This book is both a response to late political developments and a product of a decade of thinking historically about race and American political development. I would like to thank the many academics and friends whom I have met over the past decade or so, living in Cambridge, Oxford, New Haven, and Lancaster. Our conversations about race, class, populism, and political institutions have helped me to think deeply about these topics. Above all, I want to thank those mentors who left the greatest impression during my student years: Nancy Bermeo, Nigel Bowles, Christopher Brooke, Andrew Gamble, Jacob Hacker, Duncan Kelly, Desmond King, Iain McLean, Véronique Mottier, Helen Thompson, and Vesla Weaver. I dedicate this book to them collectively.

This book would not have been possible without the encouragement of my commissioning editor at Polity Press, George Owers. George is not only a great editor, whose input has improved this book, but he is also a very good friend. My life has been much enriched as a consequence of our fortuitous first encounter sitting next to each other at my matriculation dinner at Jesus College, Cambridge. The publication process with Polity has been a delightful experience, and I am very grateful for the feedback from the four anonymous reviewers. Their constructive advice has helped to strengthen this book. I also gladly thank Lee Evans, Tom Kelsey, Desmond King, and Rick Valelly, who read early chapters and gave useful comments.

Finally, thanks must go to my family for their encouragement, especially to my parents, my grandmother, and my uncles Peter, Jeff, and David.

By any measure, James Meredith had an unusual freshers’ week in September 1962. When he walked through the University of Mississippi (Ole Miss) to register for classes, there were fresh bullet holes in the buildings and monuments around him. The smell of tear gas hung in the air. The corridor on the way to the university registrar’s office was covered in blood. Two men were dead (Mickey 2015: 4–5, 209–14).

In the weeks to come, when James Meredith went to classes, he sat in barren lecture theaters and under-attended seminar rooms, receiving instruction from lecturers accustomed to much larger audiences. He often dined alone, occasionally dodging stones thrown through the windows as he ate. Students urged each other to ensure that he was “treated as if a piece of furniture of no value … Let no student speak to him and let his attempt to make friends fall on cold, unfriendly faces.” James Meredith was the victim of a “war of ostracism.”¹

Yet, the University of Mississippi’s first black student did not lack company. The federal government had seen to that. On the day that James Meredith matriculated, 31,000 federal troops were mobilized in northern Mississippi – more than were stationed at the time on the Korean peninsula (Doyle 2001: 277). Tanks rolled down the university town’s plush streets and troops marched through the grounds of Ole Miss. Meredith completed his degree under the watchful eye of three hundred US army troops, garrisoned in Oxford for his protection (Mickey 2015: 213). In living memory, no one had seen anything like it: an American town, occupied by its own government, simply to allow a young black man the opportunity to exercise his equal rights as an American citizen.

Of course, the South had seen such scenes before – but just out of grasp of living memory, if not the collective cultural memory of the region. Under the Military Reconstruction Acts of 1867 and the Enforcement Act of 1870, the federal government sent soldiers to Mississippi and other southern states to guarantee the basic citizenship rights of African Americans. Union general Ulysses Grant made his headquarters in Oxford in 1863 as he prepared the Siege of Vicksburg; ninety-nine years later, President John Kennedy used a desk belonging to Grant to sign the orders to occupy Oxford once again (King and Lieberman 2019). The comparison was not lost on southern commentators. The Hattiesburg American lamented after Meredith’s successful enrolment, “these indeed are the darkest days for Mississippi since the Civil War and reconstruction. The state has been invaded by federal troops.”²

Since the withdrawal of federal government troops from the South in the 1870s, Mississippi and every southern state had been under single-party rule. The white supremacist Democrats who governed the state were apoplectic at the idea that – after nearly a century of absence – the federal government had returned to revive multiracial democracy. Governor Ross Barnett sputtered on television two weeks before Meredith’s arrival: “There is no case in history where the Caucasian race has survived social integration … We will not drink from the cup of genocide.” Within hours, an effigy of James Meredith was found hanging from a lamppost outside the student union building, holding a sign that read: “Hail Barnett … We are proud that our governor stands for constitutional sovereignty.”³

* * *

There are two mistakes commonly made about democracy in the United States. The first is the belief that the United States is one of the oldest democracies in the world. It is often said that, by the 1830s, the “Jacksonian Era,” the United States had become a “mass democracy.” In the 1840 presidential election, the two main parties, the Whigs and the Democrats, tried to outdo each other in appeals to the “common man.” The Democrats adopted the slogan, “Shall the banks or the people rule?,” and the victorious Whigs held mass rallies with working-class symbols of cider and log cabins on banners. With the election of William Henry Harrison, newspapers exulted the “making of a poor man President of the United States” (Cheathem 2018).

