This era of swarming authoritarianism and the destruction of the administrative state amid partisan entropy reflects a basic crisis. One major party has been taken over by a semi-fascist clique, while the other has collapsed upon itself, incapable of offering systematic resistance.
To halt the slide into “illiberal democracy” as a veneer for autocracy we need a concerted response, but the conversion of the Republicans into a personalist cult and the Democrats’ decline into a feeble rump blocks popular action. How can we surmount these barriers?
Although our contemporary predicament is in many ways unique, there is a parallel in the sustained political crisis of the 1850s. During that chaotic decade, one major party (the Whigs) disintegrated; the other (the Democrats) warred internally until splitting in two, running competing candidates in 1860; finally, a new, potentially revolutionary party (the Republicans) confronted the crisis head-on. We need an equivalent realignment now, a break-up of the existing party system to create something fundamentally new under whatever party name is most useful.
How can we get there? What steps can we take to push events in that direction, where a new partisan formation challenges the wannabe fascists, Christian Nationalists, and seedy opportunists who have taken over the Republican Party?
The first task is to take an axe to the GOP’s trunk, to force splits and peel off as many as possible in the name of upholding democratic and constitutional norms. These moves should take two forms:
First, we need to foment a schism. Republican politicians in Blue States (e.g. New England, New York, and along the West Coast) should be systematically pressured to disassociate themselves from the Trump machine and run for election as “Independent Republicans.” Such a move will require the active cooperation of Democrats in those states. The decisive step will come when those figures, if elected, refuse to caucus with the MAGA diehards in their legislatures or Congress. An example of what this could look like is Vermont Governor Phil Scott, who publicly backed Biden in 2020 and Harris in 2024, repeatedly wins re-election with over 70% of the vote, and is emphatically his party’s main leader. If he, Lisa Murkowski, and even Susan Collins, were to formally break with what Murkowski calls “the party of Trump,” it would send a signal.
Second, we need to break up the Red States. Where Republicans dominate, Democrats should seek out independents and dissident Republicans to run hard against MAGA officeholders, along the lines of Evan McMullin, who won almost 43% in Utah’s 2022 Senate race, or Dan Osborn’s 47% in Nebraska’s 2024 Senate contest. This is clearly what Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (and also Representative Ro Khanna) seek to whip up in their barnstorming Republican-held districts. More power to them.
Neither of these strategies will work as just a few marquee runs, however. They need to happen at every level of our exceedingly complex electoral system: county commissioners, mayors, city councils, and state legislatures, to start notching up wins and build momentum. We cannot wait for November 2026, as if regained Democratic congressional majorities are just low-hanging fruit, ready to drop. The work needs to happen how, so that state and local wins intimidate fence-straddling Republicans into defecting; the Republicans’ shocking loss in March of a “safe” state senate seat in Lancaster County, PA is an example of how this process might unfold.
The second task will be to anticipate when opportunities will suddenly appear to break through the existing “good order.” Here are some episodes that steadily built an antislavery electorate in the antebellum North, and finally the emergence of a new party committed to using every constitutional means to suppress the South’s “peculiar institution”:
In 1842, the fiercely antislavery Ohio Whig Joshua Giddings was censured by Congress after he defended rebellious slaves who had seized the ship Creole and taken it to freedom; he promptly resigned, went home and won re-election with 95% of the vote, an unalloyed triumph. Who in Congress is willing to face censure and demand re-election today?
In 1850, the newly-elected Whig Senator from New York, William Seward, gave a maiden speech declaring there was “a Higher Law than the Constitution” and demanding, in the name of freedom, no more slave states. His challenge to what was then called “the Slave Power” anticipated the sudden emergence of the Republicans four years later. Who will give such a speech today?
In 1854, when a Democratic Congress passed the Kansas-Nebraska Act permitting the extension of slavery into all of the western territories, parties in the North came together on “Anti-Nebraska” tickets, defeating dozens of Democrats in that fall’s election, and laying the basis for the new party. Where can we build bipartisan Anti-Trump tickets? And where can we recruit Independent Republicans to primary the MAGA-ites?
