"Is this end of American Democracy?"

No. But it does mean American democracy is turning into something, um... "darker."

I was asked today, by an incredulous European friend, whether what is happening here in the United States spells, in some sense, “the end of American democracy.” My answer at first was simple, but then slightly more complicated.

The simple answer is: “No.” Even if MAGA achieves its maximalist ambitions of disenfranchising large swatches of the current voting population, deporting tens of millions of immigrants, revoking birthright citizenship, reestablishing Christian nationalism as the cultural baseline, and so on, it won’t mean the “end of American democracy.” Rather, it will mean that America has ceased to be what (liberal) political scientists call a “consolidated” democracy.

The more complicated answer comes from an understanding that the United States has always been an imperfect democracy. Depending on your preferences for lumping vs. splitting, since independence there have been perhaps half a dozen distinct eras of American democracy, which one might periodize this way:

• The Post-British Republic 1783-1828

• The Frontiersman’s Republic 1829-1863

• The Reconstructed Republic 1863-1876

• The White Man’s Republic 1877-1919

• The Melting Pot Republic 1920-1964

• The Inclusive Republic 1965-2024

• The MAGA Republic?

To highlight the shifting contours of an ever-imperfect American democracy, let me sketch each of these eras in a paragraph or two.

The Post-British Republic

Early small-r republican America was, naturally, the version closest to that envisioned by the founders of the new nation that had won independence from the British Crown. The framers of the Constitution imagined a republic whose basis for political inclusion would be white male suffrage, with an additional requirement in some cases of property-ownership, to keep the rabble sidelined. They imagined a form of politics with minimal factionalism, ruled largely by people with a shared interest in the economic possibilities afforded by a vast continent still lightly populated.

The large majority of the U.S. population at that time (fewer than 4 million people, according to the 1790 Census — less than the population of the Seattle metropolitan area today) hailed from the island of Great Britain. The rulers of that era were almost all economic and intellectual elites, mainly from the slave-owning planter class of Virginia and the merchant class of Boston, who thought of themselves as men of the Enlightenment. The thought that the franchise might include women or non-whites in any significant numbers was outside the Overton Window of the time.

Was this a “true” democracy?

The Frontiersman’s Republic

The election of Andrew Jackson in 1828 brought that era to an end with the arrival of the first president who might reasonably be called a “populist.” The white male franchise had expanded steadily as property requirements for voting were dropped almost everywhere by the 1820s, and Jackson, the hard-scrabble former general and then pioneer westerner in Tennessee was the hero of the rabble. The old-line elites regarded with no small horror the “ragged mob” that joined Jackson’s inauguration party at the White House in 1829. These “men of the West” believed that the purpose of the American republic was to empower the white man by removing the Indians and expanding westward, enabling every freeborn man to make it rich off the bounty of a clearing continent. While the idea that every white man should have the vote was unquestioned, the thought of giving the vote to anyone else, like women or the Afro-descended, remained a fringe political idea in Jacksonian America.

Was this a true democracy?

The abiding political question of that era went under the rubric of “sectionalism” and centered on the moral, economic, and political conflict over slavery. The South expanded its plantation economy — in 1845, almost all the enterprises in the country with more than 1000 workers were slave plantations — while the North industrialized on the basis of “free” labor. The tension between these two competing developmental models would eventually lead to Civil War.

The Reconstructed Republic

In that cauldron of that conflict, the possibility of a fully racially inclusive male republic went from a fringe idea to the political mainstream. The Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 ended slavery wherever the Union Army went. In 1865, the 13th Amendment to the Constitution ended slavery throughout the United States. In 1868, the 14th Amendment provided for birthright citizenship and equality before the law for all citizens. And in 1870 the 15th Amendment guaranteed voting rights for all men, specifically aiming to guarantee the vote for black men.

For a dozen years after the end of the Civil War, the victorious North would attempt to impose a vision of a politically egalitarian and inclusive republicanism on seething Southern whites, in a project known as Reconstruction. The “compromise” that settled the disputed election of 1877 would bring that experiment to an end, with the Republicans holding on to the Presidency at the price of agreeing to end Reconstruction in the South, which would in short order lead to the disenfranchisement of the black male population and de jure segregation of public facilities under a system that would come to be known as Jim Crow. Women, moreover, still did not have the vote.