Yet, this image of the United States as a longstanding democracy is astonishingly incomplete. It is only accurate insofar as “democracy in America” is understood in white terms. Working-class white men have had the right to vote since the early nineteenth century, but non-whites of all classes won the effective right to vote only half a century ago. The intensity of racial divisions in the United States is the most dramatic form of American exceptionalism. It is impossible to understand democracy and its limits without understanding America’s history of racial exclusion, racist governance, and racialized citizenship.

In his classic 1944 study An American Dilemma, Gunnar Myrdal argued that the United States was fundamentally a liberal, democratic polity, albeit one plagued by occasional racial prejudices. He argued that all Americans were united by a common creedal commitment to “the essential dignity of the individual human being, of the fundamental equality of all men, and of certain inalienable rights to freedom, justice, and a fair opportunity” (1944: 4). Myrdal acknowledged that there were some failings due to racial prejudice, but “this American Creed is the cement in the structure of this great and disparate nation” (1944: 3). Yet, Myrdal’s belief in the fundamentally democratic nature of America’s political structure does not stand up to scrutiny. The essential features of a liberal, democratic polity – free and fair elections, multiparty competition, universal franchise, free assembly and speech – were not available to millions of Americans until the mid-twentieth century.

People of Asian birth were not permitted to apply for US citizenship until 1952. The secret ballot was not introduced in Georgia or South Carolina until the 1950s. Until the 1960s, states prohibited public sector workers from joining black civic organizations such as the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People). Municipalities passed ordinances barring residents from assembling to promote civil rights or voter registration. Before the mid-1960s, millions of African Americans were unable to vote or run for office because of state constitutions designed to deprive them of their citizenship rights. It was not until the 1970s that all Native Americans could exercise the right to vote (King 2000: 238; Bernd 1972; Mickey 2015: 149, 226; Wade 1998: 331).⁴

The civil rights revolution of the 1950s and 1960s, then, must be understood as a process of democratization. It was a period of what Desmond King (2017) has called “forceful federalism,” when all branches of the federal government used their fullest powers to broaden citizenship and democratic inclusion. The civil rights revolution was characterized by a combination of coercive executive intervention (e.g., sending the military to desegregate schools), judicially imposed national standard setting (e.g., overturning state-level bans on interracial marriage, applying a “one person, one vote” standard to all state legislatures), constitutional amendments (Twenty-Third and Twenty-Fourth Amendments),⁵ and rights-affirming congressional legislation (e.g., the Civil Rights Acts of 1957, 1960, and 1964; the Voting Rights Act of 1965; the Fair Housing Act of 1968) on behalf of America’s hitherto excluded non-white citizens.

For these reasons, it is impossible to describe the United States as having been a full democracy for much more than five decades. This fact should be basic to every American’s understanding of their country’s development. Many (white) Americans prefer to imagine their country as one of the world’s oldest democracies, but, in fact, it joined the club only relatively recently.

A second mistake is the tendency to portray democratization in the United States as a linear progression of expanding rights toward a “more perfect Union.” It is superficially easy to see American political development in terms of a “steady march” of freedom, with America’s racial evils – slavery, segregation, material racial inequality – being gradually, but steadily, overcome with each successive generation (Klinkner and Smith 1999). It is tempting to draw a line from the Declaration of Independence to Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address to Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech to Barack Obama’s presidential victory, charting astonishing progress along the way. But to do so would be to ignore the evidence of democratic backsliding throughout US history.

The civil rights revolution of the 1950s and 1960s was not the only episode of the federal government’s forceful commitment to multiracial democratization. One hundred years earlier, in the 1860s and 1870s, the federal government, often through little less than military occupation, guaranteed the political rights of African American men. This period, known as Reconstruction, followed the American Civil War of 1861–5. It was marked by high levels of black representation, legislation that expanded access to public services, housing, and education, and the flourishing of black trade unions, civic and fraternal groups, newspapers, and grassroots political organizations.

