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THE CASE FOR A THIRD RECONSTRUCTION  
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K. Sabeel Rahman
November 18, 2025
Dissent Magazine
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_ The scale and depth of the attack on our institutions means that
there is no simple way for a pro-democracy coalition to flip the
lights back on after Trump. We need transformative thinking. _

Illustration of the Office of the Freedmen’s Bureau in Memphis,
Tennessee, in 1866 from Harper’s Weekly , Wikimedia Commons

 

Just months into Donald Trump’s second term, it’s clear that his
administration is transforming
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our government. The slashing of health and safety net programs like
Medicaid and SNAP will devastate millions of families. The gutting of
regulatory oversight will have equally profound and far-reaching
effects: Americans will face more exploitation and harm at work, more
consumer fraud, more discrimination, and more exposure to tainted food
and climate disaster. Even as government is being dismantled in these
domains, in other areas the administration is weaponizing the coercive
power of the state in terrifying ways. ICE conducts militarized and
lawless immigration enforcement raids across the country, while the
Department of Justice and other federal agencies target universities,
private firms, and civil society organizations that are seen as
hostile to Trump, or too committed to progressive causes.

This slew of policy changes is bound by two features. First, they
express and help realize a distinctly reactionary vision of American
society. This is not just authoritarianism for its own sake—or for
the sake of mere corruption, though there has been plenty of that
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The goal is to undo, even preclude, efforts at advancing racial,
gender, and economic equality, however modest. Second, this vision of
a hierarchical social order is being forged through a parallel effort
to remake foundational political institutions. Some institutions, from
safety net programs to regulations on corporate pollution and
malfeasance, have been dismantled, whether through mass firings or
defunding. Other institutions, like ICE, have been supercharged. Still
other transformations have converted presidential discretion over
policies like tariffs or enforcement decisions into tools of personal
rule by fiat, based on little more than Trump’s whims. And while
Trump has lost the vast majority of legal cases in district courts
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his more sophisticated judicial backers have used technical Supreme
Court maneuvers
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and stretched
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legal theories
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to fast-track the administration’s remaking of state and society.

These transformations will have a much deeper impact than any one
policy. Agencies needed to curb exploitation or protect workers or
defend civil rights will be hard to rebuild. And with each breathless
headline about a new executive order, the public is increasingly
acculturated to believe that rule-by-fiat and authoritarian crackdowns
are simply how politics work now. The damage to the very concept of
law and governance will be difficult to undo.

Yet there is another American political tradition that we can draw on
in this moment—an emancipatory
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democratic [[link removed]] tradition
that has driven major transformations of our country through
bottom-up, movement-driven struggle, often against deeply hostile and
institutionalized power structures. Emancipation, abolition, and the
First Reconstruction; the New Deal; and the civil rights era all mark
moments when social movements and policymakers shifted power away from
dominant interests and helped move in the direction of equal dignity
and standing for all Americans. While these transformations were
imperfect, what is perhaps most remarkable—and most often
overlooked—is just how durable some of them have been. As
reactionaries attempt to dismantle the achievements of the New Deal
and the civil rights movement today, it is important to remember that
these transformations occurred in the face of intense opposition from
their very beginnings.

That’s why we need to imagine pathways of social change that build
on these examples—even in the midst of the current far-right
ascendance. Whether or not we can emerge out of our current
authoritarian crisis depends on the ability of grassroots communities
and ordinary Americans to mobilize and protest, and on civic
organizations to defend basic democratic values—and thanks to the
efforts of countless organizers and advocates, we are witnessing a
dramatic expansion of such activities. We need this bottom-up movement
for democracy. But we also need a strategy for institutional
transformation. If pro-democracy pressure can generate a moment of
rupture and possibility, it will be critical to convert that opening
into structural transformations of political institutions and a
broader rebalancing of power in our economy and society. We will need
a reconstructionist approach to imagining new institutions that allows
us to advance and make durable our commitments to a more inclusive,
equitable, and responsive democracy.

