US democracy has repaired itself before . Here how we can do it again .

vox.com · Feb 26, 2026 · Collected from GDELT

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Donald Trump is not forever.There will be an after. It’s hard to see from the present, where everything feels frozen in place. But from history’s vantage, change is the only constant. American democracy has been remade several times — dramatically, unexpectedly, and often in ways that looked impossible until they arrived.Key takeawaysAmerican democracy has been dramatically remade roughly every 60 years: the 1770s, the 1830s, the 1900s, the 1960s. Each time, reform came when ambitious insiders recognized the old order was dying and switched sides before it collapsed on them.Today’s dysfunction matches the historical preconditions almost exactly: institutional trust near historic lows, and both parties fighting the last war while new pressures accumulate with no political home.The question is not whether reform is coming but what kind. Previous eras tried to work around parties and got hollow institutions captured by whoever was already organized. The next reform needs to change how parties themselves work.The question is not whether reform is coming. It’s what kind of reform.Underneath the paralysis, pressure is rising: institutional distrust at historic lows, economic dislocation spreading, AI transforming work, and a generation increasingly locked out of housing, economic security, and political influence. The parties can’t process any of this. They’re locked in battle with each other, fighting the last war.Gridlock may look like stability; it is actually brittleness. Eventually, it will crack. In some places, it already has. A new generation will pick up the pieces and build something new. In some places, they already are.That’s the history of American democracy. And it is about to continue.The pattern: How reform happens Political systems, like humans, are change-averse. Most of the time, the status quo prevails. After all, those in power have the most to lose from any new alternative. They know the current rules. They’ve mastered them. The old rules put them in power. Why would they want new ones?The outsiders are always the ones who demand change. But outsider energy alone rarely succeeds. Reform movements break through when ambitious insiders start to see that the climate is changing and decide to grow new lungs before the old ones become useless.History is full of examples. Theodore Roosevelt was an establishment party man until he wasn’t. Lyndon B. Johnson was a master of the Senate and a Southern politician until he became the president who pushed through civil rights over the objections of his own filibustering former colleagues.This, then, is the repeated pattern of American political reform: After a long period of stasis, the political system begins to falter. Outsider pressure builds. The old order loses legitimacy. New energy gathers behind new demands. New media disrupts the old landscape. A new generation challenges an older generation that has been in power for too long.Eventually, enough insiders switch sides to make a reform majority. The system adapts — slowly, then all at once. It happens every 60 years or so. The 1770s, the 1830s, the 1900s, the 1960s — and now, perhaps, the 2020s.Why the regularity? The political scientist Samuel Huntington offered an explanation for this pattern in his 1981 book American Politics: The Promise of Disharmony.Huntington identified a tension at the heart of American political culture. The American creed — liberty, equality, individualism, democracy, the rule of law — is fundamentally anti-power. But governing requires power. This creates a permanent gap between American ideals and American institutions. Huntington called it the “IvI gap”: ideals vs. institutions.Most of the time, Americans tolerate this gap. We’re busy. We’re cynical. We’ve learned to live with the distance between what we profess and what we practice. Change feels too hard, too unlikely, too much work.But periodically — roughly every 60 years — tolerance collapses. The gap becomes intolerable. Americans enter what Huntington called a “creedal passion period”: an era of moral intensity, institutional questioning, and demands for reform. The 1770s (revolution). The 1830s (Jacksonian populist enfranchisement). The 1900s (the Progressive Era). The 1960s.The reform ethos is both backward-looking and forward-looking — conservative and progressive at once.Huntington offered a metaphor: political earthquakes. “Stresses and strains develop along the major political fault line,” he wrote, “until a political earthquake occurs, releases the tension, and produces a new equilibrium.”The system survives these earthquakes. American democracy has weathered four creedal passion periods and emerged transformed — and, in important respects, more democratic.But Huntington also offered a warning. “The cry is reform,” he wrote, “the result is realignment.” Reform movements don’t just fix problems. They redistribute power. The reforms of