During Reconstruction, roughly two thousand African Americans were elected to public office and 15 percent of all officeholders in the South were black; twenty African Americans were elected to the US House of Representatives, and two were appointed to the US Senate. In the South Carolina legislature, African American representatives were a majority, the only time in US history this has occurred. For thirty-five days, the child of a slave served as the acting governor of Louisiana. African Americans served on juries and as police officers. They were elected to myriad local and state offices: city councilors, sheriffs, recorders of deeds, prosecuting attorneys, justices of the peace, state superintendents of education, and mayors. At least two black women were appointed to public office.⁶ Overall, half of these black elected officials had been slaves, and about 20 percent of them were illiterate (Foner 1993; Tate 2003).

Yet, these numbers were not maintained. By the beginning of the twentieth century, virtually all the black elected officials had been driven from office and black voter registration shrunk by as much as 90 percent. Forceful federalism had ended, and African Americans were left abandoned by the federal government. As a result, the gains won during Reconstruction, including the expansion of education and primitive welfare benefits, were lost. Mass incarceration, mob violence, and labor market exclusion took their place.

In the mid-twentieth century, historians recognized the parallels between the two periods of forceful federalism. In a 1957 article, the historian C. Vann Woodward predicted that the “present struggle for Negro rights … might even be called the Second Reconstruction” (1957: 240). Both Reconstructions saw rapid advancements in black political power, made possible by the federal government’s coordinated commitment to guaranteeing the citizenship rights of all Americans, regardless of race.

A key difference was that Americans expected the Second Reconstruction to endure in a way in which the First Reconstruction did not. In the 1966 edition of his seminal book The Strange Career of Jim Crow, Woodward confidently observed that “the Second Reconstruction shows no signs of having yet run its course or even of having slackened its pace” (1966: 8). The First Reconstruction came to an end by 1901 when the last African American was ejected from Congress and state legislatures implemented new, racist constitutions. Congress today retains large numbers of African Americans, and the country even elected a black president, unimaginable in the nineteenth century.

The Obama presidency ought to have been the apogee of the Second Reconstruction, but in many respects it represented its denouement (Harris 2012). One of the bitterest ironies of the Obama presidency was that the election and re-election of the first African American president coincided with the most serious federal judicial challenge to African American voting rights in more than a century. The Supreme Court seriously weakened one of the major legislative tools of the Second Reconstruction, the Voting Rights Act. In Shelby County v. Holder (2013) the court ended federal preclearance over local election practices, a crucial guarantee of minority voting rights. The lack of interest by Republicans in Congress and in the White House to overturn this devastating ruling demonstrates the end of a hitherto bipartisan consensus for the civil rights infrastructure of the Second Reconstruction. It had been this bipartisan consensus that caused many to believe that the Second Reconstruction would endure in a way in which the First Reconstruction could not.

Instead, the United States has entered a period of racially polarized partisanship, where partisan and racial preferences increasingly align. It is in the interests of one party (the Republican Party) to raise barriers to minorities’ access to voting, while it is essential for the other (the Democratic Party) to reduce such barriers. As with other periods in American history, including the First Reconstruction, democratic state-building (and its reversal) is tied to party-building (Orren and Skowronek 2004; King and Lieberman 2009). In The Strange Career of Jim Crow, Woodward claimed that “the Second Reconstruction, unlike the old, was not the monopoly of one of the great political parties” (1966: 9). His assessment is no longer valid.

This book argues that we have witnessed the end of federal commitment to the Second Reconstruction. Both Reconstructions were characterized by the profound expansion of coercive intervention of the American state on behalf of racial minorities, followed by a combination of inactive enforcement and active sabotage. Both Reconstructions were actively deconstructed by the federal judiciary in the midst of seemingly ascendant black elected representation. The Slaughterhouse Cases in 1873 (see Chapter 2) and Shelby County in 2013 (see Chapter 4) crippled federal civil rights statutes, yet they came when African Americans had historically high levels of descriptive representation in state and federal legislatures. The end of judicial enforcement was followed by change at the presidential level (1876 and 2016) in elections where the new president lacked plurality support in the popular vote, but secured his position through a malapportioned electoral college. Prior partisan change in Congress (1874 and 2010) spelled the end of legislative support for Reconstruction, leaving only constitutional amendments that went unenforced.

The end of the Second Reconstruction has profound implications for the vitality of democracy in the United States. As the collapse of the First Reconstruction indicated, democratic development in the United States is not characterized by a forward march of progress. Rather, it has been marked by periods of rapid expansion, followed by decline. This decline is not irreversible, but it becomes more difficult to overcome as political institutions are inhabited by actors who show no commitment to reconstructing genuine, multiracial democracy in the United States.