RECONSTRUCTION AS POSTURE AND STRATEGY

What separates a reconstructionist posture from conventional
policymaking? First, it is explicitly oriented around a moral north
star: the inclusive democracy we seek to build. Second, it requires
diagnosing the power structures—political, economic, social—that
prevent that vision from being realized. And third, it focuses on
interventions that can shift power—building up the capacity of
communities and policymakers to realize and defend equality and
democracy against a mobilized opposition.

A reconstructionist approach to policy may seem uncomfortable or
excessive in some circles, but in this moment of authoritarian crisis,
it is a moral and strategic necessity for several reasons. First, the
scale and depth of the attacks on our institutions—whether
dismantled, weaponized, or personalized—mean that there is no simple
way for a pro-democracy coalition to just flip the lights back on.
Second, many of our inherited governing institutions—including the
Supreme Court, the Senate, and many administrative agencies—were not
conducive to a more inclusive democracy even before Trump. And third,
structural changes, embedded in new and transformed institutions, are
precisely how movements can advance a normative vision in ways that
can withstand counterattack and changing conditions.

The experience of the last two Democratic presidents underscores the
importance of a reconstructionist approach. In both 2008 and 2020,
broad-based social movements helped power electoral victories that
seemed to usher in a moment of progressive possibility. In the first
case, there was a desire and opportunity to respond to the financial
crisis and the failures of the George W. Bush era. In the second case,
Joe Biden entered the White House on the heels of mobilizations
responding to the excesses of the first Trump Administration, the
pandemic, climate justice, and especially racial justice. Both moments
led to important policy victories, some of which helped for a time
shift power. The creation of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau
(CFPB), for example, created a dedicated institution for tackling
modern forms of financial extraction, altering the balance of power
between affected communities, financial firms, and the government.
Similarly, the massive expansion of the COVID-era safety net not only
halved child poverty for a time; it also created an upsurge of worker
power, particularly among lower-income workers who had more job
mobility and were able to demand higher wages as a result. And during
the Biden administration, a revived Federal Trade Commission and CFPB
both began to push back against modern forms of concentrated corporate
power. But these examples were largely exceptions; the governing
agenda in both periods did relatively little to address other
imbalances of power or to embed a more durable pro-democracy
coalition. If anything, it is clear looking back that the reactionary
coalition built significant power during both of these progressive
governing moments, leveraging courts, state governments, and
right-wing social movements to presage a return to power.

Just as the MAGA coalition has succeeded in dismantling, weaponizing,
and personalizing institutions, a pro-democracy coalition will have to
remake institutions as well, but in a different way: by building new
institutions that shift the balance of power towards economic and
social democracy; by containing reactionary and autocratic power
inimical to an inclusive democracy; and by democratizing governing
power in ways that protect against future backsliding and enable more
progressive transformations.

_Build New Institutional Capacities_

One reconstructive strategy is to build institutions that embed a
democratizing mission in a bureaucratic structure. Such institutions
can fundamentally alter the balance of power in society and have a
cascade effect on progressive policies. The mobilizations of the
Progressive and New Deal eras built a new public understanding of
economic power in the United States, but the big shifts in our
political economy were made possible by the formation of new
bureaucracies, like the Federal Trade Commission, the National Labor
Relations Board, and the Social Security Administration, among others.
These institutions were not always as effective as they should have
been, even at their formation, yet their very creation enabled a
different set of policymaking possibilities. That is precisely why
those hostile to the New Deal have sought to dismantle these
institutions since their inception
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Similarly, the Civil Rights Act gave advocates of racial justice and
desegregation greater leverage to achieve their goals. The fight over
hospital segregation offers a telling example. As David Barton Smith
outlines in _The Power to Heal_
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Title VI (which prohibits discrimination in programs receiving
government funding) was not initially understood as creating an
affirmative mandate for agencies to use federal spending to advance
civil rights. But the savvy organizing of Black doctors and civil
rights leaders helped push regulators to embrace the idea that
desegregation was a mission that health agencies ought to take on
board. Title VI did not automatically drive desegregation; it provided
an institutional lever that movements and aligned policymakers could
use to advance a democratizing policy change that was previously
unthinkable.

