Where Are We & What Is To Be Done?

  Where are we in history? This question weighed heavily on me before Trump was re-elected by a sliver of voters, who knew full well what he did during his first administration and what he intended to do during his second. During the campaign, with all the forces let loose by MAGA’s fury against the status quo, along with the resurgence of authoritarian leaders throughout much of the Western world, I thought that even if Harris won the election, nothing in American history would be settled. Once Trump was inaugurated and put the Project 2025 agenda into motion with a ferocity that stunned his opponents and many of his ardent supporters alike, that question became ever more pressing. Did his deluge of executive orders, pardons of January 6 criminals, appointments of Fox News cabinet members, pink slips for federal employees, attacks on international alliances and trade agreements represent “an inflection point,” the triumph of a lawless, fascist regime, the “existential threat to the country” that Biden, Harris, and scores of pundits and academics have repeatedly warned us against? Or were these belligerent actions, like the ones Trump took in his first administration, an aberration that would be denounced and moderately corrected by the next Democratic president who came to office? Historians who try to make sense of what happened at critical junctures in the past have the advantage over people who actually lived through volatile times, since they know, in retrospect, which actions were consequential and what they have come to mean in the unfolding history of a nation or an empire. We are not so fortunate; we have no standpoint outside the haphazardness of Trump’s latest actions and the immediate reactions they incite. Capable writers like Perry Anderson, Quinn Slobodian, and Ivan Krastev provided coherent accounts of the historical events and developments that prepared the way for Trump’s MAGA, but their accounts did not steady me in the face of Trump’s almost daily assaults on a world that had felt like it was still intact just a few months before. When it came to Trump’s extravagant show of signing multiple tranches of executive orders in front of cameras in the oval office in the opening days of his administration, it was clear he was intent on delivering his campaign promise to shrink the size, scope, and cost of the federal government—a project that went back at least to Ronald Reagan and which, for decades, has been advanced by the neo-liberal policies of Republicans and Democrats alike.

  Nevertheless, that the structure of the political and civil order, as well as the foundations of both NATO and the neoliberal global economy, fell apart like a house of cards under the pressure of Trump’s executive orders and Elon’s Musk’s DOGE took me by surprise. Adding to my disorientation was the fact that the status quo was being undermined by the wrong people, that is, if one were still operating on worn-out leftist habits of mind. It was the unlikely real-estate developer/failed casino mogul/reality TV star Trump who was in charge, aided by the erratic techno-futurist Musk and posturing Christian warriors like J. D. Vance and Pete Hegseth, all of whom behave in a gratuitously provocative manner that often borders on buffoonery. They make a spectacle of calculated impudence, blithe ruthlessness; they make no pretense to playing by the rules, let alone to mouthing liberal shibboleths about the common good, justice, democracy, or the rule of law. If the rallying cry of a small cadre of forward-looking, iconoclastic artists was “shock the bourgeoisie,” Trump, his cabinet members, Fox-news pundits, and ordinary people at MAGA rallies have their own formula for scandalizing conventional manners and morals—“own the libs”—which intensifies the feeling of the world being turned upside down, for it used to be conservatives, with their obedience to “traditional values,” who were famously shockable and the radical Left that had little use for respectability or civil niceties.

  While I was feeling at sea, all around me friends were echoing the dire proclamations of liberal politicians, pundits, and scholars. They knew where we were in history: fascism had arrived. Their alarm was understandable, but it seemed to me they were relying on false, readymade historical parallels from the 1930s and ’40s. From my perspective as a historian, it was too soon to tell, and I wanted to remain alert to what was new, to what could not be shoe-horned into familiar political categories. In the first weeks of Trump’s administration, it was not yet clear if he would actually succeed in overthrowing the longstanding though teetering establishment. After all, in the face of the most legally dubious actions, lawsuits were filed and federal judges were issuing injunctions so that the matter could be decided by the lower courts—and this left the question open.

  That history was moving in the wrong direction, however—a harrowing, authoritarian direction—became less open to question when, in March, there was a rash of violent arrests of immigrant students in broad daylight by masked and hooded ICE operatives in unmarked cars, which felt chillingly like what we have seen in history books, movies,and television shows about the rise of fascism, quickly followed by the deportation to El Salvador of alleged gang members who were then osten-tatiously put on public display in cages. And with the deployment of 4,000 National Guard troops and 700 marines to Los Angeles in early June to quell protests against brutal mass arrests of immigrants, it appeared that the liberals’ nightmare of a police state was becoming reality.