Was this a democracy?

The White Man’s Republic

This era would see the rise and eventual success of the movement for women’s right to vote. While the demand for women’s suffrage had begun in the 1840s, as part of a broader movement for women’s rights, it was only in 1869 that the first state would grant women the vote (Wyoming). In 1878 what would eventually become the 19th Amendment (granting women the right to vote) was first proposed to Congress, but it would not be ratified until 1919.

This era was also marked by a radical shift in migration patterns, as immigrants began to arrive en masse to the United States not just from Northwest Europe, but increasingly also from Southern Europe (especially Italy) and Eastern Europe (including many Jews) and even in small but growing numbers from Asia and Latin America. It was also in this era that the United States went from being a largely rural and agricultural society to an urban and industrial one. The 1920 Census showed for the first time that most Americans lived in cities — and that these cities were teeming with the foreign-born. And, at least in the North, all these people either now or soon would have access to the ballot.

But of course the biggest story of this era was the disenfranchisement of blacks after the end of Reconstruction. While African American men exercised the right to vote and held office in many Southern states from the end of the Civil War through the early 1880s, the end of Reconstruction enabled southern whites to reassert what came be called “white supremacy.” The mechanisms for excluding black men from the franchise were various: literacy tests, “grandfather clauses” (excluding from the franchise all whose ancestors had not voted in the 1860s), and other devices to disenfranchise African Americans were written into the laws of former Confederate states. Pure physical intimidation in the form of thousands of lynchings was also crucial to pushing black men back out of the political sphere in the South.

Was this a true democracy?

The Melting Pot Republic

As today, the influx immigrants in the six decades after the end of the Civil War would eventually lead to a massive backlash against immigration — a movement backed by the eugenicist “scientific racism” that was then common intellectual currency. This backlash would culminate in the 1924 Johnson-Reed Act, a Ku Klux Klan-endorsed US federal law that set quotas on the number of immigrants. The Act limited the number Eastern and Southern European entering the country by setting immigration quotas designed to maintain the “national origins” balance of the United States in that year (and for good measure excluded Asian immigrants altogether). Since a sizable majority of Americans in 1924 hailed from Northwest Europe, and since few people from those countries were trying to emigrate to America during the interwar era, the Act effectively closed the United States to all but a trickle of immigrants for the next 40 years.

At the same time, two other facts were true about American democracy in those middle years of the twentieth century: though women now had the vote, blacks in the former slave states of the South remained shut out of the franchise by Jim Crow.

The four long decades of closed borders created several politically ironic effects. Although the Johnson-Reed Act was enacted as a reactionary backlash against “orientals” and “swarthy” Europeans, it also produced an era of great cultural assimilation and amalgamation of Euro-Americans under the rubric of “the melting pot,” which had two signal effects. To begin with, the crucible of Great Depression and World War created a sense of social solidarity among Euro-Americans that was perhaps the strongest the country ever has experienced, which contributed to the possibility of building a more inclusive welfare state than has ever been achieved before or since: the federal government became the provider or enabler of pensions and disability insurance (the 1935 Social Security Act), collective bargaining (the 1935 National Labor Relations Act), food guarantees (the 1939 food stamp program), health care insurance for the old (the 1965 Medicare Act), health care insurance for the poor (the 1965 Medicaid Act), and so on. At the same time, as Euro-American cultural fusion into a uniform “whiteness” proceeded over this period, the continued exclusion of African-Americans became a more and more glaring embarrassment, and the appeals and demands of blacks for full citizenship and rights more and more undeniable. Thus a program conceived in reaction in the 1920s ended up birthing the most progressive era of inclusion that the country would ever experience.

Nonetheless, in 1964 the majority of African-Americans remained effectively disenfranchised. Was the United States yet, even then, a true democracy?

The Inclusive Republic

It is part of the liberal master narrative that it is only in 1965 that the United States can be said to have achieved “full” democratic status.

