your podcasts.

Most importantly, if you value this independent work, please know that it is your support and your generosity that is making it possible. Democracy Americana is entirely reader-supported and my main source of income as an independent writer.

Continue reading with a Membership

This essay is cross-posted from Steady, where Democracy Americana is now mainly hosted.

I am also making it available here for those who prefer to read (and perhaps share!) the piece in the Substack app. If you want to support my work, you can head over to Steady and become a paid subscriber.

The intro to this piece is free for everyone. If you want to read more than the preview or gain access to the audio version of the newsletter, please consider becoming a paid member of Democracy Americana, which is solely funded by readers and constitutes my main source of income as an independent writer.

Without your support, I will not be able to continue this work. Please know that I am immensely grateful for your generosity!

Become a Member

If a paid membership is currently not an option, the best way to support Democracy Americana is to share this piece here on Substack as well as on social media - and recommend my work to people you think might be interested.

You can also subscribe to the free version of the newsletter here on Substack: I will transfer all new subscribers coming in here over to Democracy Americana’s new home to make sure you are not missing anything.

Subscribe now

It is rare that the political discourse across the “West” is dominated by one single event. And when it happens, it’s often not a good sign: Wars and natural disasters can have that effect, or perhaps the latest victory of an extremist party in what can sometimes feel like a steady march towards inevitable authoritarian triumph.

But yesterday, all our attention was focused on what turned out to be a massive defeat for the global Far Right: In Hungary, Viktor Orbán lost the parliamentary election. And it was a blowout.

Orbán’s Fidesz party got only 38 percent – Tisza, the party of his main opponent Péter Magyar received 53 percent. Crucially, this result translates to a two-thirds supermajority, 138 out of 199 seats, for Tisza in Parliament, which could enable them to actually undo much of the authoritarian system Orbán has entrenched.

Perhaps never before have so many people paid so much attention to a parliamentary election in a small, economically weak, and geostrategically unassuming (at least in a traditional sense) country. Across the political spectrum, Viktor Orbán is rightfully seen as the symbol of the rise of “illiberalism”: He has undoubtedly been one of the defining figures in the transnational authoritarian assault on democracy and the rule of law. And after sixteen years in power, Orbán’s time as prime minister of Hungary is about to end. The people of Hungary have had enough, and they found a way to make that count.

I am not going to pretend I am an expert on Hungarian society and politics. But as my work focuses on democracy and its discontents in the United States, and how the American conflict over democracy is connected to the inter- and transnational struggle between authoritarian ethno-nationalism and democratic pluralism, I want to reflect on the broader meaning of what transpired yesterday, on the conclusions we can draw and the lessons we may or may not be able to learn.

As I am writing this, less than 24 hours have passed since the first results from the Hungarian election were made public – so take this as a preliminary attempt to provide perspective on what I believe was a truly significant outcome. More specifically, let’s discuss:

- Why we need to remember, amidst all the well-earned celebration, that this struggle is not over, and there is no such thing as a decisive “turning point”

- What we have learned about the nature and inner dynamics of regimes that are best described as forms of competitive authoritarianism

- Why the American Right has been so obsessed with Orbán in the first place

- What that transnational fixation on Orbán can tell us about the world-historic stakes in this broader struggle over democracy

- And why we must never give in to defeatism or the temptation to perpetuate rightwing assertions of liberal democracy’s supposedly inevitable fall.

Nothing about rightwing authoritarianism is inevitable.

1

This struggle is not over

Don’ worry, I am not going to indulge in some reflexive contrarianism and tell you that Orbán’s defeat was not a big deal. This was unequivocally a good thing. Something significant happened yesterday in Hungary.

And yet, I do want to start with a word of caution…

Continue reading with a Membership

The rest of this piece is reserved for paid members of Democracy Americana.

If you are not a member, but still want to read Democracy Americana, fear not: I will keep publishing free long-form essays regularly.

But if you can, please consider becoming a paid member over on Steady: You’ll gain access to additional member-exclusive essays every week - and members also have access to the audio versions of all my writing in podcast form wherever you get your podcasts.

Most importantly, if you value this independent work, please know that it is your support and your generosity that is making it possible. Democracy Americana is entirely reader-supported and my main source of income as an independent writer.

Continue reading with a Membership

This essay is cross-posted from Steady, where Democracy Americana is now mainly hosted.

I am also making it available here for those who prefer to read (and perhaps share!) the piece in the Substack app. If you want to support my work, you can head over to Steady and become a paid subscriber.

The intro to this piece is free for everyone. If you want to read more than the preview or gain access to the audio version of the newsletter, please consider becoming a paid member of Democracy Americana, which is solely funded by readers and constitutes my main source of income as an independent writer.

Without your support, I will not be able to continue this work. Please know that I am immensely grateful for your generosity!

Become a Member

If a paid membership is currently not an option, the best way to support Democracy Americana is to share this piece here on Substack as well as on social media - and recommend my work to people you think might be interested.

You can also subscribe to the free version of the newsletter here on Substack: I will transfer all new subscribers coming in here over to Democracy Americana’s new home to make sure you are not missing anything.

Subscribe now

To start the week, the President of the United States threatened to erase “a whole civilization.” It doesn’t feel right to simply move on. As Donald Trump’s madness will continue to ramp up and - excuse me for sounding dramatic - threaten humanity, it is urgently important we grapple honestly with what is happening here.

As Trump kept escalating his threats, prominent elected officials and political observers suggested there was some method to what he was doing – that it was either all a cunning distraction from matters Trump wanted to obscure or perhaps all part of a devious long-term scheme that would ultimately lead to a Trump dictatorship.

I strongly disagree.

This regime and its unstable leader are not systematically implementing a masterplan. I don’t say this to downplay the threat. In fact, it is imperative we confront the distinct dangers we face. What we are dealing with is chaotic destruction wrought by an increasingly delusional wannabe-dictator who leads a comically incompetent government and a movement drowning in its own conspiratorial hyperreality. They will continue to escalate because they are ideologically, temperamentally, and psycho-politically incapable of anything else. But there is no strategic genius at work here.

If we suspect coherence and foresight as the main drivers behind what Trump and the extremists around him are doing, we fail to understand the inner thinking of this regime. If we insist there must be strategic deliberation underneath the escalating chaos, we risk sanitizing what this government is doing and what fuels the man who leads it. Although borne out of an understandable impulse to emphasize the authoritarian threat, this nevertheless constitutes a form of sanewashing that does not help us counter the Trumpist threat. The man who is president is acutely dangerous; his dictatorial desires are limitless. But he does not have a plan.

So, let’s first examine why the assumption that everything this regime does is strategic in nature, either deliberately deceptive or part of a devious masterplan, is utterly implausible – and why other frameworks are a lot more helpful in grappling with the escalating chaos. And let us then investigate why so many pundits and commentators are nevertheless clinging to the idea that everything the MAGA regime does is a clever distraction or comes out of a carefully executed “playbook” – and what makes the assumption that there must be a secret scheme behind Trump’s actions so attractive, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary?

Continue reading with a Membership

The rest of this piece is reserved for paid members of Democracy Americana.

If you are not a member, but still want to read Democracy Americana, fear not: I will keep publishing free long-form essays regularly.

But if you can, please consider becoming a paid member over on Steady: You’ll gain access to additional member-exclusive essays every week - and members also have access to the audio versions of all my writing in podcast form wherever you get your podcasts.

Most importantly, if you value this independent work, please know that it is your support and your generosity that is making it possible. Democracy Americana is entirely reader-supported and my main source of income as an independent writer.

Continue reading with a Membership

This essay is cross-posted from Steady, where Democracy Americana is now mainly hosted.

I am also making it available here for those who prefer to read (and perhaps share!) the piece in the Substack app.

Democracy Americana is my main source of income as an independent writer. If you are reading the free version of this newsletter, I sincerely appreciate your time and effort engaging with my work. Please share it widely to help me reach new readers.

If you want to support my work, you can head over to Steady and become a paid member. You will gain access to special benefits – including many additional essays and the chance to download the audio versions of all my pieces in podcast form.

Most importantly, Democracy Americana is a publication solely funded by readers. I need your support to continue this work. Thank you!

Become a Member

You can also subscribe to the free version of the newsletter here on Substack: I will transfer all new subscribers coming in here over to Democracy Americana’s new home to make sure you are not missing anything.

Subscribe now

“We shall repeal the twentieth century.”

In January 1992, libertarian economist Murray Rothbard delivered a rousing speech before a group of prominent rightwingers gathered in a hotel near Washington, DC. It was a momentous occasion. Something was brewing on the far right. The radical wing of the Republican Party was uniting behind self-identifying “paleoconservative” Pat Buchanan and gearing up for a revolt against the establishment. Buchanan had just announced he was challenging President George H.W. Bush for the Republican presidential nomination in the upcoming GOP primaries. He was the guest of honor and the keynote speaker for the event. But that night near DC, this was Rothbard’s crowd.

Murray Rothbard was a fairly obscure figure for most of his life. He was too extreme for institutions that had any ambition to reach the mainstream, and so he lingered on the fringes. But as the paleo-revolt gained momentum, Rothbard rose with it as one of its intellectual mentors and one of Buchanan’s close advisors.

Rothbard often described himself as a “paleo-libertarian” – but most importantly, he was not a “conservative.” That label he rejected. In fact, he despised the conservative establishment and the formerly liberal neo-conservatives almost as much as he hated what he called the “loony left.” Rothbard was a man of the “radical right,” he insisted, a “radical reactionary.”

In the speech he delivered that night – later published in essay form under the title “A Strategy for the Right” – Rothbard outlined his truly radical vision and what he imagined as the pathway to implement it. The problem, as Rothbard saw it, was that the “loony left” (the liberals, social-democrats, socialists, Marxists, Communists… they were basically all the same to him) had taken over America and destroyed everything that was worth conserving. To undo the damage, Rothbard demanded the “total abolition of the New Deal state”; he also wanted to abolish modern democracy and the civil rights order – which he considered an outrageous federal overreach in service of an ideology of “victimology.”

The problem, Rothbard explained, was that the leftists and liberals had completely taken over all elite institutions, and those liberal elites were now controlling the masses with the help of intellectuals and professors. In response, the Right needed to unite behind a “charismatic leader who has the ability to short-circuit the media elites, and to reach and rouse the masses directly.” Once such a leader was found, anything was possible. Rothbard felt inspired by the fall of the Soviet Union which had officially dissolved mere weeks before he gave his speech: It seemed to indicate that even the evilest systems could indeed be brought down. As Rothbard’s speech reached its crescendo, he revealed his vision of counter-revolutionary change: “We shall break the clock of social democracy. We shall break the clock of the Great Society. We shall break the clock of the welfare state. We shall break the clock of the New Deal. We shall break the clock of Woodrow Wilson’s New Freedom and perpetual war. We shall repeal the twentieth century.”

It is not a coincidence that Rothbard, who passed away in 1996 at the age of 69, had a revival on the alt-right and among far-right thinkers just when Donald Trump rose to be the Right’s standard-bearer. What Rothbard outlined thirty-five years ago succinctly captures both the strategy of “rightwing populism” as well as the animating vision of the Trumpist Right. “We shall repeal the twentieth century.” It sounds outlandish. To most people who aren’t professionally obligated to analyze the extreme Right, it must seem bizarre that anyone would really be devoted to such a brutally retrograde idea. But the forces that elevated Donald Trump to political power are indeed committed to precisely this project. As they currently control the government of the United States, one of the two major parties, and about half the states, no measure of social, political, and legal advancement of the past one hundred and fifty years – nothing the mainstream would broadly consider “progress” – is safe.

The assault on birthright citizenship

I kept thinking about this as the Trumpist regime’s outrageous attempt to change the constitution and nullify a core element of the 14th amendment was debated before the nation’s highest court this week. On Wednesday, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in Trump v. Barbara, considering an executive order Trump issued on his first day back in the White House that excludes the children of undocumented immigrants from birthright citizenship.

The good news is that this seems a bit much even for this Roberts Court. Four of the six rightwing justices seemed rather skeptical of the preposterous arguments the Trump administration was presenting (while Thomas and Alito appear, of course, open to run with whatever Trump puts before them).

We’ll take whatever win we can get. But the fact that this is now a debate at all is bizarre. The whole thing is obscene: Trump’s blatantly unconstitutional order, his attempt to rewrite the Constitution via presidential decree, as well as any attempt to launder this white nationalist assault on pluralism and equality into respectability.

The assault on birthright citizenship is obviously part of the Right’s much broader attempt to redefine citizenship and national identity in service of an exclusionary white nationalist vision.

It is, at its core, not merely a policy dispute or a disagreement over constitutional interpretation. It is a battleground in the struggle over what this nation should be, what its identity, its defining aspiration should be going forward.

In a narrow sense, the birthright citizenship clause – the first sentence in Section 1 of the 14th Amendment – was intended to guarantee citizenship for freed slaves. But those who amended the Constitution knew exactly that its implications went far beyond that. It constituted a repudiation of the Supreme Court’s 1857 decision in Dredd Scott that Black people couldn’t be citizens because they were inferior and they didn’t have the necessary hereditary connection – and, more generally, a profound rejection of the notion that some people, because of heritage and blood, had more of a claim to being “American” than others.

The Trumpist assault is so preposterous not only because the text of the Amendment is clear – but also because the framers explicitly debated the fact that this clause would bestow guaranteed citizenship not just upon freed slaves, but to lots of other groups as well. No tiered citizenship in America: That is what the 14th Amendment declares. But a polity that excludes anyone who doesn’t fit certain ethno-religious criteria or relegates them to lesser status is exactly the vision that animates the Trumpist Right.

