The U.S. civil war — the only one the country has endured — bore familiar hallmarks: extreme partisan division, geographic sectionalism, and the existence of radically incompatible visions for the role of state and federal government, particularly regarding slavery.
A constitutional crisis, however, need not involve a shooting war. As Gary Jeffrey Jacobsohn and Yaniv Roznai argue in their 2020 book comparing constitutional revolutions, major transformations may take place without broad democratic engagement. They also note that constitutional change in response to popular mobilization may not take a revolutionary form. Such a transformation took place in late 19th-century America, and one possible path forward today is for this to happen again.
After the Civil War’s end, the United States attempted to reconstitute itself around a new vision of national citizenship and equality. This attempt failed. As political scientist Pamela Brandwein has shown, national institutions then in the hands of the Republican Party initially tried to hold states accountable for enforcing rights. That did not continue. The Supreme Court, led by Chief Justice Melville Fuller, retrenched federal authority. Rather than pursue a long civil war, the national Republican Party capitulated, deferring U.S. transformation for generations.
The Republican Party’s Trumpist core is not just dedicated to Trump and to their identities as Trump supporters. They are dedicated to continued participation in politics, using loosely democratic mechanisms in state and local elections as well as more visible and prominent venues to promote a fundamentally undemocratic agenda.
Without work within each party and sustained engagement across party lines, polarization will probably make it difficult or impossible to collaborate nationally to resist anti-democratic elements. The compromise that ended Reconstruction may begin to look like a plausible way out: leaving states to develop and implement policies based on the world views of those who control their dominant parties, with all that that could mean for those living there. The groundwork is present in the form of newly revitalized federalism and a Supreme Court that seems willing to grant states latitude, at least in some policy spheres.
But even this might be an optimistic vision, given possible Republican dominance in Congress, gained from more than 30 Republican-controlled states’ changes to districting and election laws that could tilt results against majority rule.