The lesson here is simple: to move us from our undemocratic present to
a more democratic future, we need to institutionalize our commitments
to a more inclusive and responsive democracy in more durable forms.
These might encompass everything from alternative economic regulatory
institutions
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and new approaches to anti-discrimination to a more universal safety
net that secures the essential guarantees [[link removed]]
of health, housing, and income that individuals and communities need
to thrive.

_Contain Reactionary Power_

A second reconstructionist strategy lies in containing reactionary
power and backlash. We should presume that there will always be
efforts to roll back egalitarian expansions of democracy. Part of how
democracies survive and thrive is through institutions that contain
the potential resurgence of anti-democratic policies and forces.

The histories of Reconstruction and the civil rights era (called by
some a “Second Reconstruction”) are instructive here. During the
high-water mark of Reconstruction in the 1860s and 1870s
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of statutes beyond the Reconstruction Amendments themselves to help
realize the promise of abolition, including measures to enfranchise
Black voters and to enable federal prosecutors to protect freedpersons
against efforts to curtail their civil rights or politically
intimidate them. These efforts reined in the paramilitary violence of
white supremacist groups and underwrote massive Black voter turnout
and electoral representation during the late 1860s and early 1870s.
Indeed, it is telling that it took several
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interventions
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Supreme Court to fracture a multiracial working-class coalition,
neuter civil rights laws, and unleash a new wave of intimidation and
violence that ushered in nearly a century of Jim Crow. More radically,
the framers of the Fourteenth Amendment, which secures due process and
equal protection rights, believed its most critical passages
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provisions focused on disqualification and insurrection—efforts to
contain neo-Confederate and autocratic backlash in order to enable
democracy to take root. By the same token, the significance of the
Second Reconstruction’s Voting Rights Act lies not just in its
affirmative protection of voting rights, but in the strict
preclearance regime that helped preemptively contain the danger of
racist voter suppression. Unsurprisingly, the Supreme Court’s
gutting [[link removed]] of preclearance led to
a resurgence
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of the practice.

The democratic institutions of the future will similarly need to
develop ways to contain authoritarian power. This will require laws
and institutions that respond to techniques that are emerging in the
current moment, such as new forms of state and private surveillance,
or the weaponization of presidential control of funding flows.
Policymakers also need to start thinking about reining in what Jessica
Bulman-Pozen and Emily R. Chertoff term the “second face
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of the administrative state—the overpowered and underregulated
coercive apparatus that provided the foundation for Trump’s
anti-immigrant campaign.

_Democratize Governing Institutions_

The third institutional transformation strategy is to democratize our
governing institutions, making policymaking more directly responsive
to and shaped by ordinary constituents. One important area is the
balance of power between the branches. Even before Trump, the trend
has been to centralize power in an imperial presidency. The
legislature, by contrast, has been central to past moments of
democratization. The Reconstruction amendments specifically embed
democratic sovereignty in the Congress, and the Second Reconstruction
similarly reflects a legislative mandate for civil and voting rights,
to which the Department of Justice is bound. While the New Deal is
often associated with a powerful presidency, in many ways the most
vital and durable aspects of the New Deal were rooted in the
legislature: FDR could only govern the way he did owing to large
congressional majorities—and the legislature remains central in
shaping the structure and exercise of administrative agency
authorities today. (The courts played an important secondary role in
many of these moments by deferring to legislative mandates.) Any
future reconstructionist agenda will need to be built on congressional
majorities and a legislature willing to check and permanently shift
away from the overreliance on presidential power.