Even if it looks like the white nationalist assault will, for now, fail: Birthright citizenship is no longer safe. Something that was – and should have remained! – entirely removed from the realm of contestation, unchallenged as the fundamental law of the land, is now very much contested. And that is an urgent warning: No right is safe.

Become a Member

Not ready yet for a paid membership? You can subscribe to the free version of the newsletter:

Subscribe now

Rolling back progress

It’s not like we needed another reminder that all the hard-fought rights and civil liberties that turned the United States into anything approaching a pluralistic democracy are at risk – or that taking refuge in the idea that “they wouldn’t go *that* far” is utterly foolish.

Right until the Roberts Court stripped roughly half the population of reproductive freedom and the right to bodily self-determination in the Dobbs decision in the summer of 2022, “they won’t go *that* far” was the reflexive position an industry of self-described Very Serious People had taken for literally decades. With Dobbs, America joined the very short list of countries that have restricted existing abortion rights since the 1990s, when the overall trend internationally certainly had been towards a liberalization of abortion laws. It was a basically unique development in U.S. history: While the Supreme Court had often upheld and codified a discriminatory status quo, it had never actively and officially abolished what had previously been recognized as a constitutionally guaranteed right.

The overturning of Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey really shouldn’t have come as a surprise to anyone. It constituted the culmination of half a century of conservative legal activism, and rejecting Roe had been a key element of conservative political identity for decades. But so much time had passed: The matter seemed not only settled legally but had come to define lived reality. Would they really dare to upend that? We got our answer.

Dobbs was part of a comprehensive countermobilization against the drive towards multiracial, pluralistic democracy. The Right is targeting the post-1960s civil rights order and the legislation it was built on. And they have been massively successful at hollowing out both the 1964 Civil Rights Act as well as the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Since the minute it was passed, the modern Right has searched for ways to undermine the Voting Rights Act – with the Supreme Court often acting as the spearhead of those attempts. In Shelby County v Holder in 2013, finally, the Roberts Court threw out much of Section 5 of the VRA, which required jurisdictions with a history of racial discrimination to acquire pre-clearance from the federal government for any change in voting laws. Even though the 15^th amendment clearly instructs Congress to pass legislation to prevent racial discrimination in voting, Roberts simply declared that the legislation Congress had passed – and had just extended for another 25 years by a vote of 98-0 in the Senate in 2006! – exceeded the powers of Congress. Just like that. In response, Republican-led states have since passed hundreds of discriminatory voting laws.

And the Roberts Court isn’t done yet. We will get a decision in Callais v Louisiana before the summer. Based on how the oral arguments in October went, we can expect the Court to throw out what’s left of the VRA, the prohibition of racial gerrymandering to dilute the Black vote. The Voting Rights Act will be functionally nullified.

Meanwhile, the MAGA government is hard at work nullifying the 1964 Civil Rights Act – by simply no longer enforcing it. In fact, this government now considers any attempt to enforce it a form of illegal discrimination against white people. They are not merely targeting any specific nondiscrimination measures or regulations. They are systematically demolishing the whole apparatus created to implement the Civil Rights Act. Across the federal government, offices tasked with enforcing civil rights and anti-discrimination laws are being dismantled. Anything that could serve as an instrument to level discriminatory hierarchies must be destroyed. With the civil rights revolution of the 1960s, the federal government assumed the role of an engine of democratization, often in direct conflict with the states. But no more: The federal government is now in the hands of the reaction.

Where will this end? “We shall repeal the twentieth century.” Activists, influencers, and pundits on the Right are more and more openly demanding the 19^th amendment be repealed: Their project of subjugating women and entrenching patriarchal dominance won’t be complete until women have lost the right to vote. The modern state and all its attempts to shield the people from the worst excesses of the modern capitalist economy: That also needs to go. On the state level, Republicans are hellbent on rolling back child labor laws and regulations – the majority of Republican-led states have already enacted such “deregulations.”

The goal, ultimately, is to undo the very foundations of the social and political progress America has experienced over the past century and a half. That is why the Right is assaulting the 14^th amendment, in particular. They want to turn the clock back to *before* the Reconstruction Amendments. That doesn’t mean re-instituting slavery, exactly. But it means re-orienting the government towards privileging the rights and powers of certain (white, Christian, patriarchal) groups, of those who are already at the top – and away from acting (very broadly speaking) as an engine of racial and social progress and egalitarianism, which was only possible on the basis of the amendments passed in the wake of the Civil War.

No right, no measure of progress is safe. And here we need to widen our focus even more, beyond civil rights and civil liberties: This is also how Robert Kennedy Jr.’s bizarre crusade against America’s public health infrastructure ties into the broader project of the Right. At its core, “Make America Healthy Again” is an assault on modern medicine, modern science – on some of the pillars of modern society itself.

Before you continue, can I bother you for a minute?

Today, you are reading a free article that I am making available to everyone. I would love to continue to offer these essays for a broad audience. However, long-form pieces like this take a ton of time and effort to research, write, and edit.

As an independent writer, I rely on the revenue generated by paid memberships as my main source of income. If you are a frequent reader of Democracy Americana, I am certain you will benefit greatly from a paid membership. I publish additional member-exclusive essays every week - and members can also download the audio versions of all my writing in podcast form wherever you get your podcasts.

Most importantly, if you value this independent work, please know that it is your support and your generosity that is making it possible.

And if a paid membership is currently not an option for you, there are other ways to help: Word-of-mouth is essential, and personal recommendations have an enormous impact. So, please share this piece on social media or tell a family member, a friend, a neighbor, a colleague about Democracy Americana. Thank you!

Become a Member

Why no measure of progress is ever safe

The anti-democratic, anti-modern forces on the Right have been able to advance much further, and much more rapidly, than even most critical observers would have expected. That should prompt us to reconsider certain pillars of the liberal understanding of America’s history and society – and I am using the term “liberal” in the broadest sense here to include anyone who has subscribed to a certain mainstream perspective on America’s past and present.

First of all, we need to adjust what you might describe as a progress-liberal theory of change. It is imperative we grapple with the fact that the democratizing achievements since the 1960s have not been manifestations of a broad societal consensus. They didn’t follow “organically” from successful efforts to persuade all but the fringe. They had to be imposed against massive reactionary resistance.

The question of whether or not the nation should even aspire to be a pluralistic democracy has continued to define the political conflict since the 1960s, and those who rejected that vision have not been confined to the fringes. The Civil Rights Act *not* as the culmination of noble egalitarian ambitions but as a fateful turn in the wrong direction: That is the defining position on today’s political Right far beyond the rabid MAGA base. Versions of this are articulated constantly by rightwing activists and politicians. It has become dogma in the reactionary intellectual sphere as well, where it has been quite in vogue to write whole books about why the Civil Rights Act is bad and needs to be rolled back. The Trumpists didn’t depart from a previously stable democratic consensus. They represent the radical wing of a rightwing coalition that was never on board with egalitarian principles and democratic pluralism.

Secondly, mainstream America has long underestimated the strength of anti-modern beliefs and resentments. In a much-cited essay titled “The Problem of American Conservatism,” historian Alan Brinkley warned in the mid-1990s that a liberal perspective assuming America to be a consensually “modern” nation had significant blind spots. A fundamentally anti-modern worldview as well as a social reality and political culture defined by anti-modern sentiment, Brinkley argued, was much more prevalent than most people cared to acknowledge. These weren’t just the “losers” on the fringes either, those merely slow to adapt or simply frustrated because they felt left behind socio-economically. There was a whole segmented part of society that was truly and authentically not on board with “modern” society and all its many progressive achievements – a different America “so profoundly at odds with what many Americans have come to believe are the uncontested assumptions of modern Western society.”

We should always remember that these forces of reaction do not have the support of the majority. They may claim to be representing the “will of the people” all they want, but they are ultimately pursuing a minoritarian project. Abortion bans, for instance, are not popular at all. At the time of the Dobbs decision, for instance, about two thirds of the population wanted to keep Roe and believed abortion should be legal at least in some cases; a clear majority supports a law legalizing abortion nationally. Meanwhile, a complete ban – a position many Republican-led states are taking – is favored by less than ten percent of Americans, and that has basically not changed since at least the 1990s. Alas, the Right cares little about the lack of majority support and has proven quite adept at using the counter-majoritarian structural features of America’s political system plus the deep-seated ideas of a white Christian norm (manifesting in all the “heartland” talk, for instance) to its advantage.

Progress is possible

Do not mistake any of this to mean that progress is impossible. There has been tremendous progress in certain areas and certain eras of American history!

The Reconstruction period immediately after the Civil War through the mid- to late 1870s, for instance, was an unprecedented experiment in biracial democracy – brief, but breathtaking in its impact. Amongst white Americans, there was a widespread expectation that formerly enslaved people would probably not know what to do with their newly acquired rights, that it would take time. But in reality, voter turnout among Black people was extremely high. About 2,000 Black men were elected to public office on all levels – Mississippi even sent two Black senators to Congress. South Carolina, the heart of the former Confederacy, elected a majority Black state legislature in 1868. And beyond just politics in a narrow sense, African American social and cultural life soared in those years. Here was the glimpse of what an actually democratic society might look like.

It did not last, however. America’s first attempt at biracial democracy was quickly drowned in ostensibly “race-neutral” laws and almost unimaginable levels of white reactionary violence.

However, the constitutional amendments on which that democratization was built had a more lasting impact, no matter how hard the white nationalist reaction tried to ignore them. As the historian Eric Foner put it, the Reconstruction amendments “transformed the Constitution from a document primarily concerned with federal-state relations and the rights of property into a vehicle through which members of vulnerable minorities could stake a claim to substantive freedom and seek protection against misconduct by all levels of government.” Foner convincingly argues that this transformation was so profound that it amounted to what he calls the “Second Founding.”

The civil rights revolution of the 1950s and 60s was built on those amendments. It certainly did not magically turn the country into a democratic paradise overnight. But it both represented and sparked a serious, prolonged effort to extend the democratic promise beyond just white America.

If you want to consider a less precise, but in many ways tangible measurement of racial and social progress: Watch movies and TV shows from the 1980s and 90s. There are exceptions, of course. But the base level of casual homophobia, sexism, and racism that permeated cultural production and all spheres of American life even just a few decades ago was stark.

You know who understands that racial and social progress has been real? The American Right. Their radicalization has been fueled by a pervasive sense of being under siege. That’s the paradox at the heart of the current political situation: Yes, democracy is in grave danger because reactionary forces are on the offensive. But they are not attacking out of a sense of strength, but because they are feeling their backs against the wall. And they are reacting to something real. America has indeed become less white, less Christian, more pluralistic – it had, in many ways, moved closer to fulfilling the promise of multiracial, pluralistic democracy. That is precisely why the leaders of the Right are obsessed with the idea that they have so little time left to save the nation from the leftist assault – and why there is no line they don’t feel justified to cross.

Without your support, I will not be able to continue this work. Please know that I am immensely grateful for your generosity!

Become a Member

Not ready yet for a paid membership? You can subscribe to the free version of the newsletter:

Subscribe now

Rethinking progress

Let us rethink our idea of progress in history so that we will be better equipped to defend it. The realization of how fragile democratizing progress is should make us appreciate and celebrate it more, not less. Only if we value the progress that has been achieved do we understand what we must defend. But nothing is ever guaranteed, there is no linear progression, no end goal we are somehow destined to reach.

You may object that in the long run, things do certainly get better, do they not? Well, even that is a matter of perspective and timeframe. If you compare the 1890s or even 1950s to today (or to pre-January 2025, at least), then yes, absolutely, America is a much more democratic, fairer society. But what if we set the temporal parameters differently: What if we compare the situation of anyone who was not white in 1930, 1940, or even 1950 to the height of Reconstruction? Tens of millions of people lived their entire lives in those decades. The America they experienced was not a democracy; it wasn’t getting better. In fact, they would have been told stories of that brief but marvelous moment, right after the Civil War, when “We” experienced democracy (a very different “We” then the exceptionalist “We” that speaks of America’s glorious democratic tradition going back hundreds of years).

Let us also grapple properly with the fact that no progress is irrevocable. There is a pervasive idea of history unfolding in “breakthroughs” – that once society has reached a certain line, it has passed a point of no return. In the dominant mainstream narrative about U.S. history, the civil rights revolution of 1964/65 is generally framed as such a moment. Wasn’t this, finally, when the country came to a conclusive decision to go full steam ahead towards true democracy? But, again, there is something to be learned from those who rejected that progress. The staunchly anti-democratic, anti-egalitarian, anti-pluralistic forces didn’t vanish into thin air or meekly accept defeat. They mobilized.

The actual takeaway here is that we must not assume directionality in history at all. There is no arc, and there definitely is no ironclad law of the universe that says “We” can’t slide back – or slide forward into a new kind of authoritarianism.

Courageous people have achieved marvelous things, often at incredible risk and devastating personal cost. But we must accept that things can change – in either direction: It really could get much, much worse. But it could also get better. There is nothing inevitable about either doom or progress. We are neither fated nor guaranteed to experience the status quo for all eternity. There is something deeply unsettling about this realization: There is no moral arc of the universe, progress can always be reversed, victories are never guaranteed to last. But it should also be empowering and, at the very least, create the sense of urgency that is needed to defend democracy and propel America forward.

No “end of history”

At the end of the Cold War, just when Murray Rothbard proclaimed that the time was ripe for the radical Right to “repeal the twentieth century,” the political establishment bought into a complacent sense of liberal democracy’s inevitability.

