The Case for a Third Reconstruction
The Case for a Third Reconstruction
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.
Just months into Donald Trump’s second term, it’s clear that his administration is transforming 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. 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, his more sophisticated judicial backers have used technical Supreme Court maneuvers and stretched legal theories 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, democratic 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.
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, 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 and new approaches to anti-discrimination to a more universal safety net that secures the essential guarantees 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, Congress passed a series 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 interventions by the 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 to be the 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 of preclearance led to a resurgence 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” 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, 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, 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 to national policymaking; as some scholars have noted, even issues as complex as industrial policy could be 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, in 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 bulwarks 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 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.
