The Republic as we knew it is over. The fight now is whether the new one will be a fascist, dictatorial regime or a pluralist democracy that, we can hope, is better than what came before.
Even if you think restoration is possible, it’s a bad idea. The Constitution has failed. Or, more accurately, the Constitutional order built out of the New Deal, the Second Reconstruction, and the repudiation of the Nixon presidency has failed. This is not a prediction. It’s not a “if we continue on our current course.” The Constitution as designed by the founders, was supposed to prevent the current regime. Its original guardrails did not work. The ones added after the Civil War did not work. The de facto amendments created by the accretion of judicial decisions did not work. The post-Watergate reforms did not work.
There are two officials — other than Trump and his kleptocratic and fascistic barnacles — who did the most to shiv the Republic in the back: John Roberts and Mitch McConnell. There are two corollaries. First, the small-d democratic opposition should go “scorched earth” on the Court. And by this I mean that it should adopt the same kind of rhetoric — the same denial of legitimacy — that conservatives employed for decades prior to wresting supermajority control. Second, the filibuster has to go. Not only so that we have a chance of implementing the structural reforms we desperately need, but also because the future of constitutional democracy in the United States depends on shifting power to the legislative branch. We know that returning to the status quo ante won’t stop the next Trump. We also need to recognize that no half-baked reform of the filibuster will prevent another McConnell from destroying the legislative branch.
The regime is not only reactionary, it is a criminal enterprise and dictatorial. New institutional arrangements cannot survive if the American people and its representatives fail to address the morally offensive concentration of wealth and power in the hands of the very few — or if they leave intact the grift economy that funnels money upwards while creating profound systemic economic risk.
The single most important problem for pro-democracy forces is that too many people — especially in position of power — seem unable to truly believe that we are living in a dictatorship that is in teh midst of consolidating its power. Perhaps they are too habituated to the “rules” of the system that no longer exists. Perhaps they still cling to the drug of American exceptionalism, which makes it difficult for them to accept that “it can happen here.” Perhaps they understand it intellectually, but find it too difficult to make the necessary shift in how they conduct business.