Whatever else there is to say about Francis Fukuyama famously (or infamously) diagnosing the “end of history” as the Berlin Wall was about to fall, he captured something crucial about this particular moment in the “West”: It was hard for mainstream observers to imagine anything but a liberal democratic future, a perpetuated status quo; most contemporaries quickly discounted the upheavals of the early 1990s as just a blip. The political center eagerly bought into the posthistorical framework, the center-left parties that rose to power on either side of the Atlantic in the first post-Cold War decade certainly acted and governed as if the grand ideological struggles for a better world were a thing of the past, and all that was left to do was to manage efficiently, with the right kind of expertise – a non-ideological, non-political politics.

The biggest blind spot of the pervasive post-historical thinking was that it vastly overestimated the extent to which liberal democracy, in the form it existed across the “West,” was actually satisfying every individual’s desire to be recognized as equal. In the early nineteenth century, German philosopher Georg Friedrich Wilhelm Hegel had defined history as a series of conflicts or contradictions over what idea, what societal and political order would best satisfy this human desire for recognition. In his 1989 essay (and three years later in a book), Fukuyama argued that this struggle was over, as humanity had found the answer in liberal democracy, and no serious competitor remained that could reasonably claim to have any sort of comparably universal appeal for humankind. Therefore, with the end of the Cold War, humanity was witnessing the “end of history.”

But this diagnosis underestimated the severity of the conflict surrounding the claims for true equality, and how much resistance, “backlash,” and counter-mobilization the idea of equality engendered once it was extended beyond straight white men and beyond a formalistic understanding of equality to all spheres of life: the family, the public square, gender relations. It is not an external authoritarian foe, but the internal conflict over whether or not all human beings – regardless of race, gender, religion, and wealth – should indeed have a right to be recognized as equal that is threatening the democratic project itself. A sizeable portion of the electorate in most “Western” countries is evidently not on board with that vision, drawn to illiberal ideas that maintain certain hierarchies: between white people and people who are not white; between men and women; between Christians and people who are not Christian, between those who adhere to a binary understanding of gender and those who don’t.

Far from enshrining liberal democracy forever, the end of the Cold War actually created the conditions for a more open, more explicit anti-democratic politics to (re-) gain mainstream credibility. For the assembled paleo-conservatives who were enthusiastically cheering on Murray Rothbard’s speech in 1992 just as for the leaders of Trumpism today, democracy – any attempt of leveling what they insisted were “natural” hierarchies – was and is the real enemy. To them, liberal democracy wasn’t the end of history, it was the end of the only version of America they were willing to accept.

And so, they resolved to fight it. Let us believe them when they say they want to “repeal the twentieth century.” Now it is up to those who abhor such a retrograde order to respond. The fate of democracy may well be decided by whether enough people can be convinced to defend the vision of democratic pluralism with equal ferocity and conviction.

Thank you for reading – and please know that I am deeply grateful for your support and your generosity!

Democracy Americana is my main source of income as an independent writer. Want to support my work? Consider becoming a paid member:

Become a Member

This essay is cross-posted from Steady, where Democracy Americana is now mainly hosted.

I am also making it available here for those who prefer to read (and perhaps share!) the piece in the Substack app. If you want to support my work, you can head over to Steady and become a paid subscriber.

The intro to this piece is free for everyone. If you want to read more than the preview or gain access to the audio version of the newsletter, please consider becoming a paid member of Democracy Americana, which is solely funded by readers and constitutes my main source of income as an independent writer.

Without your support, I will not be able to continue this work. Please know that I am immensely grateful for your generosity!

Become a Member

If a paid membership is currently not an option, the best way to support Democracy Americana is to share this piece here on Substack as well as on social media - and recommend my work to people you think might be interested.

You can also subscribe to the free version of the newsletter here on Substack: I will transfer all new subscribers coming in here over to Democracy Americana’s new home to make sure you are not missing anything.

Subscribe now

Dear all,

This is not a regular post, but a quick follow-up to the piece I wrote earlier this week – and an attempt to respond to the many messages I have received from you. I promise I’ll try to keep it somewhat brief.

As you’ll recall, after six months of writing Democracy Americana full time, I was giving you an update on how it’s been going, on the state of the newsletter, and on the challenges of making it work as an independent writer. I have received a ton of messages in response. Between all the comments under the piece, direct messages across all the social media sites, and emails, I believe I have heard directly from over ten percent of my paying subscribers / members. That may not constitute a representative sample in a strict statistical sense, but it certainly is a significant response. And there are certain recurring themes in what you have told me that I find extremely important. I wasn’t planning on writing a follow-up, but as I have been making may way through all the messages (and if you haven’t heard back from me, I promise: you will!), I am feeling the urge to reflect a little bit on what you are telling me.

Let me start here: Almost all the messages I have received have been extremely kind and supportive. Some of the feedback was critical – but in a thoughtful, considerate, productive way. And so many of you have really put in significant time and effort to engage with me. I could not possibly ask for more. I am humbled and grateful. A little overwhelmed, honestly – mostly in a good way, because I am frankly not used to this kind of outpouring of support. And I just want to say: Thank you. I hope that you all know that your support means a lot to me. I feel honored to write for you, and I take that responsibility very seriously.

I am also a little bit overwhelmed because there is so much to grapple with, so much to ponder in your replies and comments. I am very much still in the middle of reflecting on everything you have told me. Here are some recurring themes in your messages: A general news fatigue and a sense of being exasperated with politics (and the political media landscape), a frustration with “How we got here” pieces that don’t address the question of how we get out, and a longing for hope and optimism amidst all the dark chaos. If you’ll indulge me, I’d like to share some thoughts on what I am learning from you - and what I am taking away from your feedback.

Continue reading with a Membership

The rest of this piece is reserved for paid members of Democracy Americana.

If you are not a member, but still want to read Democracy Americana, fear not: I will keep publishing free long-form essays regularly.

But if you can, please consider becoming a paid member over on Steady: You’ll gain access to additional member-exclusive essays every week - and members also have access to the audio versions of all my writing in podcast form wherever you get your podcasts.

Most importantly, if you value this independent work, please know that it is your support and your generosity that is making it possible. Democracy Americana is entirely reader-supported and my main source of income as an independent writer.

Continue reading with a Membership

This essay is cross-posted from Steady, where Democracy Americana is now mainly hosted.

I am also making it available here for those who prefer to read (and perhaps share!) the piece in the Substack app. If you want to support my work, you can head over to Steady and become a paid subscriber.

Become a Member

If a paid membership is currently not an option, you can also subscribe to the free version of the newsletter here on Substack: I will transfer all new subscribers coming in here over to Democracy Americana’s new home to make sure you are not missing anything.

Subscribe now

Please note that a free audio version of this piece is also available over on Steady!

Dear Readers,

It has been exactly six months since I started a new career as an independent writer – since I made Democracy Americana the focus of my work and the main source of my income.

I set out on this new path in the midst of a series of life-changing transitions. Last summer, my family and I left the United States where we had lived the past five – and six of the past seven – years; we left the only house my two kids remembered as home. And I left academia after eleven years as a full-time professor and almost 18 years of teaching at the university level.

As we decided to follow my wife’s career and settle in Hamburg, in the north of Germany, I made a big bet that this newsletter would provide the basis for a sustainable independent career. At the outset, I gave myself twelve months to figure out if I could make it work. I am now halfway through this first year, and I would like to give you an update on the state of this experiment, on what I am – what we are, together – trying to build here, and on why, as of this moment, the future of Democracy Americana is still uncertain.

Become a Member

Not ready yet for a paid membership? You can subscribe to the free version of the newsletter:

Subscribe now

These kinds of personal reflections are inevitably somewhat self-indulgent, and I know that’s not for everybody. I promise I will do this sparingly (and not again until at least six months from now), and we’ll return to our regular programming later this week. If this isn’t your cup of tea, let me suggest that you just read the abstract / TL;DR version below – and then jump straight to Part II at the bottom of this post, where I am outlining some of my plans for the future of Democracy Americana and what topics, questions, and themes I will be focusing on over the next few months.

I you are continuing to read, please know that I am grateful for your interest and patience. Since I am asking you for your financial support, I think it is only fair to be as transparent as possible. And along the way, I believe my own experience may also provide some insight into the newsletter industry as well as the economic, technological, and online platform realities that are shaping / constraining the landscape for independent writers and journalists.

So, here is the short / TL;DR version of where things stand:

After six months, Democracy Americana has not reached sustainability yet – and as of right now, it is an open question if I can get it there. The newsletter has really struggled to attract new subscribers since I moved it to Steady last September - while the monthly churn (existing subscribers canceling their subscriptions) has gone up significantly. My readership now shrinks with every piece I publish. You don’t need to know much about the newsletter business to see how that math doesn’t work over the long-term.

Meanwhile, I am still gaining new *paid* subscribers – or “members,” as they are called on Steady, the platform that hosts Democracy Americana; but the growth of members is also slowing down considerably. Even if I figure out a way to stabilize the subscriber base, I would need to bring up the conversion rate of free-to-paid subscriptions to about five percent of all subscribers paying for a membership. Right now, I am fairly far off that goal of five percent. To compensate, I would need to grow the overall pool of subscribers to get to the necessary number of paid subscriptions even at a lower conversion rate. Alas, the opposite is currently happening.

Over the next six months I will need to figure out a way to reverse those trends. If you regularly read Democracy Americana, please consider helping me do that. I totally understand not everyone can afford to chip in. But there are other ways to help: Word-of-mouth is essential, and personal recommendations have an enormous impact. So, please tell a family member, a friend, a neighbor, a colleague about Democracy Americana.

And if you are in a financial position to do so, please consider becoming a paid member.

Become a Member

The state of Democracy Americana, Part I: On being an independent writer (and the pitfalls of the newsletter business)

When I re-launched Democracy Americana at a new platform called “Steady” last September and started my new life as a full-time independent writer, I wrote about the changes in my private and professional life that had led me to that point. However, a lot of new subscribers have joined since. And many of those who had already been on board when I sent out what you might call my mission statement may have still missed it, since we encountered some rather unfortunate server issues in the beginning, which meant the launch post only ever went out to a fraction of my readership. So, please allow me to re-introduce myself.

I was trained as a historian and have spent almost my entire adult life studying, researching, and teaching political history in Germany, England, and the United States. Before I decided to take the leap and become a full-time writer last summer, I taught international history as a Visiting Professor at Georgetown University in Washington, DC for five years; before that, I was Assistant Professor for contemporary history at Freiburg University in Germany. I received my PhD from Freiburg in 2015 and my MPhil from Cambridge University in England in 2007.

My academic work focused on anti-democratic tendencies and impulses on the American Right as well as the relationship between mainstream conservatism and the Far Right since the 1930s. As you might imagine, when Trump first took over the Republican Party and then rose to the presidency, I had thoughts… or rather questions that I believed were of more than purely academic interest: Where did Trumpism come from? How can we situate it in the longer-term context of U.S. history? Where does our moment sit in the contested history of the struggle over how much democracy, and for whom, there should be in America? And how is the situation in the United States connected to the inter- and transnational struggle between authoritarian ethno-nationalism and democratic pluralism?

About halfway through the first Trump administration, I decided it was time for me to intervene publicly and offer whatever I could to help make sense of what was happening around us. I became very active on social media, wrote op-eds, gave public talks, started a podcast... Finally, in November 2022, I launched Democracy Americana as a way to provide regular long-form commentary and offer historically informed deep dives into our current political and societal conflict. As long as I received a salary from Georgetown, the newsletter was always entirely free.

Leaving the academy

At the end of May 2025 my contract at Georgetown University ran out. By that point, I had grown disillusioned with academia. Not with what happens inside the classroom: I have always found teaching to be an immediately rewarding experience. And not with the actual doing research either – that was the best part: the chance to learn, discover, grow as a result. But the academic job market is a mess. I was never tenured or on a tenure track. I couldn’t even tell you exactly how many short-term contracts and appointments I’ve cycled through: I crossed into the double digits many years before I finally left.

When I became a father for the first time in 2017, I set certain red lines for myself. I wasn’t going to ask my wife to consider her professional and private aspirations as secondary. I wasn’t going to uproot my boys several more times, chasing yet more short-term contracts here or fellowships there.

At some point over the past few years, I can’t even point to an exact moment, we decided that the best path forward for us as a family was for me to go independent, become a full-time writer, and thereby gain the flexibility to go where my wife’s career would take us and where my kids would have the best possible life growing up.

This was not an easy decision. I’m a first-generation academic from a tiny village in rural southwest Germany. Getting a PhD, the chance to be a historian for a living, to work and learn with students - it all felt light years away from where/how I grew up. I thought this was going to be my life. But as big of a caesura as this has been for me both professionally as well as biographically, I do not regret my decision, nor do I mourn my academic career. In fact, I feel more content with where I am and what I am doing today than probably ever before.

I have long admired people who believed in what they had to offer, took the leap to independence, and built their own careers around what drove them. I wasn’t sure if I had that kind of leap in me. I am glad the circumstances gave me a little extra push.

Leaving America

It was, strictly from a professional perspective, probably not ideal that I launched my career as a full-time writer focused on American history and politics right after we left the United States. But life in America was simply no longer tenable for us.

There was a bunch of reasons why we decided to move back to Germany – I want to be clear that this was not solely, or even primarily, about politics. But the political situation certainly played a role.

Authoritarianism is never distributed evenly. As a straight white man, I was obviously not among the key targets of this regime. But as a foreign national, I increasingly felt my choice was to either continue to intervene publicly, at the increasing risk of potentially making myself and my family a target; or to fall silent, accommodate, ignore the political reality. Don’t go to protests, don’t add your name to any initiative that defends democracy, don’t publish anything too harsh, be careful what you say in the classroom… Unacceptable. Untenable.