Organization of This Book

This book holds that the fate of the First Reconstruction can shed light on the collapse of the Second Reconstruction. This is not the first book to draw systematic comparisons between the two Reconstructions. In The Two Reconstructions, Richard Valelly made a major contribution in this respect, but events have shifted in important ways since that book was published in 2004. Crucially, Valelly took for granted that the Second Reconstruction was a success. He began his book with a puzzle: “The historical and social science riddle lies in the contrast between these two reconstructions … Why did the first effort fail? Why has the second succeeded?” (2004: ix). This book starts from a different premise. It argues that federal commitment to the Second Reconstruction has ended and that its legacy is unravelling. Democratization in the United States is once more characterized by backsliding rather than by persistent and durable advance.

The book, therefore, will outline the rise and fall of the First Reconstruction before moving on to examine the trajectory of the Second. I pay close attention to a period unexamined in Valelly’s text: the Obama and Trump presidencies. I hold that there is more continuity in explaining these seemingly very different men’s elections than is generally understood. Both men were beneficiaries of finely balanced but sharply racially divided electorates. This rise in racially polarized partisanship was toxic for the First Reconstruction and has poisoned the Second Reconstruction.

Chapter 1 (“The Rise of the First Reconstruction”) outlines the inclusion of African Americans in US politics in the nineteenth century. This was the United States’ first experiment in multiracial democracy. While many commentators argue that Reconstruction lasted for just over a decade (1865–77), I contend that multiracial democracy endured in some states and localities through grassroots resistance to white supremacy for a further twenty-five years. Reconstruction was not merely a moment of elite representation for African Americans; it was also a period of great popular participation for ordinary African Americans. Union Leagues, local Republican Party branches, school boards, lodges, workers’ associations, and churches were all sites of popular black political involvement. Well over a million black agricultural laborers were unionized. In some southern states, a majority of trade union members were black (DeSantis 2016).

Chapter 2 (“The Fall of the First Reconstruction”) explains why by the start of the twentieth century all these democratic gains had been reversed. There are myriad explanations for the failure of Reconstruction. Some Marxist historians blame the absence of land reform and the failure to redistribute wealth from white elites to former slaves (Taylor 2008). Some commentators point to black cooptation by white powerbrokers, with black elites delivering a (shrinking) share of the African American vote to white candidates in exchange for access to a limited set of patronage appointments (Reed 2002: 111). Older commentaries proposed that politics advanced too quickly ahead of social attitudes on race (Myrdal 1944), while less generous accounts blamed black incompetence and misrule (Coulter 1947).

I argue in this chapter that the fundamental flaw of the First Reconstruction was the failure of reformers to dismantle the dangerous undemocratic institutions embedded in the US Constitution. Most importantly, the power of the Supreme Court went unchallenged, leaving civil rights reforms vulnerable to judicial attack. The political will to resist this judicial onslaught was lacking as a result of high levels of partisan polarization over civil rights. Only one party – the Republicans – was committed to black enfranchisement and political power. Democrats had every incentive to diminish black voters’ access to the polls and to indulge white prejudices about African Americans. When Republicans lost their nerve on the continued deployment of forceful federalism, Democrats reacted, sometimes with the support of violent paramilitaries, to assert political power on racial lines. Democratization is not sustainable if only one party is committed to it.

Chapter 3 (“The Rise of the Second Reconstruction”) charts America’s second period of democratic expansion in the mid-twentieth century. Minority officeholding, the right to vote, and access to basic public services were all dependent on the massive intervention of the federal government, secured through legislative reforms, judicial rulings, constitutional amendments, and the physical presence of federal agents monitoring the citizenship rights of African Americans. As the example given above of James Meredith shows, multiracial inclusion was only possible through profound coercive involvement from the federal government.

This chapter will focus, in particular, on the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the most important piece of civil rights legislation ever enacted. As black voter registration and officeholding skyrocketed in the years after its passage, this legislation was said to have produced little less than a “quiet revolution” in voting rights for racial minorities (McDonald 1989; Davidson and Grofman 1994). Its measures, such as the dispatching of federal agents to promote registration and strict federal preclearance rules, demonstrated serious federal commitment to the enforcement of voting rights for African Americans and other minorities. When President Lyndon Johnson signed the bill into law on August 6, 1965, he called the legislation “a triumph for freedom as huge as any victory that has ever been won on any battlefield.” At his last press conference as president, Johnson stated that he regarded the Voting Rights Act to be his greatest achievement.

