Government and politics in the United States have come to epitomize a world-wide drift toward authoritarianism. How is it, then, that America resisted a similar slide in the 1930s? The simple answer, not without weight, is that America in the 1930s was led by a charismatic president who was committed to democracy’s advance. But look closer, and several complications quickly come into view.

At the outset of his second term, that charismatic president, Franklin Roosevelt, opened a multi-front assault against constraints on his power. His challenge to the constitutional order featured a brazen plan to subordinate the judiciary to presidential will, a purge campaign aimed at building a personal party based on loyalty to his program, and a proposal to consolidate presidential control over the entire executive branch. In broad outline, those transformative ambitions are not all that different from the designs of our current president. And yet, in that earlier episode, defenders of the Constitution in both parties mounted stiff resistance. They denounced the president as a would-be dictator. All three of Roosevelt’s initiatives were defeated.

Leaving it at that, however, is also too simple. The sobering fact is that those faithful constitutionalists of the 1930s were not resisting presidential power on behalf of an advanced position on American democracy. At the heart of the coalition that defeated Roosevelt’s designs were Southern racists determined to protect oppressive forms of rule in their home region from the threat of unbridled presidentialism. In the 1930s, the U.S. sidestepped the risks of a strongman at the top, but that was because authoritarianism characterized so much of American governance at the local level.

To deepen the paradox, consider the new state that was ushered in by the resistance those racists mounted to the strong arm of presidentialism. As a settlement shook out in the aftermath of World War II, a general consensus on the outlines of a new democracy took hold. In place of presidentialism, constituent legislation for each of the three branches institutionalized an administrative state that featured collective control, inter-branch collaboration, and pluralist competition among a wider range of private interests. In the Reorganization Act (1939), Congress provided an alternative to the president’s proposal for administrative control, one that balanced White House oversight with due regard for the independence of the administrative agencies. In the Legislative Reorganization Act (1946), Congress geared up for its own form of oversight, providing through its standing committees “continuous watchfulness” over the newly empowered administrative apparatus. The Administrative Procedure Act (1946) established due process rights for parties to administrative proceedings and balanced administrative power with access to courts. The Employment Act (1946) capped the new system by declaring an economic policy for the United States that balanced the interests of capital with the interests of labor. All told, the system of ‘46 was an advance for democracy in America and a ringing affirmation of the adaptive capacities of the American Constitution.

But that achievement was realized through and delimited by conspicuous and harsh social exclusions. Those exclusions were swept away in the “rights revolution” of the 1960s and ‘70s, and that has had equally curious effects. Disrupting the administrative settlement of the 1940s, this advance for American democracy set in motion the institutional developments that now place American democracy at risk.

America’s national government had been designed to deal with the issues likely to arise in a great commercial republic. It also worked to submerge issues that might threaten that common aspiration, issues of the sort that abruptly intruded in the wake of the rights revolution. Demands for social justice proved difficult for the Constitution to resolve because they exposed the conflicting purposes within the structure itself. Instead of ameliorating conflict, the Constitution began playing host to an ever-deepening wrangle over its most basic principles and purposes.

Though the federal government was faced with more interests to manage than ever before, no new intermediary instruments took hold to ameliorate their conflicts and promote power sharing. The political parties gradually sorted into polarized ideological camps. Instead of managing national conflict, they served to magnify it. Institutional confrontations became routine, keeping rules and norms unsettled. The Constitution’s historic capacity to adapt, to reestablish firm footings and stabilize the polity, began to dissipate.

This new universe of action liberated the presidency. It was the one institution that could claim a popular mandate for national action, and as such, it held out the promise of simply muscling through the seemingly intractable conflicts. In the wake of the rights revolution, presidents began to develop their own personal parties to mobilize the electorate. At the same time, they began to exploit the potential for governing through the bureaucracy, and they adopted a more aggressive stance toward control of the administrative apparatus. America’s more fully inclusive democracy abetted the rise of unbridled presidentialism, and it is this unbridled presidentialism that has exposed American democracy to the risks of backsliding.

American backsliding is not just part of a world-wide trend. It is also part of a distinctly American puzzle. The American Constitution stands out for its historic capacity to adapt to changing social conditions. But the Constitution was not designed for fully inclusive polity, and what our history makes plain is that through the New Deal adaptations relied on social exclusions. Social exclusions made it easier to reconcile checks and balances with the separation of powers and to square national supremacy with local autonomy. They filtered out conflicts that might threaten the regime’s survival. Now the advance of democratization has drawn out conflicts and contradictions among the Constitution’s many ordering principles, and the serviceability of the old frame has been thrown into doubt. Two questions are now starkly posed: first, does the American Constitution require exclusions to establish firm footings and stabilize the polity; and second, does exclusion after democratization, a.k.a. backsliding, hold out any real hope for constitutional government today.