In that situation, we were in an immensely privileged position: As German citizens, we could leave. It is, of course, a choice that is not available to those in the United States directly targeted by the regime, those most vulnerable to MAGA’s aggrieved aggression. When we left last summer, I felt mostly relief and gratitude for the privileged position we were in - mixed with a deep sense of despair, sadness, and anger.

Leaving Substack

I needed to move forward. But I did not want to help Substack make money.

It is well documented that Substack serves as the platform for a whole host of unsavory characters. In late 2023, the work of independent journalist Jonathan Katz uncovered what has since been confirmed over and over again: That a bunch of literal, self-identifying Nazis and white supremacists are using Substack to make money off disseminating their violent ideology. Yet Substack’s leadership proved very reluctant to do anything about it, even describing the continued platforming of such ideas and people as a heroic act of defending “free speech.” That never made any sense, as Substack was always in the business of moderating content, of suppressing and prohibiting some forms of speech while actively elevating others. The most charitable interpretation, at this point, is that Substack has a rather lax attitude towards hosting hate speech, and a tendency to be actively lenient towards the rightwing extremist scene.

Frankly, I find the politics of the Substack leadership rather abhorrent. And the problem is not *just*, as Substack defenders will say, a handful of extremist newsletters on the margins. My biggest issue is that Substack insists on actively supporting leading far-right activists and propagandists like Christopher Rufo, Curtis Yarvin, and Richard Hanania – not only platforming, but actively promoting them as important thinkers.

Unsurprisingly, Substack has also pushed Bari Weiss’ “The Free Press” to becoming one of the most successful publications on the platform – enabling Weiss, a disingenuous reactionary grievance entrepreneur, to become one of the regime’s chief apologists. It makes sense that the Silicon Valley tech elite that stands behind Substack has recently teamed up with the gambling / betting machine: Never pass on an opportunity to make money by poisoning society some more, I guess.

I think all of this is bad. And it didn’t feel right to contribute to the success of such a platform.

I will say, however, that six months after my decision to leave, I am more convinced than ever that people can be a little too quick and casual with their critique of individual writers who publish on Substack. There are wonderful people producing extremely valuable work on Substack. There are academics who have found a broad public audience for their scholarly insight; leftwing intellectuals who offer the most incisive commentary out there; independent journalists who provide invaluable coverage of what is happening around us. Some of the best data and polling analysis in the world is being hosted on Substack.

These are serious people, with a serious commitment to the democratic struggle. The reason why they have stuck around is, I am assuming, that Substack works. There is no question that it has made life as an independent writer or journalist viable for a lot of people who otherwise almost certainly would not have had that option. If you have built a substantial audience via Substack, and your livelihood depends on it, leaving that behind comes with a risk. If you think I am being overly dramatic, let me tell you that it is still unclear whether Democracy Americana will withstand the significant hit that came with leaving Substack behind – and I’ll come back to that point later.

However, I still believe leaving was the right thing to do. As Philip Bump put it so succinctly in a piece he wrote last August in which he explained why he was *not* joining Substack: This is about “building power.” Bump had just left the Washington Post, as all good people have; and it would have been easy for him to generate quite a decent income quickly by launching a newsletter on Substack. But Bump insisted: “There is value in helping institutions that are doing good, important work to build their power” – rather than helping Substack and the Silicon Valley elite behind it build its institutional power.

So, I looked for alternatives and found one in Steady. Founded by a group of independent German journalists, Steady is based in Berlin and operates with a small, international team. It is a privately owned, self-funded business, a real refuge from Silicon Valley venture capitalist domination. That felt right to me, as I was hoping to gain a little distance from the near-monopoly of Substack and seeking to de-risk, basically, from my dependence on U.S. tech feudalists.

Without your support, I will not be able to continue this work. Please know that I am immensely grateful for your generosity!

Become a Member

Democracy Americana is struggling

So, how has this experiment been going so far?

Before I break down the hurdles Democracy Americana is facing, let me emphasize something that is very important to me: I do not feel entitled to anyone’s financial support. I feel privileged to be doing this work. And the reality is that this is a tough business, and there is no reason why it shouldn’t be tough for me. I am not trying to guilt and coerce anyone into giving me money they don’t think I deserve or aren’t in a position to give. My goal is to make sure my readers have an adequate understanding of the realities that determine the future of my work.

As of this morning, Democracy Americana goes out to about 20,000 subscribers, with a little over three percent of them supporting the newsletter financially as paid members. This is almost exactly the same number of total subscribers (free and paid) as six months ago – and that is not good news.

After three years of consistent growth on Substack, the growth has stalled. In fact, since an initial spike in subscribers last September, fueled by my launch announcement and a lot of support from friends and colleagues who helped me spread the word, the overall number of subscribers has been in steady decline. What happens is that every time I send out a new piece a large number of people unsubscribe in reaction. To some extent, that’s just what happens when you drop a newsletter in people’s email inboxes: You inevitably remind some of them they have a subscription they may not want anymore. But the number of “unsubscribes” that follows every post has drastically gone up since I left Substack. Meanwhile, I am finding it much harder to attract new subscribers.

What’s changed? Some of this is difficult for me to decipher. Why the number of people who click on “unsubscribe” every time I send out a piece is something like six to seven times higher now, on Steady, than it had previously been on Substack is utterly beyond me, for instance. I just don’t understand it. I have not changed the type of essays I write nor the frequency with which they go out – and yet…

It seems undeniable to me that the change of platforms played a significant role. Substack very likely exaggerates the effect of its reference and recommendation system - but that system does generate growth. Most importantly, I believe, is the fact that so many millions of people are already on Substack, where subscribing to another newsletter is just one click away. And if someone already has their payment information stored on Substack, upgrading to a paid subscription also takes one click only.

Meanwhile, I have been trying to convince people to set up an account and enter their information at yet another platform, one that my overwhelmingly American audience is highly unlikely to be familiar with. That has proven to be a much more significant hurdle than I anticipated.

This may also explain why social media attention no longer translates into new subscribers. I have built a relatively substantial social media presence, and there used to be a direct correlation between successfully promoting a piece or even just posting a thread with some observations on social media and an increase in subscribers. That is no longer the case at all. I always thought people found me on social media and that animated them to subscribe. But that probably wasn’t quite right. The more likely explanation is that social media attention only reminded people who were already on Substack to subscribe to *my* Substack newsletter as well – while it is much harder to get people to follow you from social media to a new platform.

One particularly frustrating change I have had to institute is the use of paywalls. When I started, my plan was to continue publishing most of my writing for free and only reserve occasional extra content for paid subscribers. I was hoping, perhaps naively, that with a sizeable (and supposedly growing!) subscriber base of 20,000, enough people would still want to support my work, even if they didn’t *have to* in order to access it. That has, unfortunately, not worked at all. For quite some time now, free pieces have generated hardly any new paying members – not even enough to replace those who cancel their paid subscriptions. What is especially nasty is that free pieces still cause the same high number of “unsubscribes” – while not even generating any more free subscribers either. It is very hard to justify sending out free pieces, therefore. But while putting most of my writing behind a paywall does generate revenue, it also means I am drastically curtailing my audience. If you believe that you work matters, in whatever small ways – and as a political writer, you must! How on earth could I be doing this work if I didn’t think it had any significance at all? –, this is a big issue.

Is this newsletter worth your money?

Some of you may be thinking: We are already thousands of words in, and the author hasn’t even addressed the key questions yet – Is Democracy Americana *worth* your money? I hesitate. This is a totally fair question. But I truly don’t believe I can properly answer it for you. Let me share my own thinking on this matter.

First of all, a paid membership gets you additional benefits. While I still intend to publish free pieces regularly, the majority of my writing is now reserved for those who support Democracy Americana financially. Members also have access to the audio versions of all my writing in podcast form – either via an RSS feed that enables you to get the audio version in the podcast player of your choice or via a premium Spotify feed. Members also have the option to discuss all the posts with me and other readers in the comment section. If you are feeling especially generous and consider a “Democracy Ambassador” tier membership, you will get all that – plus two free “Ambassador” passes that you can share with / gift to whoever you think might benefit from reading Democracy Americana.

Does that package mean a Democracy Americana membership is “worth” the cost? Purely in transactional terms, who am I to make that assessment for you? Sometimes, people reach out to me to tell me they don’t believe Democracy Americana is worth $9 per month or $90 per year when that also gets you a New York Times subscription. And if that is your calculus, then fair enough!

The question I am most concerned with is this: Does my work add something of value to the political discourse? And that question I feel justified answering with a confident Yes!

Not counting this piece here, over the past six months I have published about 92,000 words here on Democracy Americana. That means an average essay comes in at about 4,000 words (the median at about 3,900). These are not opinion pieces (for those, a newspaper will usually give you around 900 words or so), I am not firing off some quick takes. These are proper deep dives. Intended for a broader audience, yes – but I take pride in researching and writing them in a way that stands up to academic scrutiny. Others will always be faster or cover the news more broadly. But I don’t think anyone will be more thorough.

Become a Member

The state of Democracy Americana, Part II: Future plans

This has all been rather gloomy thus far, and that’s not the note I want to end on. Because despite all these very real concerns about the sustainability of what I am trying to build here, I also feel a great deal of excitement about the next steps in this journey. A big reason why the past few months have been such a grind is that I had to deal with so much bureaucracy and spend so much time on the business side of this one-person enterprise – something I had zero experience with and also not something I can claim any great talent for. It’s been a lot of trial and quite a bit of error. But my sense is that I am getting the hang of this, which hopefully frees up time and resources to build Democracy Americana into what I am envisioning it to be.

I know these long-form essays are a hard sell for some people. Sometimes, I wonder if there is something outrageous about asking people to spend so much time with my work every week. In fact, one of my oldest and closest friends flat-out told me two weeks ago that he stopped reading the newsletter months ago because he simply didn’t have the energy or the nerve to read such pieces. Fair enough.

I do have some ideas for complimentary formats, both video and audio, that I would love to offer in addition to the long-form essays (more on that soon, in a separate post). But the core identity of Democracy Americana has always been – and will always be – the deep dive.

The idea behind this newsletter is to offer extensive, historically informed explorations of our current political and societal conflict. So much is happening, on so many levels – it often feels overwhelming, almost disorienting. We need to find ways to gain perspective, a sense of the big picture. I truly believe the mission of Democracy Americana is more important than ever.

Something I am really excited about is to launch, in addition to the week-to-week reflections on the political conflict, several ongoing series of essays that focus on broader questions and specific themes. The first of these I am tentatively calling: “Core Texts of Trumpism.” I will announce the start of this series in more detail soon in a separate post. But basically, I want to look at speeches, essays, and books by rightwing politicians, intellectuals, and activists that I believe anyone should know, because they capture core ideas and sensibilities of today’s Right, because they can help us understand the permission structure that governs rightwing politics. I want to select texts that can provide a window into key dynamics that have shaped the past and present of the modern Right and the relationship between mainstream conservatism and the far right. In every entry in this series, I will choose one such text and explain why it is important, what it helps us understand better about the modern Right since the 1950s or so. Over time, I am hoping to build a virtual library of sorts, focusing on accessible, shorter texts so that you can read them yourselves and follow along as I explore what they can unlock about Trumpism and its antecedents on the Right.

A second such recurring series I would like to tentatively call “How Progress Happens in American History.” Where “Core Texts of Trumpism” is very much preoccupied with the question of how the hell we got to where we are now, this series is about where we might go next, and what we can learn from America’s past about the kind of democratic transformation that the country so desperately needs. My idea is to explore the moments when transformative change happened – after the Civil War, for instance, during the New Deal, or in the 1960s Civil Rights era – and explore what made those leaps possible; the structural conditions that made them feasible; the key actors that seized the moment; the possibilities and limits of imagination in such moments of acute crisis-turned-transformation. Conversely, I also want to look at moments when such transformative change, even though it may have been possible, did not occur – and explore the reasons why the potential was squandered.

A third idea for a series (and then I’ll leave it at that, as this piece is already far too long!): “Why We Fight Over the Past.” This series will closely track the Trumpist assault on history that has already been ramping up – and is certainly about to escalate as we are getting deeper into this anniversary-heavy year. I want to situate this latest escalation in the context of the twenty-first century “history wars,” as “history” – the stories we tell about the past, how we teach it, how we commemorate it – has been at the forefront of the political debate for quite some time. The struggle over “history” is a conflict over national identity and who gets to define it, who gets to define what “America” is and who gets to belong here. As such, the assault on history is an essential part of the Trumpist agenda. These “history wars” have been going on for a long time, of course (the term itself was popularized in the 1990s), and it is worth exploring the longer-term continuities as well as the more recent radicalizations. There is also a transnational dimension here, as similar contestations over the national story have been escalating all across the “West” and wherever authoritarian movements have been on the rise. Understanding the U.S. “history wars” in this broader context will help us understand the stakes in this struggle – and how to respond to the rightwing assault.

Onward. Forward.

If you have hopefully made it this far, let me say that I am feeling an overwhelming sense of gratitude: Being able to do this work that I believe is meaningful is deeply gratifying. It is the best job I can imagine, and I promise you I will work as hard as I possibly can to keep building Democracy Americana into something that is worthy of your time, your engagement, and your support. It is your generosity that is making all of this possible.

Thank you!

Take care, Thomas

Become a Member

This essay is cross-posted from Steady, where Democracy Americana is now mainly hosted.

I am also making it available here for those who prefer to read (and perhaps share!) the piece in the Substack app. If you want to support my work, you can head over to Steady and become a paid subscriber.

This is Part II of a two-part series on the history of the Republican Party. Not a total history of the GOP and the American Right since the 1850s, of course – but an attempt to identify some key moments and dynamics, to come up with a framework for how to think about that crucial question: How the hell did we get here?