  Fortunately, these shocking actions were successfully challenged in federal courts and, after much delay, the illegally detained Mahmoud Khalil was returned to New York and the illegally deported Abrego Garciato the U.S. As for the deployment of troops in Los Angeles, the question of its legality took longer to settle. A temporary restraining order against the Trump administration was granted almost immediately, but it was quickly blocked by an appeals court. But, then, on September 2, Judge Breyer, the same federal judge who had issued the temporary restraining order, ruled that the Trump administration violated the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 barring the use of soldiers for civilian law enforcement. That the judiciary continued as a bulwark against the threat of authoritarianism suggested the country was still recognizable. And that there had been a number of peaceful public demonstrations, culminating in “No Kings” marches on June 14, when five million people protested Trump’s actions in more than 2100 cities and towns, also gave me reason to hold onto at least a margin of hope.

  That margin, however, collapsed in on itself when just two weeks after these huge protests, the Supreme Court issued a ruling on the so-called birthright citizenship case, Trump v. CASA, Inc. (June 27). The Court did not consider the legality of Trump’s executive order to end birthright citizenship for millions of people, leaving the determination of their fates to the lower courts. What it did decide was that “universal injunctions likely exceed the equitable authority that Congress has given to federal courts.” I now knew where we stood in history: the Trump-friendly Supreme Court had taken away our sole protection against Trump’s unscrupulous consolidation of power, unleashing a real crisis where his MAGA notion of America might very well prevail. But that conclusion was not quite justified, as the legal literature about “universal” or “nationwide” injunctions revealed.

  First, to my relief, the Supreme Court had indicated that class-action suits were still a remedy to block an executive order from taking effect while questions over its legality move through the courts. And the justices were not giving the Trump administration an unfair legal advantage, which had been my initial impression from the media coverage. It turned out that there were legitimate reasons to question the authority of universal injunctions. In fact, both the Obama and Biden administrations had opposed their use. Federal district courts had halted many of their key initiatives, especially politically contentious ones put into effect by executive order—in Obama’s case, immigration reform and LGBTQ rights; in Biden’s, policies combatting the COVID-19 pandemic as well as D.E.I. directives. The purpose of executive orders is to set out the policies the president wants to institute. They are not law nor are they meant to replace legislation by the Congress. That clarified for me the first-day actions of Biden when he signed a stack of executive orders revoking Trump’s and Trump responded in kind on his first day in office, rescinding seventy-eight of Biden’s executive orders. Policy by executive order rested on a very thin reed.

  Before 1960, executive orders were primarily issued in times of emergency, such as war or economic collapse. Their use—in particular, during a president’s first 100 days in office—increased with Obama, who signed nineteen. Trump, in his first administration, signed thirty-three, and Biden, forty-two. This time in office, Trump signed a record 143 executive orders, which enabled him to single-handedly disrupt the global economy through tariff policies, dismantle entire federal agencies, freeze funding appropriated for climate and clean energy projects—to name just a few. Congress has the power to check executive orders, but the servile Republican majority has acquiesced to Trump’s every whim. The courts are also empowered to stop an executive order if it violates the Constitution, a federal statute, or takes power away from Congress. And that is what has happened: lawsuits were filed to challenge a number of Trump’s executive orders and district courts issued a record twenty-five universal injunctions to halt or prevent their implementation.

  According to a much-cited article in the Harvard Law Review published in 2024, from 1963 through 2023, 127 universal injunctions were issued, and of that total, ninety-two between 2001 and 2023. Furthermore, just over half of the total—sixty-four—were issued against the first Trump administration. My first reaction was relief. I thought these numbers represented the rule of law against an increasingly imperial executive branch. But that turned out to be a misapprehension, since challengers of the president’s power typically resort to the strategy of “judge-shopping,” where plaintiffs seek a particular court or judge most likely to find in their favor. Ninety-two percent of universal injunctions against the first Trump administration were issued by Democratic-appointed judges, and of the fourteen against the Biden administration, all were granted by Republican-appointed judges.

