Government and civil society alike need to recognize that democracy is only as good as the way it treats its marginalized citizens.  

The current threat to American democracy is impossible to separate from the racial backlash that paved a path for it. This was true in Trump’s first term, when many of the harshest offenses against democratic norms had to do with insulting members of other coequal branches of government on race grounds. Trump said that four progressive women in the House of Representatives should “go home,” and he referred to immigrants from “shithole countries.” The January 6 insurrection was premised on the idea that voter fraud had occurred in cities with large African American populations. 

The second term has ramped up these racialized attacks on democratic values and institutions. Attacks on higher education – serious governmental encroachment on the First Amendment and the freedom of civil society – have been connected to DEI and accusations of racial preferences in university hiring and admissions. The president also made a social media post on Juneteenth, which commemorates the end of slavery in the United States, opining that the country has “too many non-working holidays.” The administration has sought to boost white immigration from South Africa as it attempts to limit immigration from other groups and parts of the world. In both terms, these actions and statements have added up to both abuses of government power and a general sense that those in power are not trying or claiming to act on behalf of the nation as a whole. Critics also suggest that the deployment of National Guard troops in Washington, D.C., and threats to send them to other cities have a distinctly racial dimension that taps into long-standing racialized tropes about crime. In other words, race and crime have been deeply implicated in what critics across the ideological spectrum have identified as an excessive and anti-Constitutional use of executive power.  

In my book, Backlash Presidents, I explore this dynamic – and the fact that racially transformative presidents have been followed by ones who not only embraced backlash but faced impeachment crises. I find a recurring connection between the politics of racial backlash and presidential behavior that violates norms and threatens the basic tenets of democracy. Common dynamics across the cases of Andrew Johnson – following Emancipation and the Civil War, Richard Nixon – following the Civil Rights bills of the Johnson years, and Donald Trump – following the first Black president, demonstrate this connection. Trump’s subsequent election after the presidency of Barack Obama’s hand-picked successor (with a Black and South Asian woman as vice president) deepens the link. Each impeachment crisis featured election interference and transgression of institutional boundaries, stretching executive power beyond what the system could bear. 

But the aftermath of these crises has also held the seeds of the next backlash. After impeachment, politics tends to revert to a new normal – and the party associated with the racial transformation that upended things in the first place tends to find other priorities, while the backlash forces find new expression. After Reconstruction, the federal government offered an increasingly limited response to violence against African Americans. Post-civil rights Democrats in the 20th century distanced themselves from Lyndon Johnson’s racial agenda, while the Reagan revolution brought defense of “states’ rights” and attacks against affirmative action to the national stage. 

We again find ourselves in such a period – perhaps even in an extended backlash. Defenders of democracy – including, but not limited to, Democrats – might find it tempting to move away from positions they worry alienate centrist or the much-storied white working class voters. But not confronting the racial realities of American society only pushes the problem further down the road, leaving us vulnerable to a repeat of the backlash cycle. In the wake of the 2016 and 2024 elections, Democrats are especially susceptible to election narratives that emphasize how they should have been more cautious and less bold about the interests of marginalized people – whether it’s the rights of transgender Americans, Black Americans, or immigrants. History shows that this will not work, and will impoverish rather than save democracy. Efforts to keep slavery off the national agenda or compromise the issue away, to dodge civil rights are not high points in our national story, and these efforts didn’t prevent crisis in the long run.  This cycle of backlash and retreat can and should be broken. A healthy politics can directly, and peacefully, engage the complexity of difficult social questions, while insisting on the dignity and equality of every person. This advice is in direct contradiction to perspectives that urge taking down the temperature and calming polarizing forces. There will be a time for that, but the larger goal for improving democracy can’t be achieved by avoiding confrontations over what equality for all citizens would actually mean.