Part I, which you find here, covered a lot of ground from the GOP’s anti-slavery origins in the middle of the nineteenth century to the party emerging as the parliamentary arm of the American Right, dominated by the conservative movement, by the end of the Cold War. I obviously recommend reading Part I first – but if you want to jump right in here, don’t worry, this second part should also work as a stand-alone exploration of the past forty years of Republican history. So, strap in for: The ethno-nationalist revolt under Pat Buchanan and the GOP’s aggressive embrace of “culture war” politics in the 1990s; the mainstreaming of militant nativism, the hard turn against immigration, and the explicit embrace of the surveillance state after 9/11; the Right’s unhinged reaction to the first Black president and the rise of Donald Trump; and the question of what might become of the Republican Party in the future.

The extended intro to this piece is free for everyone. If you want to read more than the preview or gain access to the audio version of the essay, please consider heading over to Steady and becoming a paid member of Democracy Americana, which is solely funded by readers and constitutes my main source of income as an independent writer.

Without your support, I will not be able to continue this work. Please know that I am immensely grateful for your generosity!

Become a Member

If a paid membership is currently not an option, the best way to support Democracy Americana is to share this piece here on Substack as well as on social media - and recommend my work to people you think might be interested.

You can also subscribe to the free version of the newsletter here on Substack: I will transfer all new subscribers coming in here over to Democracy Americana’s new home to make sure you are not missing anything.

Subscribe now

A radical revolt after the end of the Cold War

By the early 1990s, the Republican Party had become a recognizably conservative force on an accelerating rightward trajectory, as the conservative movement had managed to define the GOP’s agenda and identity.

To an unsuspecting observer, it may not have appeared like that on the surface. After all, Ronald Reagan was succeeded by George H. W. Bush, a distinctly moderate political figure, certainly by today’s standards. However, Bush was very unpopular with the party’s ever ascending radical wing: His centrism on the domestic front they regarded as an anachronism, his foreign policy vision of a “new world order” characterized by multilateral cooperation they despised as a sellout of America’s true interests. Bush presided over a party whose center of gravity was shifting rapidly away from the mainstream of American society on many key political, social, and cultural issues. Spurred on by the Religious Right, for instance, it was adopting the position of militant anti-abortion activists; the GOP was also embracing a reflexive anti-environmentalism as a key part of its political identity – climate change denialism became a pervasive posture among Republican elected officials.

More and more, the GOP was devoted to the interests and sensibilities of two constituencies only that were united in a sometimes awkward alliance against liberalism and any attempt to level hierarchies of race, gender, religion, and wealth: A white conservative base that tended to define America – “real America” – as a predominantly white, Christian, patriarchal nation; and a relatively small elite of business people and wealthy donors. Strategically, the Republican Party faced a dilemma: In a pluralizing society that was generally moving away from such a vision for the country, the GOP would either have to find a way to broaden its appeal – or be destined to struggle finding a democratic majority. Republicans, however, were neither willing to widen their focus nor accepted the prospect of relinquishing power. It was the hour of those who favored a third option and identified the constraints of democracy itself as the real problem. They were determined to transform the political system in a way that would allow them to hold on to power without majority support, even against the explicit desire of a growing numerical majority of the electorate.

Immediately after the end of the Cold War, ethno-nationalist forces inside the Republican Party believed their time had come to stage a revolt against the GOP establishment. Uniting behind Pat Buchanan as their standard bearer, they challenged incumbent President George H. W. Bush in the 1992 Republican primaries. Rightwing pundit Joe Sobran, one of Buchanan’s closest confidants and advisors, described the project of the self-proclaimed “paleo-conservatives” like this: “Now that democracy has overthrown communism, we can turn to the problem of how to overthrow democracy.”

Buchanan openly professed an aggressive nationalism and explicitly embraced a vision of white Christian domination. His hostility towards the party leadership endeared him to a conservative movement that emerged frustrated from twelve years of Republican rule in the White House. Instead of actually implementing the rightwing agenda, conservatives bemoaned, Reagan and Bush had caved to establishment pressure and appeased liberal domination.

But the party elite’s tentativeness and lack of conviction had not been the only obstacle, according to those around Buchanan. They came away from Republican rule in the 1980s convinced that controlling the executive was insufficient on a more profound level: Politics, they believed, was ultimately downstream from culture, so to change the country’s trajectory and roll back the ongoing liberalization of American life before it was too late, the Right needed to change course. Buchanan was instrumental in shifting the Right’s focus more explicitly to what came to be called the “culture wars.”

You have reached the end of the free preview. The rest of this piece is reserved for paid members of Democracy Americana.

Continue reading with a Membership

If you are not a member, but still want to read Democracy Americana, fear not: I will keep publishing free long-form essays regularly.

But if you can, please consider becoming a paid member over on Steady: You’ll gain access to additional member-exclusive essays every week - and members also have access to the audio versions of all my writing in podcast form wherever you get your podcasts.

Most importantly, if you value this independent work, please know that it is your support and your generosity that is making it possible. Democracy Americana is entirely reader-supported and my main source of income as an independent writer.

Continue reading with a Membership

Read Democracy Americana on Steady

If you were already subscribed to Democracy Americana, I have automatically transferred you over to Steady and you should already have this post in your email inbox. And no worries: I will also transfer new subscribers on here over to our new home. I promise you won’t miss anything. If you have any problems, please don’t hesitate to contact me at newsletter@democracyamericana.com and I promise we will get it sorted out.

With this post, I am re-launching Democracy Americana at a new platform called Steady. I am now a full-time independent writer – and I depend on the support of my readers.

In this piece, I am offering a proper explanation for why I left my academic career, why I left the United States, why I left Substack – and what is next for this newsletter and my overall work.

If you want just the main practical information, here it is:

- If you were already subscribed to Democracy Americana, you have been transferred over to the new platform in what should have been a seamless process on your end. But please note that these emails are now coming from a different address, and you can make sure you always receive them by marking this address as ‘not spam.’

- If you want to subscribe for the free version of the newsletter, just enter your email. Please note that Steady will send out an email asking you to confirm your subscription, so that no one else can sign you up without your consent. Pease look for that email in your inbox and confirm!

- You will automatically be asked to create an account on Steady – but if it is just the free version of the newsletter you want, you can skip that.

- If you want to support my work with a paid membership, you will indeed create an account on steady first (super easy, with just your name and country of residence) and then choose between the different membership tiers I offer. They come with a host of additional benefits, all explained below.

- And if you have any problems or questions, please don’t hesitate to email me at newsletter@democracyamericana.com

Most importantly: I really want to keep going. I hope you will join me and make it possible. For your support and your trust, I am grateful.

This is it. With this post, I’m re-launching Democracy Americana at a new platform, away from Substack. And I need your help as I am launching my new career as a full-time independent writer. I am asking you today to support my work by purchasing a paid subscription – or a *membership*, as it is called on Steady, the platform that now hosts my newsletter.

I am extremely excited this moment has finally come, after many months of preparation and some massive professional and personal changes. But I am also nervous, feeling more anxious than probably ever before in my adult life. As I am writing this, my hands are trembling a little bit. Whether or not I will be able to turn my writing and political commentary into a viable career and continue this work that I feel so passionate about is now up to you, the readers of Democracy Americana.

Read Democracy Americana on Steady

I started writing Democracy Americana on November 22, 2022. In the almost three years since, it has always been entirely free. In fact, I didn’t even offer paid subscriptions – mostly because, let’s be frank, I was not allowed to: As a German citizen who lived in the United States on a work visa, I was legally precluded from accepting compensation unless it was my regular salary from my employer, meaning Georgetown University. I wasn’t exactly thrilled about this. But as long as I had a job, and a decent income, I decided it was worth it – if it meant I could engage publicly and offer my perspective on the escalating struggle over American democracy.

But May 31 was my last day at Georgetown – and the last day of my academic career. I am now a full-time writer with no other income but through my public work. I now depend on your support.

I have been fortunate to build Democracy Americana into a sizable publication. This post goes out to almost 20,000 subscribers – and hopefully a lot more people who are not subscribers yet will stumble upon it online. The key challenge is to get enough of you to convert from a free subscription to a paid membership. Such a membership comes with extra benefits that I will outline in more detail below. But the bottom line is this: I am not a salesperson, and I will not pretend that I am selling you a product that you won’t be able to live without. I am asking you for your support, your generosity, and your trust.

I believe the mission of Democracy Ameriana is more important than ever. The idea behind this newsletter is to offer historically informed deep dives into our current political and societal conflict. So much is happening, on so many levels – it often feels overwhelming, almost disorienting. We need to find ways to gain perspective, a sense of the big picture. Democracy Americana seeks to combine historical context and political analysis, with a focus on the United States, but situated within the transnational struggle over the fate of democracy. I really want to keep going. I hope you will join me and make it possible.

I know there is more important stuff going on right now than the latest personal news. And there is something inherently self-indulgent about writing a piece like this. But as I am now asking you for financial support, I want to be maximally transparent about what’s been going on in my life that has brought me to this place, about what I am asking of you, and about what you can expect from Democracy Americana going forward. So, here is what I want to explain to you: Why I left my academic career; why I left the United States; why I left Substack; and what you will get from Steady, the new home of this newsletter.

(And if you have no time or are not in the mood for the “How we got here” part of the story, feel free to jump straight to the last two sections of this post to get a clear picture of what you can expect from Democracy Americana in the future!)

Leaving academia behind

After 18 years of teaching, and the last 11 years as a full-time professor, my university career ended when my contract at Georgetown University ran out on May 31. For four-and-a-half years I taught international history at Georgetown; before that, I was an assistant professor of contemporary history at Freiburg University in Germany. For complicated reasons that have nothing to do with me or my job performance, my contract at Georgetown was never up for extension or renewal. I can’t really point to the exact moment I decided I wasn’t going to apply for another academic position. But it has been a while since I saw my future in academia.

For most of my adult life, starting with my first semester at university in 2003, I was certain I wanted to become a historian. But I have grown disillusioned with academia. Not with what happens inside the classroom: I have always found teaching to be an immediately rewarding experience. And not with the actual doing research either – that was always my favorite part: the chance to learn, discover, build expertise, gain a better understanding of the world that surrounds us and how we got to be who we are in it.

But the academic job market is a mess. When I became a father, I set certain red lines for myself that I wasn’t going to cross to keep my academic career alive. I have never been tenured or on a tenure track. I couldn’t even tell you exactly how many short-term contracts and appointments I’ve cycled through: I crossed into the double digits many years ago. And that has meant a lot of anxiety, while the system, in return, asks for maximum flexibility and a lot of work with uncertain outcome. If you want to have a shot at becoming a tenured professor at a university, you have to apply for everything, anywhere, seek out whatever might be out there, and follow jobs and positions across the country – or, in my case, even across the Atlantic. At age 43, and as the father of two young children, I am simply no longer willing to do that. I wasn’t going to ask my wife to consider her career, her professional and private aspirations, as somehow secondary. I wasn’t going to uproot my boys several more times, chasing yet more short-term contracts here or fellowships there. We decided that be best option for us as a family was for me to go independent, become a full-time writer, and thereby gain the flexibility to live where my wife’s career would take us and where my kids would have the best possible life growing up.

I realize this may sound like I am mourning my academic career and regretting the choices I had to make. Please don’t take it that way. This is a big caesura for me professionally and biographically, no doubt. But I feel more content with where I am today than I felt for many years in the academy. I have long admired people who believed in what they had to offer, took the leap to independence, and built their own careers around what they really wanted to do. I wasn’t sure if I had that kind of leap in me. Now the circumstances have given me a little push, and I am grateful.

Leaving America

I am launching my career as a full-time writer focused on American history and politics right after we left the United States. We flew out of Washington in early June – having lived almost five years, and six of the past seven years, in our near DC. We were in a privileged situation there, with good jobs; the beautiful house we rented was the only place my kids remember calling home. But life in America was simply no longer tenable for us.

There were many reasons why we decided to move back to Germany, and some had nothing to do with politics at all. But the political situation undoubtedly played a role. Like everyone else with any kind of platform, I have been getting a lot more abuse in response to everything I’ve written or said publicly since January. More importantly, it became clear soon after Trump took power that the First Amendment would simply no longer apply to foreigners in Trumpist America. In late March, Turkish PhD student Rumeysa Ozturk at Tufts University was arrested by masked agents of the state for the “crime” of writing an op-ed in a student newspaper. That was totally fine, Marco Rubio declared, because “if you come into the US as a visitor and create a ruckus for us, we don’t want it.” Freedom of speech, the right to assemble, due process – the U.S. constitution explicitly grants these fundamental protections to all *people*, not just citizens. But no more. Constitutional rights now come with a disclaimer in America: Unless the regime decides otherwise. Not surprising, therefore, that immediately after the murder of Charlie Kirk, the State Department declared it would come after foreigners who were supposedly “praising, rationalizing, or making light of” his death.

The comprehensive assault on free speech we are experiencing now is obviously not just, or even primarily targeting foreigners. But it does affect people differently, as authoritarianism is never distributed evenly. And as a foreign national, I increasingly felt my choice was to either continue to intervene publicly, at the increasing risk of making myself and my family a target; or to fall silent, accommodate, ignore the political reality. Don’t go to protests, don’t add your name to any initiative that defends democracy, don’t publish anything, be careful what you say in the classroom… Unacceptable. Untenable. In that situation, we were in an immensely privileged position: As German citizens, we had an additional choice – we could leave. It is, of course, a choice that is not open to those in the United States directly targeted by the regime, those most vulnerable to MAGA’s aggrieved aggression.

Leaving Substack

Let’s move forward. But not on Substack.