  Confronted by these appalling facts, faith in the rule of law—that the courts are impartial, non-partisan, and therefore, legitimate—was difficult to maintain. If that were not distressing enough, it turned out that the very legal mechanism—the universal injunction—that I had believed was protecting us from authoritarianism was inherently undemocratic. What is in dispute about its use is that it applies to all relevant persons and entities—anyone nationwide—rather than only the particular parties to the lawsuit. It takes one single district judge among nearly 700 to shut down an executive order, agency regulation, or federal law. And this gives a district judge who grants it enormous power, which, in an unexpected symmetry, mirrors the inordinate power of a president who issues an executive order.

  Governance by executive order lacking the authority of law, halted by a universal injunction granted by a partisan judge, or revoked by the next president when his party returns to power and who then immediately issues new executive orders restoring the previous status quo, starting up the whole desperate cycle again: all this extra-democratic maneuvering is a sure sign of systemic paralysis. It is no secret that voters have become rampantly factionalized and that this has led them to send increasingly sectarian but razor-thin majorities to Congress. That members of the opposing parties share few political aims or legislative priorities makes bipartisan compromise rare, resulting in deadlock after deadlock. And if one were to design a procedural rule that would enshrine obstruction of the majority party into the system, one could do no better than the Senate filibuster, which requires a sixty-vote supermajority to pass most bills. Its original purpose was to safeguard the rights of the minority party and force consensus, and it was to be reserved for only the most controversial issues. But, beginning with the Obama administration, its use increased dramatically, making it virtually impossible to legislate, as both parties, whenever they attain the majority, have discovered.

  During Trump’s first 100 days, only five bills were signed into law, a record low. Biden, during his first 100 days, signed eleven bills, which was among the fewest for any president dating back to FDR. In order to circumvent the filibuster on major legislative initiatives, the party in power has resorted to a special parliamentary procedural process, “reconciliation,” which permits the Senate to adopt legislation—sweeping legislation with enormous consequences, such as Biden’s “Inflation Reduction Act of 2022” and Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill”—through a simple majority of fifty-one votes. At first glance, this process appears to be a remedy to the stalemate-producing filibuster and a victory for democracy. But this, too, turns out to be an illusion, for the simple majority allows senators who represent states with very small populations to wield disproportionate power. A notorious example was on display during the Biden administration when Joe Manchin, the Democratic senator from West Virginia, singlehandedly blocked the combined will of fifty of his own party’s senators who supported Biden’s “Build Back Better Act.” This was done by a man representing the tenth smallest state in the country, with approximately 1.7 million residents, in order to protect the interests of West Virginia’s coal industry.

  The disproportionate power of senators is an artifact of the eighteenth-century Constitutional Convention; delegates from smaller states who had had an equal vote with larger ones under the Articles of Confederation were loath to relinquish that standing when the founders were drafting the powers of the legislative branch of government. To appease smaller states who threatened to leave the confederation, the so-called “Great Compromise” of July 16, 1787 devised two houses of Congress. Disputes about the membership of the Senate grew out of the larger problem facing the new republic of how to transform a loose alliance of sovereign states into a national government that derived its legitimacy directly from the people. Whether the Senate would represent the individual states and be co-equal proved the most contentious issue of all, raising fundamental questions about the nature of representation and the proper scope of direct democracy, and it was decided by a single vote—five states to four, with Massachusetts divided.

  In 1790, Virginia, the largest state in the union, had thirteen times the population of Delaware, the smallest. Today, of course, the population ratio of large cities to rural areas is even more skewed. According to the 2020 census, the nine most populous states contain slightly more than half of the total population, but they have only eighteen senators to represent them. In practice, this means that the vote of one senator from the smallest state, Wyoming, representing about 290,000 people, has the exact same weight as the vote of one senator from the largest, California, who represents about twenty million people. California, with close to forty million residents, contains more people than the twenty-one least populous states combined. The equal representation of each and every state carries with it long-lasting repercussions since their power comes into play not only when senators pass bills that determine the well-being of millions of people, but also when they confirm or reject a president’s cabinet secretaries and heads of federal agencies and even more consequentially, judicial nominees to the Federal and Supreme courts, offices with lifetime tenure.