In 1857, after the Supreme Court issued its infamous Dred Scott decision authorizing slavery everywhere in the United States and abrogating the citizenship free Black people enjoyed in parts of the North, state legislatures and supreme courts in Maine, Vermont, and Wisconsin nullified that decision. Which states today are willing to stand up to not only the Trump Administration but whatever permission the Supreme Court gives it?
The point here is not to replicate a particular historical episode, but rather to suggest the urgency of breaking with conventional thinking about what is permissible. Lethargy and pusillanimity got us into this mess in the first place. Just think: if in 2022 even a handful of prominent Democrats had called out Joe Biden’s evident infirmity, we might be facing a much better world now!
Unfortunately, it is now clear that any of the above strategies will run up against the vested interests of a Democratic Party which, with honorable exceptions, is committed to the disastrous course advocated by that self-promoting hack, James Carville: “Do Nothing.”
The final task, therefore, is to challenge the stranglehold of do-nothing Democratic “leaders” like Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries, and forge a new party consensus, or even a new organization or coalition, committed to all-out resistance. But such a struggle cannot be simply about picking better leaders. It requires leaving behind the Democrats’ corporate wing represented by moguls like Jamie Dimon, Mark Cuban, and Jeffrey Katzenberg. Right now, the action arm of that faction is groups like Democratic Majority for Israel and AIPAC, whose “rule or ruin” practices and vast financial resources have been (and will be) employed to defeat progressives, in the way they took out Representatives Cori Bush and Jamaal Bowman in 2024. A new or renewed party must directly confront the “billionaire class” in the explicit defense of working people, fairness, and equality for all. And the Democratic Party must leave behind its crippling legacy of support for Israel’s apartheid state. To quote Hubert Humphrey’s famous speech denouncing Jim Crow at the party’s 1948 convention, it is long past time for Democrats to “walk forthrightly into the bright sunshine of human rights” for the Palestinian people.
Who will lead those confrontations today, and what form might they take? Bernie and AOC are showing us the way with their “Fighting Oligarchy” rallies, and J.B. Pritzker’s no-holds-barred speech in New Hampshire denounced both Trump and his own party’s leadership. But these efforts do not yet constitute any kind of organized mass movement. We have a long way to go to reach “an 1854 moment,” and seductive grandstanding by opportunists like Cory Booker, calling out Trump but avoiding his own party’s failures and cowardice, won’t get us there. None of the hoped-for breakthroughs I have enumerated may happen, and our corrupted republic may simply keep descending into the sham hypocrisy of “illiberal democracy,” Viktor Orban’s Hungary writ large. In Karl Marx’s much-quoted dicta, “Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.” Our “dead generations” are the barely-concealed habits of racial hatred and violence built into this country’s narrative, the ease with which our political system can be manipulated by reactionaries and demagogues, and the moral rot and incoherence of the Democratic Party’s leadership.
Still, we are called to act, to “make our own history…under circumstances existing already,” and the 1850s provide a salutary lesson in how to assemble the kind of popular front required to defeat MAGA. Back then, the new party was cobbled together from local and state Whig apparatuses and the various antislavery third parties. Its leaders ranged from radicals like Senator Charles Sumner and Congressman Thaddeus Stevens to moderates like Lincoln, who upheld his party’s mandate when it mattered during the secession crisis in early 1861, refusing to compromise with Southerners. Driving it further in radical directions were those willing to uphold the higher law by any means necessary, like Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, and John Brown, whose December 2, 1859 hanging provoked mass mourning all over the North.
In its long history, the United States has functioned as a genuine democracy only briefly, first during Reconstruction, and then in the sixty years since passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965, the culmination of what many historians call the Second Reconstruction; it will take everything we have to keep even that flawed democracy and bring about a Third Reconstruction. By now it should be evident that there will be no return to “normal” politics. Either we go forward and seize this time, or we are done for.
Van Gosse
Professor of History Emeritus
Franklin and Marshall College