It is well documented that Substack serves as the platform for a whole host of unsavory characters. In late 2023, the work of independent journalist Jonathan Katz uncovered that a bunch of literal, self-identifying Nazis and white supremacist extremists were using Substack to make money off disseminating their violent ideology. Yet Substack’s leadership proved very reluctant to do anything about it, even describing the continued platforming of such ideas and people as a heroic act of defending “free speech.” That never made any sense, as Substack was always in the business of moderating content, of suppressing and prohibiting some forms of speech while actively elevating others. Eventually, they did take some of the extremist accounts down – but left others up… at this point, the most charitable interpretation is that Substack has a rather lax attitude towards hosting hate speech, and a tendency to be actively lenient towards the rightwing extremist scene.

Frankly, I find the politics of the Substack leadership rather abhorrent. And the problem is not *just*, as Substack defenders will say, a handful of extremist newsletters on the margins. My biggest issue is the fact that Substack insists on actively supporting leading far-right activists and propagandists like Christopher Rufo, Curtis Yarvin, and Richard Hanania – not only platforming, but actively promoting them as important thinkers. Unsurprisingly, Substack has also pushed “The Free Press,” founded by Bari Weiss, one of the most disingenuous reactionary grievance entrepreneurs in the country, to becoming one of the most successful publications on the platform. I think that’s bad. And it doesn’t feel right to contribute to the success of such a platform in any way.

Let me say that I believe people can be a little too quick and casual with their critique of individual writers who publish on Substack. There is no question that Substack works, in the sense that is has made life as an independent writer or journalist viable for a lot of people who otherwise almost certainly would not have had that option. There are wonderful people producing extremely valuable work on Substack. There are academics who have found a broad public audience for their scholarly insight; leftwing intellectuals who offer the most incisive commentary out there; independent journalists who provide invaluable coverage of what is happening around us. These are serious people, with a serious commitment to the democratic struggle.

I’m assuming many of them feel just like I do about the Substack leadership. Why haven’t they left yet? I can’t speak for them, of course. But I will say that if you have built a substantial audience via Substack, and your livelihood depends on it, leaving that behind comes with a risk. Substack is by far the biggest platform out there – the networking effects that it generates are real. For instance: A lot of people are used to paying for newsletters on Substack, they have their payment information already stored, if they stumble upon a new publication, a paid subscription is just one click away. That is just not the case anywhere else.

Look, I don’t want to be defensive about any of this. I just want to be honest. I have, until now, continued to publish my newsletter on Substack. It was always entirely free, so I didn’t make any money for the company, at least not directly. But my presence on Substack inevitably helped legitimize the platform. As I am now asking for your financial support for the first time, I could not justify doing that on Substack. As Philip Bump put it so succinctly in a piece he wrote in late August in which he explained why he was *not* joining Substack: This is about “building power.” Bump had just left the Washington Post, as all good people have; and it would have been easy for him to generate quite a decent income quickly by launching a newsletter on Substack. But Bump insisted: “There is value in helping institutions that are doing good, important work to build their power” – rather than helping Substack and the Silicon Valley elite behind it build its institutional power.

I will no longer publish on Substack. Democracy Americana will stay up, at least for a transition period, with this post announcing my departure greeting everyone who finds the newsletter there – almost like a forwarding address. But the time has come to move on.

Read Democracy Americana on Steady

Welcome to Steady!

Enter Steady. Who? Even if you’ve been paying attention to the alternatives that seem to be attracting most Substack defectors, most of you will not have heard of Steady. Some of you might think: Does it have to be yet another platform? Can’t we consolidate somewhere? I get it. But Steady, believe me, is pretty cool.

Steady was founded by a group of independent German journalists; it is based in Berlin, but operates with a small, highly international team. Most importantly, it is a privately owned, self-funded business, a real refuge from Silicon Valley venture capitalist domination. And the people who run it have their hearts and their politics in the right place. Two months ago, I didn’t even know Steady existed – they have been pretty successful in Europe but haven’t really penetrated the US market yet. But they rapidly won me over with a level of care, support, and competence that is unlike anything I could have expected anywhere else.

I’m sure you are happy to hear that my experience with Steady has been great – but what about your experience? Everyone who was a subscriber to Democracy Americana on Substack has been transferred over to Steady in what should be a fairly seamless process. If receiving the free version of the newsletter is all you are interested in, there is nothing else you need to do – except this: Since the emails are coming from a different address now, you can make sure you always receive them by marking this address as ‘not spam.’

If you want to support my work, however, I’d like to point your attention to two more things:

First of all, on Steady, paid subscriptions are called “memberships.” I like the idea behind that: The term is supposed to signal that there is more than merely a transactional relationship between the writer and the reader – that this is about supporting the work you deem valuable, that there is a communal aspect to what we are doing here.

Secondly, to become a member, you first have to create a free account on Steady (with just your name, email, and country of residence) – and then choose between the different membership tiers. Just like on Substack, you have the option to do a monthly plan – or get a significant discount for an annual plan (please note that for the annual membership, Steady lists not only what it costs you per year, but also what that means in terms of a per-month breakdown, so that you can directly compare the de facto per-month cost for an annual plan to a monthly plan).

My hope is that I can keep one long-form essay per week free – but that depends on how the ratio between free subscribers and paid members develops.

Those of you who will support me with a membership will have access to additional benefits. I want to offer exclusive posts almost every week – mostly shorter commentary, intended as a diary or record of our extraordinary moment. This is something I have been wanting to add for a long time: A “For the Record,” basically. Additionally, all members will get access to the audio versions of the posts (which free subscribers can only access directly in the email or on the website) in podcast form, via an RSS feed that enables you to get the audio version in the podcast player of your choice or via a premium Spotify feed. Finally, members will be able to discuss all the posts with me and other readers in the comment section. That is something I have never had the time to do so far: Properly engage with my readers’ comments, critique, and suggestions. Those benefits are all available in the “Democracy Supporters” tier. If you are feeling especially generous and consider a “Democracy Ambassador” tier membership, you will get all that – plus two free “Ambassador” passes that you can share with / gift to whoever you think might benefit from reading Democracy Americana.

What I am asking of you

Does that package mean a Democracy Americana membership is “worth” the cost? Honestly, I find it impossible to answer that question. Purely in transactional terms, who am I to make that assessment for you? The calculus will be different for people, depending on their own situations. Some may only occasionally open the emails; others may have been reading Democracy Americana for free for years, creating a totally different value proposition.

I genuinely know I am asking a lot of you. We are all dealing with an increasingly fragmented media landscape – I know exactly what it feels like to be trying to keep an overview over what newsletter subscriptions I have, where I can read my favorite writers, who is moving from this platform to that… I can only be honest with you: I am asking for your support – because your support is the only thing that will allow me to keep going. As in individual writer with no big company or platform behind me, no third-party funding, I can’t calculate membership prices that only work if I attract a mass audience. Because I won’t attract a mass audience. But I believe I have a committed readership. And I hope I can convince you to take the leap and convert to a paid membership.

What I am promising

I want to end on a promise. There is a lot of uncertainty surrounding this jump into independence. I expect it will be a while before it feels like I have firm ground beneath my feet again. I am sure there will be mistakes. There will be technical glitches. There will be trial and error. But at the core of it all, I do feel confident about my work. Because I am not trying to sell you on an unproven idea or the concepts of a plan. My main promise is that I will continue the work I have been doing with this newsletter for almost three years. I want to do more of it, more regularly. But if you feel unsure whether my work is worth your endorsement and your support, I invite you to stroll through the archive of long-form essays I have published on Democracy Americana so far: 90 pieces, ranging from 2,000 to, more often, around 5,000 words – proper deep dives into what I believe are the crucial issues that define the political and societal struggle. For better or worse, that is my track record.

This post got a lot longer than I initially anticipated – I thank you for your patience and for indulging me. It’s time to get back to work. I believe this is the most dangerous, most precarious moment since Trump came down the golden escalator in 2015, and we need to grapple with that honestly. At the same time, we must not perpetuate the Trumpists’ assertions of strength and dominance. The gap between their authoritarian aspirations and the reality of American society remains vast. That’s where politics continues, that’s where the counter happens.

With your help: Onward. Forward.

Read Democracy Americana on Steady

Quickly, before we get started: For the last time, I promise, I want to start with a sincere apology: I am very sorry about the prolonged silence of the past few weeks. I know I still owe you the third and final part of my series on how to situate our Trumpist moment in U.S. history, and that is definitely coming soon. I have finally set (almost) everything up over here in this new life as a full-time writer (and that includes setting up a business, which the German law requires!). My plan is to re-launch Democracy Americana next week (!) at a new platform (!!). I will be getting back to writing my regular weekly long-form essays – plus additional pieces exclusively for subscribers. It has been a very difficult transition after I left my academic career and my life in the United States. I am really excited to get back on track, and I am truly grateful to all of you for sticking with me!

And no worries: If you are already subscribed, you won't be missing anything, and you don’t have to do a thing.

No one knows what is going to happen next. Charlie Kirk, a well-known rightwing activist and media figure, was killed in what certainly looks like a political assassination. Here is the obvious part: That’s really bad. This is an exceedingly dangerous moment.

While it seems impossible to imagine anything good coming out of this, the spectrum of realistic outcomes is wide. The last time an act of political violence led to an overly confident “This changes everything” chorus from journalists and pundits was when Trump was shot during one of his rallies in Pennsylvania in July 2024. But this did not change everything. In fact, just a week later, Joe Biden declared he was dropping out of the presidential race, Kamala Harris quickly emerged as the Democratic candidate – and everyone talked about that. There was no widespread explosion of political violence after the attack on Trump; there is even an indication that the acceptance of political violence decreased in the wake of the events. Trump ended up winning the election, but not because someone had attempted to assassinate him.

Then again, we are in a very different situation right now. Last July, a Democrat was in the White House and urged peace and reconciliation. Now, the President is the leader of a movement that is convinced to be fighting an evil leftist enemy about to destroy America.

The most plausible expectation is that the Trumpists will use the murder of Charlie Kirk as justification and pretext for a significant escalation of political repression. But as I am writing this, I hesitate. There is a real danger of manifesting bad outcomes by doomsaying (doomfesting?) – by convincing people that escalating violence is inevitable, or that there is nothing left to be done against Trumpian totalitarianism. We really don’t know. And nothing is ever inevitable.

Violent America: Who is to blame?

Political violence has been on the rise in the United States. I know this won’t make anyone on the Right reconsider their reactions, but let us note that political violence overwhelmingly comes from the Right. Over the past decade, rightwing violence has sharply gone up, and the far right accounts for most of the general increase – a trend that is observable not just in the United States, but also on the international level. According to the Department of Justice and the FBI, the general rise in hate crimes around 2020, for instance, was almost entirely due to an increase in racist and antisemitic incidents, in attacks on Muslims and other people of non-Christian faiths, in crimes against people who present as gender non-conforming and against trans people. Violent political extremism committed by white nationalist militant groups, specifically, has exploded in recent years. Anyone who comments on the threat of political violence in the United States in the wake of the Kirk murder and doesn’t start there is not actually concerned about political violence.

It is important to note that this isn’t something new or unprecedented in U.S. history: The country has gone through periods that were vastly more violent in the past. And yet, we are undoubtedly on a very dangerous trajectory. Of particular concern is the fact that the acceptance of political violence among Americans who aren’t themselves committing violent acts is also rising. Americans are increasingly likely to regard political violence as a legitimate and necessary response to the situation they face. Once again, this is much more widespread on the Right than on the “Left,” broadly defined. But it is a general trend we observe across the political spectrum.

Who is to blame for this situation? In individual cases, that question can be very difficult to answer. The motivations of individual perpetrators are often muddled and contradictory; it might be impossible to determine exact causalities of how they arrived at their ideas. From a societal perspective, however, there is no doubt that an increasingly aggressive, militant political culture has spread, providing fertile ground for violent expressions and excesses. And no one has contributed more to this distinctly dangerous political culture than the leaders of the American Right.

All strands of the Right – Republican elected officials, the media machine, the reactionary intellectual sphere, the conservative base – have been embracing rightwing vigilante violence in an increasingly aggressive fashion. They have openly encouraged white militants to use whatever force they please to “fight back” against anything and anyone associated with “the Left” by protecting and glorifying those who have engaged in vigilante violence coded as rightwing – call it the Kyle Rittenhouse dogma, or the Daniel Perry dogma, or the Daniel Penny dogma, or the Ashli Babbitt dogma. The fundamental reality of American politics is that anyone who opposes Trump – politicians, judges, election officials, anyone – faces an avalanche of violent threat.

There is simply no equivalent to this among leaders of the Democratic Party or the influential circles of the institutionalized Left. It has become dogma on the Right to view the Democratic Party as a fundamentally illegitimate faction that must not be allowed to govern; that a nefarious, radically anti-American “Left” has taken over all the institutions of American life and desires to destroy the nation; that there is no room for restraint or compromise with the “enemy within”; that all measures, regardless of how extreme, are justified and indeed necessary in this struggle for the very survival of “real America.” That is what Donald Trump and the leaders of the Republican Party have been propagating relentlessly. That is how rightwing intellectuals have been portraying the political conflict. And that is also what rightwing media activists like Charlie Kirk have been telling their audience.

Strange valorization

This assessment of Kirk’s role, by the way, would have been entirely uncontroversial in mainstream published opinion until Wednesday. Since the moment Kirk was murdered, however, leading Democrats and influential voices on the center-left have been engaged in a campaign to paint a very different picture of the man who was assassinated. It has been a strange spectacle. How misguided the attempts to valorize Kirk are is evidenced by how much sanitizing they require. In order to make the case that he was an admirable, respectable public figure who strengthened rather than assaulted democratic values through his work requires creating an imaginary “Charlie Kirk” who bears little resemblance with the actual person who was killed this week.