  This is where the House of Representatives comes in, for it was designed to offset the power of individual states in the Senate. Like anyone alive today, I was well aware of the damage done to democracy by gerrymandered districts and of the corrupting force of “big money”—super PACs, “dark” money, and all the rest—on elections; yet somehow, uncritically, I assumed that the House still functioned as a more democratic institution than the Senate. In July, however, when Trump ordered Texas Governor Greg Abbott to redraw five district boundaries currently held by Democrats to give Republicans the advantage in the 2026 midterm election and Abbott complied, what was left of the House’s legitimacy took another blow. Almost immediately Governor Gavin Newsom of California announced he would counteract Abbott’s cheating by responding in kind, appealing directly to voters to authorize redistricting in his state to the Democrats’ advantage, and six additional governors, Republican and Democrat alike, declared they intended to follow suit. In their usual sensation-mongering fashion, politicians and pundits described retaliatory gerrymandering as an “arms race,” “maximum warfare,” and “mutually assured destruction.” When I turned to more scholarly sources, I found that gerrymandering—and by both parties—had infiltrated the system further than I had realized. According to the Brennan Center for Justice, in the last election, only twenty-seven of 435 House districts were considered “competitive”—that is, their outcome could not be predicted in advance—which gives the lie to the notion that there was very much of American democracy or spirit of fair play left to lose.

  I had these same depressing thoughts when George Bush became president in 2000 and Trump in 2016, despite the fact that both lost the popular vote. Their elections spoke to the undemocratic nature of yet another institution bequeathed to us by the highly contested Compromise of 1787—the electoral college—and also to the inordinate power of so-called “battleground” states in determining the political realities with which we are forced to live. In 2016, Trump became president because he narrowly carried three of these states—Wisconsin by about 23,000 votes; Pennsylvania by about 44,000 votes; and Michigan by about 11,000 votes—which meant that the votes of 78,000 people for Trump in these three states counted thirty-six times more than the votes of 2,868,518 people for Hilary Clinton in other states. In the last election, Trump carried all six battle-ground states with a larger collective margin of about 760,000 votes, although five of them were won by less than three percentage points.

  Just as gerrymandered districts left fewer and fewer House seats that could be genuinely contested by opposing parties, the country has become so predictably and irrevocably split between Democratic and Republican states that only five or six states still exist where the outcome of the presidential race is not a foregone conclusion. And the sclerotic condition that has taken hold of all three branches of the federal government is reflected in the apathy—or is it contempt? or cynicism?—of large numbers of people who do not participate in one of our only civic duties—voting. In the last election, close to 90 million eligible voters did not think the choice between Trump and Harris was pressing enough to cast a ballot—a greater number than those who voted either for Trump(around 77.3 million) or for Harris (around 75 million).

  “Battleground states” in elections, gerrymandering as “mutually assured destruction,” as well as discussions about eliminating the Senate filibuster described as “the nuclear option”: such hyperbolic, war-infused rhetoric has done much to constrict the range of our political imagination and capacity for judgment. In this context, I could not help thinking of the replacement of official public statements written by seasoned policy-makers by short, reactive, blustering “posts” by individual politicians on social media. This format, which now monopolizes our public space, trivializes political discourse, guaranteeing in advance that nothing substantial can be said, and relegating sustained intellectual debate—the very lifeblood of democracy—to the trash heap of history. With this grim accounting in mind, the habitual refrain of the party out of power, “Just wait until the next election,” or the liberal pundit’s article setting out the steps to “save democracy” or “renew the Democratic party,” have never felt more hollow.

  No wonder that when Biden was still in office, seventy-two percent of Americans—a record high—said that they were not satisfied with “the way democracy is working in the U.S.,” according to a Gallup poll from 2024. And a more recent New York Times/Siena University survey(September 22-27) captured the conflicting realities that many Americans inhabit these days: half of the registered voters polled think Trump is “a unique threat to the American system of government,” while the other half think he is presiding over “an improved or stable economy and has donean excellent job of keeping his campaign promises.” This did not exactly surprise me, but still I did not expect to read that a staggering ninety-three percent of Democratic voters think the United States is in “a political crisis.” Eighty-four percent of Independents agreed and so did a majority of Republicans, sixty percent, according to a Quinnipiac University Poll(September 24). These statistics made me think of Christopher Lasch’s words about “the obsolescence of Left and Right” and his description of the state of American politics back in 1991: “The old political ideologies have exhausted their capacity to explain events or to inspire men and women to constructive action.”

