For the better part of a century, many Americans have taken for granted a basic story about the country’s place in the world. The US’s inherent promise—as underscored by the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution—is inextricably joined to the spread of constitutional democracy: equal rights and civil liberties for all, free and fair elections, institutional checks and balances, and the presumption that no one is above the law. American interests are nothing less than the world’s interests. Today, however, it is increasingly hard to sustain this account either of US domestic politics or of what American power means for the world. In fact, preserving democratic life globally will likely require a pathway beyond American primacy, as well as a significant project of constitutional transformation at home.

It is no doubt the case that the US-led post-World War II order helped to diffuse a version of constitutional democracy, wedded to market capitalism, as the “default design choice” eventually for the globe. Yet, from the very beginning there were at least two inherent instabilities in Pax Americana’s relationship to this design choice. First, US officials enjoyed striking impunity for their exercise of state violence. Embedded in the postwar order was an American investment in both rule-following and rule-breaking. On the one hand, US officials were committed to framing global institutions like the UN in terms of collective decision-making and self-restraint. Yet, on the other hand, such restraint was always tied to the idea that for this system to work there would have to be some actor, namely the United States, that could step outside the rules to ensure that the order itself was maintained. The result has been a persistent history of US defection from the very rules it established, through coup attempts, assassinations, and countless military interventions. Indeed, this history extends all the way to Biden-era complicity in what legal experts describe as a genocide in Gaza. 

This meant that the era of the postwar “rules-based order” was at one and the same time the era of the American “imperial president.” Politicians in both parties defended an expansive, largely unchecked executive and tended to treat systemic accountability for US state violence—whether in US or international courts—as nothing less than a threat to national security and the global order. It has been a rare occurrence for security officials to face real and enduring consequences for their misconduct, a fact further aided by the federal bench’s judicial cover and by the persistent cycling back into power of security appointees implicated in past abuse. Well before the rise of Trump, a blanket of protection cloaked government behavior almost no matter the action, trickling down from the president even to the local police officer.

The second instability concerned the US’s own complicated domestic commitment to representative government. Alongside real support for inclusive democracy, a mixture of ethno-nationalism and authoritarianism has always circulated within American politics, embodied not that long ago by the Jim Crow system. In recent decades, the constitutional structure’s dysfunctions have elevated ethno-nationalist and authoritarian strains, in part given the nature of how political representation works in the US.

American elections and judicial appointments are built on the unit of the state, organized to an extreme degree around geography rather than actual population. Aided by Senate malapportionment, state-based gerrymandering, the Electoral College, and the Supreme Court’s appointments process through the Senate and presidency, the right in particular has been able to project power whether or not its coalition diverges dramatically from the country’s cultural and racial diversity. The related effect has been to incentivize right-wing politicians to invest in mechanisms of minority rule that block the electoral voice of perceived opponents—even to treat principles like “one person, one vote,” along with US’s broader demographic diversity, as near-existential threats. This has both helped to push more extreme ideas into the mainstream and to align right-wing electoral interests with growing suspicion of multiracial democracy itself. 

Trump is the apotheosis of how these two instabilities—impunity and democratic dysfunction—are now operating in tandem to uproot constitutional democracy at home and abroad. At each step of his ascendance, instruments from within the global constitutional toolkit would have contained his power or held him accountable. Most obviously, elsewhere when on multiple occasions you lose more votes than you win, as he did in 2016 and 2020, you never hold office—a fact that typically diffuses the influence of the politician and those around him. But in the US, Trump nonetheless won the presidency with resulting long-term institutional and cultural effects, starting with his ability to reconstitute the Supreme Court. Again, elsewhere, if you try to overthrow an elected government, you often face—in fairly short order—criminal punishment in addition to the removal for a period of years from office-holding. But in the United States, because of an inoperable impeachment process, deep elite ambivalence toward accountability, and rulings from a Trumpist Supreme Court, Trump remained for years in the wings as an ex-president, able when the time came to take advantage of Democratic weakness and global anti-incumbent sentiment.

And so today, the US is witnessing an aggressive Trumpist version of the imperial president and a related assault on all the elements of constitutional democracy, including the integrity of domestic, foreign, and international legal systems. At home, this means attacks on racial inclusion, free speech, free and fair elections, civil society infrastructure, and the basic rights of noncitizens—through masked ICE raids as well as detention, deportation, and even imprisonment in or exile to client states engaged in their own pervasive rights abuses.

Abroad, it means what UN experts term “extra-judicial executions” in the Caribbean and in the Pacific, lawlessness that takes Bush and Obama-era “targeted killings”—with their extreme executive say-so and secrecy—as a destructive building block. It also entails direct attacks on efforts in foreign states and at the international level to contain authoritarian resurgence and mass violence. Brazil’s Supreme Court faces sanctions, visa revocations, and threats for its role in prosecuting Bolsonaro for an attempted coup—in effect, for exercising the rule of law function a compromised US Supreme Court abandoned. The ICC faces similar sanctions—and the ICJ abuse and threats—for the temerity of extending foundational elements of international law to Israel. This is of course the same ICC that US officials played a central role in developing, including in drafting the Rome Statute, before refusing to ratify the treaty and be bound by it. These attacks on non-US legal institutions parallel the domestic drive to punish lawyers and officials that sought legal accountability after the 2020 election. All of this is in keeping with a transactional approach to law and politics, marked by open graft and in which tariffs and sanctions, not to mention overthrow and annexation threats are wielded against the non-compliant. As for billionaire backers, pliable politicians, and friendly foreign presidents, they enjoy everything from legal favors to massive financial largess.

Du Bois wrote in the NAACP’s 1947 petition to the UN, that unless dramatically reformed, American internal practices would eventually impede the achievement of global peace and security. He argued that the “rotten borough system” of state-based representation, made worse by Jim Crow disenfranchisement and domestic impunity for racial violence, “spell[ed] danger: danger to the American way of life, and danger not simply to” Black people but also “to white folk all over the nation, and to the nations of the world.” For Du Bois, Americans’ refusal to confront their own government-backed violence, as well as to reform the institutions of political representation, were latent threats to the very rules-based order US officials sought to erect for the world.

Today, it is just those dangers that increasingly define the US’s position. This reality can be a strange one to hear as Americans, given longstanding intuitions about our inherent national meaning and international role. But especially with the US’s continued global economic and military might, we must be forthright in recognizing exactly where this power is driving the world. Indeed, engaging in the same old conversations about a fundamentally stabilizing US leadership and grand strategy embodies a profound failure to appreciate the severity of the times.

Equally important, this moment suggests that the future of constitutional democracy rests just as much on the capacity of non-US reformers and movements to find a pathway out of the present, beyond either a broken Pax Americana or a new destructive order dictated by competing regional authoritarians. This pathway must be grounded in a vision of a shared global commons, mutual and collective decision-making, and systematic legal rule-following. At home, the same reality underscores the need for Americans to address, finally, our own house—by reforming our institutions of electoral democracy and by engaging in a genuine accounting of Trump-era and pre-Trump-era practices of impunity. Unless we do so, US power may well continue to “spell danger” for us all.