The signature “contribution” of Turning Point USA, the organization Kirk founded as a teenager, is the “Professor Watchlist,” a website TPUSA runs. It serves to enable a McCarthyist hunt for “leftists” so that they can be publicly disparaged; once a professor is on the list, harassment, intimidation, and threat are guaranteed to follow. Kirk existed in a rightwing media and online eco system that runs on anger and monetizes outrage. And he was very good at his job, constantly telling his audience what new devious plot “the Left” was pursuing to take America away from “real Americans.” In the process, he propagated basically any rightwing conspiracy theory that has emerged over the past few years: the Big Lie about the 2020 election, Covid disinformation, Great Replacement… all combined with a hefty dose of bigoted white grievance. How much of what he preached did he *actually* believe, about the leftist conspiracies and dangerous “woke” domination? It’s unlikely even he knew. In significant ways, Kirk was the face of a New Right that is not “conservative,” certainly not in the colloquial sense, but devoted to permanent radical culture war.

And yet, leading Democrats have been asking us to honor Kirk’s memory and “continue his work: engage with each other, across ideology, through spirited discourse” while liberal opinion leaders are explaining how Kirk was “practicing politics the right way.” I suspect there is an element of trying to appease the President and his followers – which is quite the indication of how far down the dark path America already is. Some of this is also intended to demonstrate how magnanimously above the partisan fray one is: a performances of faux-high-mindedness. But there is certainly, I am sure, a genuine desire to model good democratic behavior behind this. That impulse I commend and share. I believe, however, that sanitizing Charlie Kirk’s politics and actions is the wrong way to go about this. We should trust ourselves and those we address to be able to hold two thoughts at the same time: That we must forcefully condemn political violence but also acknowledge that it festers and thrives in a deeply unhealthy political culture that Kirk himself helped create. The message should not be that political violence is bad and requires a strong response because it targeted a good guy who was “practicing politics the right way” (which Kirk definitely was not). Political violence is bad because it inherently corrodes the democratic polity, because it makes democracy impossible. Pluralistic democracy depends on people feeling safe enough in the public square to actively express themselves and participate in the political process. If they don’t, because the public square is dominated by intimidation and violent threat, democracy must perish.

American Reichstag Fire

Unfortunately, that is exactly what the movement currently in charge of the American government wants – to curtail democracy and roll back pluralism. And they are itching to escalate the situation.

The reactions from the Right have been as unsurprising as they have been unhinged. The idea that the murder of Charlie Kirk was the “American Reichstag fire” quickly made the rounds in rightwing online circles. On February 27, 1933, just weeks after the Nazis had come to power, the German Reichstag, the seat of parliament, was set on fire. The Nazis used this event as pretext to nullify civil liberties and conduct mass arrests of political opponents – a key step in destroying whatever was left of the formerly democratic Weimar Republic and towards erecting dictatorship. That is also what rightwing radicals envision for America: The Democratic Party should be classified as a “domestic terrorist organization”; all “leftist” organizations should be criminalized, all their members arrested; in any case, unwanted foreigners who are “making light” of the assassination ought to be expelled.

There certainly is an element of posturing involved. But these reactions are far too numerous and coming from people with far too much influence to simply discard them as online chatter. In fact, it is a key characteristic of today’s Right that there is no clean line of separation between the more extreme online spaces, the intellectual sphere, and the halls of Republican power. That is one reason why Charlie Kirk was an emblematic, important figure: He existed where media activism, online scene, and institutionalized political power intersected. And in any case, the President himself is all in. Soon after the murder, Donald Trump declared he would “find each and every one of those who contributed to this atrocity.” He also says he wants to “beat the hell” out of all those “radical left lunatics.”

War!

The Trumpists are convinced that it is all connected: This assassination is just the latest offensive in an ongoing, comprehensive leftist assault on America, Charlie Kirk – the “America First martyr,” as Steve Bannon declared – a soldier who died in the war against the Left.

The Right is at war. War on Chicago. Department of War. A Civil War against the Left. As is always the case in the Trump era, there is something silly about these proclamations, about the constant need to perform “rah-rah-we-are-going-to-war!” MAGA manliness. But unfortunately, the Trumpists are seeking to bring reality closer in line with rhetoric. Over the summer, they have militarized the political conflict. What was just a horror scenario in the background in January is already reality: Trump is deploying troops domestically, against blue cities and political opponents.

The Trumpists want the escalation. They are convinced it is the only path to defeating the “enemy within” and imposing their vision of “real America” on a society they know does not want to comply. That is one major goal of the militarization of American cities: Create situations that are likely to result in violent escalation sooner or later. This is the context in which Charlie Kirk was murdered. The Trumpists believe they may have found their Reichstag fire moment. And if it is not this one, then how long until something else happens that might serve as pretext? When those who are controlling the levers of state power are itching for violence, how long until mass violence follows?

Over the past few months, I have been thinking about a different moment from the Nazi period, and as imperfect as it may be as a potential analogy, I find it terrifying: The assassination of Ernst vom Rath. On the morning of November 7, 1938, a 17-year-old Jewish boy named Herschel Grynszpan shot German diplomat Ernst vom Rath in the German embassy in Paris. Grynszpan was the son of Polish Jews who had fled to Germany in 1911. Herschel emigrated to France by himself in 1935, at the age of 14, trying to get away from Nazi repression. In November 1938, he found out that his family had been deported to a border region between Poland and Germany, robbed of almost everything they possessed. The details of the story are contested, but it seems he decided he wanted revenge. Vom Rath died in the afternoon of November 9. In reaction, the Nazi leadership ordered stormtroopers and party loyalists to vandalize and destroy synagogues across the country. What followed was the so-called Reichskristallnacht, a nation-wide pogrom in which the Nazis killed 1,300 people, arrested tens of thousands, and destroyed over 1,400 Jewish synagogues and town halls. The Nazi propaganda presented it as a spontaneous eruption of the anger of the German people. But the regime had long planned this next escalation, and the killing of Ernst vom Rath offered a welcome pretext to radicalize the persecution of German Jews.

As the Trumpist government deploys the National Guard and ICE roams the streets carrying out the Trumpist dream of purging the nation: What if someone decides to fight back as they are being assaulted in broad daylight by masked agents of the state who refuse to identify themselves? Maybe someone whose brother, father, or son was disappeared into a foreign gulag? Or someone whose rights, dignity, and identity are being taken from them simply for who they are?

We don’t know what will happen next. Nothing is ever determined. But if there remain influential people on the Right who believe this has gone too far, who understand and fear where this President and the movement he leads are taking the country, this is the time to step up. America is now teetering on the brink of a dark place from which it is very difficult to come back.

This is Part II of a broader reflection on how to situate our Trumpist moment in U.S. history – sparked by a question I have been getting constantly in recent months: “Why is America suddenly so divided?”

If you need a refresher or didn’t read the first part and want to jump right in, here is the argument I have made so far: America has always conceived of itself as a democracy. This has obscured the fact that a variety of different regimes, of competing social and political orders, of incompatible visions of what the country should be, have existed side by side throughout the nation’s history. A hierarchical ethno-state dominated by white Christians or a pluralistic democracy with sincere egalitarian aspirations? That conflict was not resolved in 1776. It wasn’t settled in 1865. And unfortunately, contrary to the dominant mainstream narrative, the passing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 didn’t usher in democratic consensus either. Instead, the forces who fear and disdain the vision of egalitarian pluralism have been engaged in a comprehensive counter-mobilization spearheaded by movement conservatism. On January 20, those who explicitly reject the creedal or civic national identity came to power. Their overarching goal is to restore white male domination in all spheres of life and recenter the social and political order around strict hierarchies of race, gender, religion and wealth - as opposed to equality and egalitarian principles. The Trumpists didn’t depart from a previously stable democratic consensus. They represent the radical wing of a rightwing coalition that was never on board with egalitarian principles and democratic pluralism. They believe any measure – regardless of how extreme – is now justified to defend “real America.”

But why now? Why has the Right radicalized so much in the early twenty-first century? What is it about our particular moment in this longer-term struggle over what “America” should be that allowed the extremists to take over and catapult Trump to power? Let’s tackle those questions in Part II below.

America is currently experiencing the latest iteration of a very old struggle that has defined the country since its inception. What should this nation strive to be: A land of and for white Christians that supposedly works best when wealthy white men get to exert power and steer the community – or a place where “all men are created equal” and the individual’s status is not determined by what they look like, where they came from, who they pray to (or not), how they identify, and how much money they possess? The answer to this fundamental question of national identity determines who gets to belong and who gets to define the boundaries of what counts as “American,” who gets to shape the public square in their image. These competing visions are best accommodated by fundamentally incompatible political and societal orders: A white Christian ethno-state with strict hierarchies of race, gender, religion, and wealth on the one hand; an egalitarian democracy embracing a pluralistic society on the other.

This has always been the central fault line in U.S. history. But it is now playing out under distinct political circumstances, shaped by an unprecedented societal and cultural constellation that explains why one side in this conflict has radicalized rather drastically over the past few decades. Trumpist rule is not an aberration from some glorious democratic past. But the Right is also not simply the same it has always been; American politics, as difficult as it may be to remember, has not always been like this.

The most plausible interpretation lies somewhere in-between tales of either total aberration or complete continuity (though that does not mean exactly in the middle). The challenge is to grapple seriously with long-standing traditions and continuities while also acknowledging the more recent radicalization. Take the Republican Party: It has long been beholden to plutocratic interests; extremists and radical conspiratorialists have exerted a significant influence inside the party for decades (the historian Seth Cotlar, for instance, is investigating the life of one Walter Huss, a leading right-wing activist in Oregon from the late 1950s all the way through the early 2000s, a man with ties to the Neo Nazi scene and domestic terrorists who managed to take over as chair of the Oregon GOP in the late 1970s); the shameless fearmongering against an imminent leftist / socialist / communist revolution became the party line as soon as movement conservatism rose to be the preeminent force within the party; waging an aggressive culture war to mobilize the base has been the standard Republican playbook since Buchanan and Gingrich in the 1990s.

And yet, today’s GOP – acting mostly as an authoritarian movement defined by a leader cult – is very different from the political party that existed sixty, forty, or even twenty years ago. Large majorities of Republican lawmakers in both the Senate and the House, for instance, voted for the Civil Rights Act of 1964. In the 1970s, there was significant Republican support for the (ultimately failed) Equal Rights Amendment, and the GOP was broadly on board with the establishment of the modern environmental protection state, which was instituted under Nixon. The mainstream of the party either actively supported, or at least accepted, and certainly didn’t dare to fully dismantle the New Deal state through at least the end of the Cold War – which was one of the greatest frustrations of the radical right and paleo-conservative hardliners during the Reagan era. And it was quite uncontroversial in Republican circles until not that long ago to take a pro-immigration stance as part of a broader affirmation of a creedal nationalism that, at least rhetorically, allowed anyone to become American if they declared their allegiance to a set of founding ideas.

I am certainly not trying to sell you on the idea that the Republican Party was all on board with egalitarian pluralism until Trump came down the golden escalator in 2015. Far from it. The point is that the creedal nationalism and the democratic aspiration were still present and at least somewhat influential within the GOP through the end of the twentieth and into the twenty-first century. There is simply nothing left of that now. Today’s Republican Party is fully dominated by ethno-nationalism and an aggressive disdain for cultural or religious pluralism, by a desire for patriarchal domination, by a fervor to dismantle the modern state and destroy anything that might act as a check on moneyed interests.

Red America vs Blue America

America’s major parties now represent two fundamentally incompatible visions for this country. What is America? Who gets to belong? How much democracy, and for whom? Those have always been contested issues. But the fact that this struggle now overlaps so clearly with party lines is the result of a rather recent reconfiguration.

In the middle of the twentieth century, there simply was no liberal party and no conservative party in the United States. Both Democrats and Republicans existed as heterogeneous coalitions covering an enormous spectrum ideologically, demographically, and culturally. Sometime between the 1930s and the 1960s, however, those who generally embraced a modern state and the extension of the democratic promise beyond just white people took hold of the Democratic Party. This alienated its Southern wing, the so-called Dixiecrats, whose sole mission it was to uphold Jim Crow apartheid. The 1960s civil rights legislation supercharged a process of partisan realignment and ideological sorting. While it took decades to play out, it ultimately united the forces opposing multiracial, gender-egalitarian pluralism in a Republican Party that has been focused almost solely on the interests and sensibilities of white conservatives. And they tend to define America – “real America” – as a white, Christian, patriarchal nation. America, to them, is supposed to be a place where traditional authority is revered and wealthy white Christian men are at the top.

Today, the struggle over what “America” is maps onto the conflict between the parties. That is the fundamental reality of U.S. politics: National identity and democracy have become partisan issues. This existential dimension of the conflict between Democrats and Republicans overshadows all other considerations, it shapes all areas of U.S. politics.

The conflict over what America should be is not confined to abstract discussion and political discourse. It defines the reality of everyday life for everyone who lives in the United States. Two Americas exist within the boundaries of the nation state: liberal, left, progressive vs conservative, rightwing, reactionary… those are just labels. But they correspond to a reality that threatens the very existence of the United States. The gap between Red America and Blue America is rapidly widening – a profound reversal of a general trend of convergence that had characterized recent U.S. history, especially since the civil rights legislation of the 1960s. Democratic states, cities, and communities are quickly moving towards a pluralistic future; meanwhile Republican states and communities are trying to roll back much of the social and cultural change of the past century.