Another frontier lies in improving electoral democracy itself. It is
notable, for example, that Progressive era movements focused on
corporate power and economic immiseration put political corruption and
reform at the center of their agenda. They helped pass a wave of state
and federal constitutional amendments establishing the direct election
of senators, state-level ballot referenda and anti-corruption
provisions, and efforts to democratize a corrupt and overly partisan
judiciary. Political reformers will similarly have to build support
for alternative approaches to core electoral and democratic
institutions, such as proportional representation in the legislature.
We will also need alternatives to the counter-majoritarian
institutions that have been central to the current rise of
authoritarian rule: in particular, the politicized and captured
Supreme Court and the imbalanced Senate.

Equally important is the relationship between civil society and
policymaking institutions. As a host of scholars have argued
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an effective democracy requires institutions that give mass-member
civil society organizations—from labor to community groups—a
meaningful role in shaping policy. This could take the form of wage
boards
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such as those established in the early twentieth century to set labor
standards for whole sectors. Or it might take the form of policies
like Social Security, which create organized constituencies ready to
defend these egalitarian policies from repeal. It might alternatively
take the form of more participatory approaches
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to national policymaking; as some scholars have noted, even issues as
complex as industrial policy
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democratized.

GETTING THERE FROM HERE

These three strategies—building, containing, and democratizing—are
the basis of a reconstructionist agenda. But we should be clear-eyed
about just how difficult it will be to turn the authoritarian tide.
Every week brings new forms of state-sponsored repression. The
entrenched power in the Supreme Court and a fragmented information
environment have helped insulate the reactionary coalition from any
powerful response to its actions. A future pro-democracy governing
moment is not guaranteed.

Yet it is important to underscore that these repressive tactics and
reactionary policies are deeply unpopular. And they do nothing to
solve the actual, worsening crises of affordability, inequality,
precarity, climate disaster, and proliferating human rights abuses by
the regime itself. These crises are, if anything, likely to worsen as
the policy effects of the GOP reconciliation bill and tariff chaos
start to impact people on the ground.

These crises create opportunities for forging broad-based
pro-democracy movements. The threats to bodily integrity and basic
safety experienced by immigrants and Black and brown communities
caught up in ICE’s dragnet are not so different from the bodily
harms imposed on women post-_Dobbs_, or the threats on LGBTQ
communities in the face of reactionary backlash. Similarly, the
destruction of the administrative state and safety net will have
negative material effects on millions of Americans—the potential
basis of an alliance for economic security, focused on renewing the
safety net and implementing protections against the harms of corporate
power. This will be the critical work of organizers and ordinary
Americans. But even as this essential movement-building takes place,
we should also be taking this moment to forge a shared vision for the
kind of governing institutions we want—and not merely accept as
given the deeply imperfect institutions we happened to have on hand
prior to January.

These efforts to build toward a next reconstruction will not happen
everywhere all at once. It is, instead, likely to happen
asynchronously
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geographically uneven ways. Local footholds for an alternative
vision—such as the Zohran Mamdani campaign in New York City—will
arise. States with Democratic majorities can be xxxxxxs of opposition
to the worst excesses of the authoritarian moment, and pioneers in
alternative forms of protection, provision, and empowerment. A state
and local foundation was central to past moments of democratizing
breakthrough as well. The urgent, local, on-the-ground organizing that
protected Black Americans from the abhorrent Fugitive Slave Law helped
catalyze a broader national shift
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in favor of abolition. Similarly, it was state and local movements and
policies during the Progressive and Populist era that lay the
groundwork for the New Deal.

Such bottom-up movement power is not by itself enough. We also need to
have at the ready plans for reimagined institutions that make
democracy real and durable going forward. Past generations of
democratizers have transformed the country against impossible odds; it
is on us to do the same.

_K. SABEEL RAHMAN is a Professor of Law at Cornell Law School._

_DISSENT is a magazine of politics and ideas published in print three
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* corporate power
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