The two great breakthroughs of that year were the Immigration and Nationality Act, on the one hand, and the twin Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts, on the other. What these acts together did was undo the explicit ethnoracial limits on American democracy. The Immigration and Nationality Act repealed the Johnson-Reed Act by ending the discrimination between would-be immigrants on the basis of national origin (a scarcely-veiled proxy for race). The Civil Right and Voting Rights Acts in turn ended de jure discrimination between blacks and whites in the United States in terms of political and civil rights. No longer would the laws of the United States make distinctions of access to the rights of nationality and citizenship on the basis of ethnoracial categorization.

In the sixty years since, the result has been a massive change to the shape of the polity of the United States. While the political inclusion of African Americans for a long time enjoyed the most historiographical and political attention, arguably the change to the immigration laws changed the shape of American society more. In 1965, fewer than 10 million U.S. residents had been born outside the United States — today the number is closer to 50 million; likewise in 1965 there were barely a million Asian-Americans — whereas today there are twenty times as many. And sixty years of this immigration regime has in turn also changed the shape of the native-born population: since the turn of the century, the majority of children born in the United States have been non-white. And all these people have voting rights, or at any rate expect to receive them on the basis of their birthright citizenship. (It’s worth noting that those who passed the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act scarcely anticipated any of these changes.)

Even now, however, there exist many limits on the American franchise. In at least ten states, for example, those convicted of felonies remain disenfranchised even after completing their sentences. (By contrast, two states — Maine and Vermont — allow even the currently imprisoned to vote.) But the more conspicuous exclusion from the franchise is the 75 million Americans under the age of eighteen. Not allowing children to vote may seem natural and reasonable enough to most of the readers of this post, but I would submit that it’s no more natural and reasonable than excluding African-Americans from the vote seemed be to the large majority of white Americans for most of American history. And of course tens of millions of non-citizen residents are also excluded from the voting booth — which, by the way, is not true in many other places around the world.

The current president of the United States claims a “huge mandate” based on his victory in the November election, but here’s the raw fact: of the 340m people who live in America today, Trump received votes from only 77 million of them — less than a quarter of national population.

So again: is American even yet now a “true” democracy?

The MAGA Republic?

Here’s the thing: 1965 is not that long ago.

Americans like to think of ourselves as an “old” democracy, and in some senses that’s true. Our constitutional architecture, for example, dates to the 18th century (and alas is very much showing its age — the topic for a different post). Likewise, many aspects of our civil society that support democracy at a cultural level are deeply institutionalized and “embedded” (as the sociologists like to say). But at the same time, as the brief narrative above suggests, the process of inclusion in the political franchise has only reached its present form within the lifetime of many people who are not yet even of retirement age. All Baby Boomers were born in the world of “melting pot democracy” when blacks were still excluded from the vote in a dozen states, and when cultural assimilationism was an assumed fact of life for all immigrants.

It’s just not that long ago. Which is part of why it turns out our democracy is not nearly as “consolidated” as liberal-minded political scientists long assumed.

I want to be clear on one point: MAGA republicanism will still likely be one in which political leaders are chosen through elections. After all, self-avowed “illiberal democrats” the world over — from Russia and Turkey to Brazil and Hungary — still do hold elections. I do not expect this is likely to change in the United States in the near term. The idea of abolishing elections altogether remains outside the present Overton Window (though it is being discussed a lot the tech world, who imagine replacing electoral democracy with a “network state”). What MAGA republicanism will be, however, is a far less inclusive democracy. It will be a republic in which “the circle of the ‘we’” will be shrinking rather than expanding.

For the large majority of American history, insofar as there were changes to the shape of the franchise, it was toward greater inclusion. The early 19th century saw the expansion of the franchise to include non-property owning white men. The late 19th century saw the franchise widen to include Asians and African Americans (though the latter soon lost the access to the ballot across the South). In the early 20th century, women got the right to vote, and in the late 20th century African-Americans finally got the de facto right to vote, and the voting age was also lowered from twenty-one to eighteen. In other words, with the important exception of the rollback after Reconstruction, who has been “included” in the American polity has undergone a general albeit punctuated process of expansion. This direction of change is exactly what Martin Luther King was referring to, in what has become a liberal cliche, when he claimed that “the arc of history bends toward justice.”

But arcs of history can also be S curves or even bell curves. There is no “ultimate” direction to history. American democracy certainly will end one day, because everything in history eventually ends. I just don’t think that day is here quite yet.

It’s merely that our long-imperfect democracy is about to get even less perfect.