one generation become the vested interests of the next. Direct primaries, created to democratize candidate selection, gave us the primary system we’re now trying to reform.The institutions that reformers create “reflect one constellation of political interests and purposes,” Huntington wrote. They’re built by temporary coalitions, moments of passion and mobilization. When that moment passes, the reforms become less effective, even counterproductive. They “lack a well-organized constituency to sustain and protect them.”Reforms have enthusiasm, but enthusiasm fades. Organization endures.Why the Progressive Era is the most like our own The Progressive Era is the closest analog to our current moment, so close that the parallels can feel like a taunt, or a promise. It’s worth lingering there, to understand how reform eventually comes, even (especially?) when politics feel stuck and stagnant.The early 1890s looked a lot like today. By the quantitative measures political scientists use, the Gilded Age was one of the most polarized periods in American history. Party-line voting in Congress exceeded anything we’ve seen until recently. Elections were knife-edge affairs, bitterly contested, decided by tiny margins.And the parties were fighting the last war. Politics was about group loyalties — regional, ethnic, cultural — not policy. Republicans waved the “bloody shirt” of the Civil War. Democrats were the party of “Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion.”Meanwhile, corporate consolidation was remaking the economy — and the parties couldn’t process it. Railroads were the transformative technology of the age, reshaping commerce, enriching a few men to cartoonish degrees, leaving everyone else to adapt or be crushed. The “money power” seemed to control everything. But the two parties, locked in their zero-sum warfare over Civil War grievances, had no answers. Congress passed the the Interstate Commerce Act (1887) and the Sherman Antitrust Act (1890), but neither party made enforcement a priority, and the courts gutted both The pressure accumulated.Reform energy was building outside the major parties. In 1892, the People’s Party — the Populists — won outright pluralities in four states. But Populism was regional, agrarian, easily dismissed by the establishment as a fever of the plains. It wasn’t enough to break the system on its own.Then the Panic of 1893 hit — and validated everything the Populists had warned about. Banks failed, farms foreclosed, cities went insolvent. There was no polling then, but the wrong track/right track numbers were surely hell.The crisis broadened discontent beyond the agrarian periphery and into the urban middle class, where professionals and reformers who had once dismissed Populist rhetoric now found themselves asking the same questions.The refusal to bend invited demands to break.The old order could not hold. The parties could not keep fighting about the Civil War while the industrial economy remade society. Something had to give — and eventually, it did. Political reform became the way to fight back: the public interest against the special interest, citizens against machines.What emerged was not a single great crusade but a scramble of overlapping fights that confused old party lines and old class allegiances.The unifying conviction was that the political system itself was the problem. Purify the procedures, and democratic outcomes would follow. If parties were corrupt, bypass them with direct primaries. If senators were creatures of state legislatures and the corporations that controlled them, elect them directly. If ballots were printed by parties and cast in public, replace them with secret government-printed “Australian” ballots. If legislatures were unresponsive, give citizens the initiative, referendum, and recall. If patronage was the currency of machine politics, replace it with civil service.The reforms needed champions — insiders willing to break with their own establishment. In Wisconsin, Robert La Follette built the “Wisconsin Idea,” turning his state into a laboratory for direct democracy and expert administration. At the national level, Roosevelt became the essential figure: an establishment man who recognized the climate was changing and channeled outsider fury into his “Square Deal” — changes the system could absorb without shattering.The ferment produced constitutional change. In 1913, two amendments were ratified within months of each other.The 16th Amendment authorized the federal income tax — a direct assault on the plutocracy, forcing the wealthy to fund the government they had long controlled. The 17th Amendment required the direct election of senators, bypassing the state legislatures that corporations had learned to manipulate. These were structural attacks on concentrated power, written into the nation’s fundamental law.Women’s suffrage followed in 1920, after decades of organizing — an expansion of the franchise that reformers had long demanded.Four constitutional amendments in seven years (including, yes, Prohibition, a reminder that reform en