Chapter 4’s title (“The Compromise of 2016”) is an allusion to the Compromise of 1877, which spelled the end of the forceful federalism that sustained the First Reconstruction. In the 1876 election, as a result of the malapportioned electoral college, it was the loser of the popular vote, Rutherford Hayes, who was awarded the presidency. Hayes’s tenure brought executive branch federal support for Reconstruction to an end, coinciding with the loss of Congress by pro-Reconstruction candidates in the previous midterm elections. While elements of the First Reconstruction persisted in fits and starts in varying states and localities, its legacy had, within a generation, been entirely erased. Federal commitment to the Second Reconstruction came to a firm close by 2016, as a result of the sharp increase in racially polarized partisanship and judicial backsliding on civil rights.

The increase in racially polarized partisanship contributed to substantial Democratic losses in Congress and in state legislatures. Barack Obama and Donald Trump were both beneficiaries of extremely racially divided, but finely balanced, electorates. The historically high levels of support and turnout from non-white voters that Obama received in 2008 and 2012 ensured his presidency, but they masked a long-term (and intensifying) decline in white support for the Democrats, which proved devastating for Obama’s party in the midterm elections, in state legislatures, and, ultimately, in the election of his successor.

Additionally, this period has seen trenchant judicial challenge to the civil rights infrastructure that had sustained the Second Reconstruction. In particular, in 2013 the Supreme Court in Shelby County v. Holder rendered the most powerful element of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (Section 5) inoperable. The decision was the first since the nineteenth century in which the Supreme Court struck down a major piece of federal civil rights legislation outright. It led to discernible changes in electoral law and practice in areas previously covered by Section 5 of the Act. The weakening of the Voting Rights Act represented not only a setback for minority voting rights, but also a major reversal of American democratization more broadly.

Chapter 5 (“Reconstructing Reconstruction”) is a reflection on how best to rescue the Second Reconstruction from failure. The path that followed the failure of the First Reconstruction is not preordained, but Americans must not be so complacent as to believe that democratic backsliding is simply historical artifact. Relatedly, commentators must avoid lazy prognostications that declare “demography is destiny,” pointing to the increased proportion of non-whites in the American public as salvation. A majority, non-white electorate is decades away. Additionally, non-white growth in the American population is driven almost entirely by Hispanic and Asian Americans and their children with white partners, whose alignment with the interests of African Americans cannot be assumed.

The US Constitution makes sustained democratization challenging. The institutional structures of American federalism provide areas with less diverse populations a greater say in the American policymaking process. The Constitution affords each state two votes in the Senate, regardless of population differences, which in turn is a basis of the electoral college. The consequence is that states with the most power in deciding crucial national-level policy through the Senate and in electing the president are those that lack the large, diverse populations found in big cities. Constitutional change is itself extremely difficult, due to the Constitution’s own amendment procedures. An amendment must command the support of two-thirds of both chambers of Congress and three-quarters of states, giving disproportionate influence to states with lower populations, which are disproportionately white and rural.

The challenge, then, for reconstructing Reconstruction must involve a grassroots, multiracial coalition committed to restoring America’s crucial civil rights infrastructure. This coalition can be united by a commitment not only to civil rights, but also to the delivery of general demands for greater equality and economic justice. This “dual agenda” approach was posited by the race theorists Dona and Charles Hamilton (1998), but it has lately been neglected as political actors and commentators have increasingly accepted racially polarized partisanship as a tragic inevitability. I argue in Chapter 5 that the alternative is a form of working-class, multiracial populism.

The book finishes with a reflection on the fragility of democracy in the United States. It overturns linear assumptions about the steady construction of a “more perfect Union.” Democratic reversal in the United States is unlikely to take the form of a declaration of martial law or the imposition of single-party rule. Instead, reversal is likely to resemble the processes of the American state itself – with changes that are diffuse and incremental, but which collectively can be hugely consequential. When race and party so closely align, efforts to rewrite the rules of the political game to advantage a particular party inescapably also rewrite the rules to advantage a particular race. Steps that appear individually to be minor, color-blind, or innocuous have the aggregate effect of tilting the playing field away from historically marginalized groups, reasserting historic imbalances in racial power.