In nearly all spheres of life, “red” and “blue” worlds are moving in opposite directions: Voting rights and participation in the political process; gender relations; the relationship between church and state; education and parenting; access to health care and welfare state protections; attitudes towards science and modern medicine; trade unions and workers’ rights; gun laws and environmental regulations. It all contributes to a situation in which the life expectancy at birth in the two Americas diverges drastically: It is almost universally higher in Democratic states while 15 of the 16 states with the lowest life expectancy are dominated by Republicans. The average lifespan of a newborn in Mississippi, West Virginia, Alabama, and Kentucky is seven to eight years shorter than in California, New York, or Massachusetts. This is not entirely due to deliberate decisions by political leaders, of course – but a significant part of it is. The conflict between the two Americas is, in this sense, quite literally a matter of life and death. The Right is, we should therefore admit, not wrong about the existential stakes of this struggle.

Extremists in charge

The forces dominating the Republican Party today are not willing to resolve that existential struggle within the confines of democratic self-government. They want to impose their version of “real America” by openly embracing state authoritarianism and militant extremism.

Such forces were always part of the modern rightwing movement that formed between the 1930s and the 1950s. It brought together all those who were critical of – or downright hostile towards – the establishment of the modern state and the emergence of a pluralistic, multiracial democracy. Anti-state libertarians and the business right, rejecting any intervention in the market (and regulation of the practices that made them a lot of money) in the name of “free enterprise”; reactionary intellectuals and traditionalists who were skeptical of modern society as such; religious conservatives and Christian nationalists fighting against “secular humanism”; white segregationists and far-right activists convinced that the civil rights legislation of the 1950s and 60s would doom “Western civilization.” This coalition ranged from relatively moderate conservatives still attached to the center and willing to accommodate the system to extremists on the very fringes of society. They all viewed modern democracy as a threat to what they declared were “natural” hierarchies of race, gender, religion, and wealth. They disagreed on whether the advancement of “un-American” leftism, liberalism, and egalitarianism could be halted from within the political system – or had to be stopped by much more radical means, including the use of violence.

The radicals have emerged victorious from this internal rightwing conflict: The people in charge on today’s Right are at war with pluralistic society. A decade ago, they united behind Donald Trump as their standard-bearer. Now they control the government of the United States of America.

Why Now?

Why is this happening now? The Right itself offers two contradictory answers simultaneously. On the one hand, they are constantly trying to project strength: They want us to believe they represent a vital, virile alternative to anemic liberal democracy – and a cohesive vision far superior to weak, divisive pluralism. Liberal democracy, in this tale, is destined to surrender to the far right. On the other hand, rightwingers are also obsessed with their own weakness. The Trumpist imagination is defined by a sense of besiegement: Powerful enemies everywhere, anti-American forces both from without and from within conspiring to destroy the nation, “real Americans” constantly victimized by a society they believe owes them eternal adulation and deference, made to suffer under the yoke of crazy leftist politics.

Relentless self-victimization – a veritable persecution complex – has been a defining feature of modern conservatism since its inception. The heightened version of this type of siege mentality we are seeing now points to something that is diagnostically important: Until very recently at least, the Right was indeed losing the fundamental struggle over what kind of country “America” should strive to be. The idea of a “crisis of liberal democracy” has dominated the political and broader public discourse over the past decade. But in crucial ways, it is the conception of “real America” as a white Christian patriarchal homeland that has come under enormous pressure. Socially, culturally, and – most importantly, perhaps – demographically, the country has moved away from the rightwing ideal since the middle of the twentieth century. It is not just a figment of the reactionary imagination that America has become less white, less religious, and more pluralistic in basically every dimension. As a result, the conservative hold on power has become tenuous. In a narrow political sense, they may be in charge right now – in the White House, in Congress, at the Supreme Court. But it is not just political power the Right seeks. They desire cultural domination and affirmation. In the cultural sphere, the public square, and across many societal dimensions like the family, the shift in power away from white male conservatives has been more pronounced. The Right has engaged in a comprehensive counter-mobilization in response – a radicalization fueled not by a feeling of strength, but by a sense of weakness.

From Obama to George Floyd to Joe Biden

Nothing symbolized this threat to white dominance like Barack Obama’s presidency – an outrageous subversion of what reactionaries understand as America’s “natural order.” Obama’s presidency dramatically heightened the white conservative fear of demographic and cultural change, of the non-white “Other” taking over.

The Republican Party’s increasingly open embrace of aggressive nativism had been coming for a long time, of course. It’s what the self-described paleo-conservatives had been demanding for decades. In 1992, they came close to toppling the party establishment when their standard-bearer Pat Buchanan challenged President George H. W. Bush in the Republican primaries. A wave of white anger, resentment, and despair allowed these ethno-nationalist forces to advance significantly after the end of the Cold War – even if it wasn’t quite enough yet to take over the party. While the rightwing base was almost certainly with Buchanan on issues of national identity and immigration in the 90s, the conservative power centers and the Republican establishment were strong enough still to hold on. They never really denounced the openly anti-democratic forces in their midst, however, and instead decided they would try to harness the extremist, far-right popular energies on the base. As a result, the whole party kept being pulled to the right, with almost every election cycle bringing in a new cohort of people more radical than the last.

9/11 worked as an accelerant for the xenophobia, nativism, and white fear that increasingly defined rightwing political culture well into the political mainstream. Conservative icon Phylis Schlafly, for instance, who had risen to fame in the 1970s as the leader of the grassroots protest against the Equal Rights Amendment, regularly used her monthly newsletters to rage against “invading” Mexicans and “foreign diseases” attacking America. She also fully embraced what is today called Great Replacement Theory, propagating the conspiratorial idea that Democrats were actively trying to bring in “illegals” and dangerous foreigners in order to “change the make-up of the nation.”

Against this backdrop of an already riled-up rightwing base, Barack Obama was elected president in November 2008. In the rightwing imagination, Obama – a moderate liberal politician by any reasonable standard – epitomized the threat from brown foreigners, the dangers of Black radicalism, and the triumph of extreme leftism. His presidency dramatically heightened the white reactionary fear of demographic change, it supercharged the perception of a loss of political and cultural dominance.

By the end of the Obama era, it had become dogma on the Right that Democratic governance was fundamentally illegitimate – an existential threat to the very survival of the nation, actually. Shortly before the 2016 election, Michael Anton, now Director of Policy Planning in the State Department, channeled this perception in an infamous essay published in the Claremont Institute’s online magazine, titled: “The Flight 93 Election.” Anton called on conservatives to unite behind Donald Trump – who had, not coincidentally, risen to political prominence as the most famous proponent of the racist birther conspiracy theory. According to Anton, Democrats constituted a threat to America akin to the terrorists of 9/11. The Republican establishment had failed to stop them; far more radical measures were needed than what a “normal” conservative politician was willing to even consider. Trump, however, was different: “Trump, alone among candidates for high office in this or in the last seven (at least) cycles, has stood up to say: I want to live. I want my party to live. I want my country to live. I want my people to live. I want to end the insanity.” Since Trump, in this interpretation, wasn’t bound by norms, traditions, or precedents, he alone could be counted on to do whatever was necessary to fight back against the “wholesale cultural and political change” - to “charge the cockpit,” in Anton’s crude analogy, like the passengers of United Airlines flight 93 on September 11, 2001, one of the four planes hijacked by terrorists: It never reached its target and crashed into a field in Pennsylvania, as the passengers decided to fight back. In many ways, the “Flight 93” mentality has completely taken over the Right – it is now all “Flight 93” politics, all the time.

The Right quickly fell in line. Even among political and intellectual leaders who had initially vowed to stand “Against Trump” because they saw him as insufficiently conservative, most quickly settled for Trump being sufficiently anti-Left.

However, the first Trump presidency did not bring about the comprehensive undoing of all the racial and social change the Right disdains so much. Instead, it ended with millions of people protesting against racist police violence in the wake of the murder of George Floyd. On the Right, the mass mobilization of a multi-racial coalition was not seen as a glimpse of a desperately needed racial reckoning, but instead as the harbinger of national doom. The summer of 2020 was yet another in a series of inflection points that further escalated the perception of imminent threat. It has become a key element of rightwing political identity to regard the protests as irrefutable proof that radically “Un-American” forces of “woke” extremism were rising, that “the Left” had started its full-on assault. This interpretation is a central component of the permission structure that governs rightwing politics. Building up this supposedly totalitarian threat from the “Left” enables the Right to justify its actions within the long-established framework of conservative self-victimization. It’s a permission structure that doesn’t ever allow de-escalation or retreat. Clinging to the idea that “The Right won’t go THAT far” is futile because they have convinced themselves that their leftist enemies have already gone *much further*.

And then Joe Biden “stole” the 2020 election. Well, if he didn’t “steal” it, necessarily, he was still an illegitimate president. That’s what a clear majority of Republicans believed throughout Biden’s time in office. It’s not even necessarily the case that they all bought into Trump’s Big Lie or truly believed the specifics of this conspiracy theory or that conspiratorial rumor. Many of them probably conceded there was nothing technically wrong with how the election was conducted. But that didn’t affect their assessment of Biden’s presidency as illegitimate very much. Republicans didn’t start from an investigation of how the 2020 election went down and came away from that exercise with sincerely held doubts. The rationalization worked backwards: They looked at the outcome and decided it must not stand. Accusations of fraud gain plausibility among conservatives not because of empirical evidence, but because they adhere to the Right’s “higher truth” of who is and who is not legitimately representing – and therefore entitled to rule – “real” America. The Right disputes the legitimacy of the 2020 election not necessarily on the basis of claiming fraud and conspiracy, but because democracy itself subverted the will of “the people” by allowing a supposedly illegitimate coalition to pursue its fundamentally “anti-American” project.

The rightwing intellectual sphere has articulated these claims in remarkably stark terms. In the spring of 2021, the magazine American Mind published a particularly instructive essay by Glenn Ellmers, entitled “’Conservatism’ is no Longer Enough.” Although the author made no claim that the 2020 election was “stolen” and explicitly acknowledged that more people had voted for Joe Biden than for Donald Trump, he maintained that the outcome was illegitimate. According to Ellmers, Biden’s presidency represented a vision of multiracial pluralism that was hostile to what he referred to as “authentic America.” In his view, everyone who voted for Joe Biden and his “progressive project of narcotizing the American people and turning us into a nation of slaves” was simply not worthy of inclusion in the body politic. Ellmers declared that “most people living in the United States – certainly more than half – are not Americans in any meaningful sense of the term.” Only “authentic Americans” allowed – a clearly racialized idea of “the people,” mostly represented by “the vast numbers of heartland voters.” On the other side, the “Un-American” enemy for whom Ellmers knew nothing but disgusted contempt, not coincidentally characterized by their blind admiration for a young Black artist and activist: “If you are a zombie or a human rodent who wants a shadow-life of timid conformity,” Ellmers raged, “then put away this essay and go memorize the poetry of Amanda Gorman. Real men and women who love honor and beauty, keep reading.” Ellmers demanded to redraw the boundaries of citizenship and exclude over half the population. For “authentic America” to survive, he was sure, a different kind of leader had to emerge: “What is needed, of course, is a statesman who understands both the disease afflicting the nation, and the revolutionary medicine required for the cure.”

A rightwing “counter-revolution”

The general sentiment that traditional conservatism needs to be replaced by a much more radical form of politics is being echoed across the Right – among pundits, activists, politicians, intellectuals. People at the center of rightwing politics are now rejecting the label “conservatism” outright. In October 2022, for instance, The Federalist published an instructive piece titled: “We need to stop calling ourselves conservatives.” It pleaded with people on the Right to accept the “need to forge a new political identity that reflects our revolutionary moment.” No more restraint, no more “small government”: “The government will have to become, in the hands of conservatives, an instrument of renewal in American life – and in some cases, a blunt instrument indeed.” John Daniel Davidson, the author of the piece and senior editor at The Federalist, was fully aware of the implications of what he demanded: “If all that sounds radical, fine. It need not, at this late hour, dissuade conservatives in the least. Radicalism is precisely the approach needed now because the necessary task is nothing less than radical and revolutionary.”

What unites all factions on the Trumpist Right is the belief that a “leftist” revolution has already taken place, that the radical “Left” has taken over all the major institutions of American life. In this view, the civil service, the universities, the “liberal media” – they are the power centers from which a leftist subversion is quickly spreading. As the Left now has command of America, all that is noble has been destroyed, there is nothing left to conserve; nothing short of a radical “counter-revolution” can now save the nation. When Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts infamously declared that “we are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be” a little over a year ago, he was merely expressing what is now the defining sensibility on the Right. A brazen threat of violence, fully in line with the logic that dominates rightwing politics. As Roberts wrote in his Foreword to Project 2025’s policy report: “With enemies at home and abroad, there is no margin for error. Time is running short. If we fail, the fight for the very idea of America may be lost.”

So little time left. The Right’s political and intellectual leaders believe they are engaged in a noble war for the “soul,” the identity, the very existence of the nation. If the stakes are so high, if the other side is out to destroy all that is good about America and not only tear the nation’s moral fabric apart, but erase the natural order in the process, moderation, restraint, and patience are not an option. There is therefore no line they don’t feel justified to cross.

Where does America go from here? “Normal” politics is not an adequate response to the kind of challenge the country now faces. In fact, a return to pre-Trump “normalcy” is not even desirable, as it would merely restore a deeply dysfunctional, deficient system that gave rise to this mess in the first place. America needs transformative change. But as we are locked into an existential struggle, is it even remotely realistic to hope for a democratic leap? What are the actual chances of transformational progress in a society so fundamentally divided?

Let’s end this Part II here, as we are almost 4,500 words in. This last question deserves proper reflection, and we will tackle it in a Part III - to be published early next week.