  Since the country’s founding, American democracy has been conceived primarily as a legal system of counterbalancing institutions that makes it possible for people to live with their differences. The vicious January 6 attack on the Capitol by Trump supporters determined to overturn Biden’s election and the alarming increase of death threats and assassinations of public figures over the last several years are signs of how inflamed and irremediable these differences have become. And therecent forty-three day shutdown of the federal government suggests that our antiquated two-party system is approaching a state of rigor mortis. The description of the current situation as “a political crisis,” then, is accurate. With each new deployment of the National Guard to democratic states opposing federal immigration raids, halted by a temporary injunction, only to be overturned by an appeals court, it is unsurprising that many liberals have concluded they are now living in a lawless, authoritarian regime.

  A similar conclusion was reached by many MAGA Republicans during the Biden administration, who experienced federal mandates for Covid vaccines and masks during the pandemic as tyrannical incursions into their freedom. And it was not so long ago that the arch-conservative Tea Party held “Don’t Tread on Me” signs declaring their independence from the federal government under Obama or, back in the 1990s, that the National Rifle Association denounced federal law enforcement agents as “jack-booted government thugs.” In each case, what is revealed is the volatile, though usually submerged, tension between the authority of the federal government and states’ rights that breaks to the surface whenever large numbers of people feel the federal government is interfering with their very way of life—what the shorthand “states’ rights” cannot properly capture.

  What has been especially disorienting for those of us who have clung, even unconsciously, to a belief in progress is Trump’s deployment of the National Guard to Los Angeles, Chicago, and Portland to assist agents carrying out brutal ICE raids and terrifying streetside abductions. Previously, the comparable federal action engraved in our historical memory was that of President Lyndon Johnson sending federal troops to Alabama in 1965 to protect voting-rights activists from vicious harassment and attacks by mobs as they marched from Selma to Montgomery. Who could have imagined that one day—today, in fact—governors of liberal states like Gavin Newsom, J .B. Pritzker, and Tina Kotek, who are defending their cities against Trump’s “unprecedented usurpation of state authority and resources” (Newsom), the “unconstitutional invasion of Illinois by the federal government” (Pritzker), the “gross, unamerican abuse of power” (Kotek), would be cast in the same embattled position as the white-supremacist governor of Alabama, George Wallace, when he defended his state against the federal government—“I draw the line in the dust and toss the gauntlet before the feet of tyranny, and I say segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.”

  Until what felt like yesterday, the “sovereignty, freedom, and independence” of states originally provided for in the Articles of Confederation and then secured in the Tenth Amendment as “states’ rights” had been invoked by bigotted reactionaries fighting to protect the status quo, and this meant the slave-holder South before the Civil War or the Jim Crow, segregationist South of the first half of the twentieth century. But, in our world turned upside down, these positions are now reversed. I realized I was as guilty as any progressive who believes that history is on their side—“we are not going back,” as Kamala Harris and her supporters chanted during her presidential campaign—of not fully noticing that the “liberal,” “woke” political order had become the status quo and that it was despised and repudiated by a majority of voters who thrilled to Trump’s declaration, “I am your warrior. I am your justice. And for those who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution.”

  Now that we have arrived at a point in time where there is no longer even a minimal consensus about what kind of society Americans want to live in or adequate faith that those in power will abide by what is called “democratic norms”—both of which kept our flawed political institutions functioning—I am returned to the question with which I began: where are we in history? Will those of us who are shocked to be cast in the reactionary historical role of defender of states’ rights find ourselves, as our predecessors did, on the losing side of history? Will the momentary triumph of the nativism and nationalism of MAGA and Project 2025 be the critical turning point toward a new American society that liberals will find as alien to them as George Wallace found the world after the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and ’60s?

  That the Democratic-led House of Representatives impeached Trump once for abuse of power and obstruction of Congress and then again for incitement of insurrection, and that Trump’s brazen contempt for the law did not matter enough to the requisite number of Republican senators to convict him—not even those who had denounced him on the day the Capitol was attacked—demonstrates the damage to moral conscience that comes with habitual obsequiousness. And that Democrats when they controlled both Houses of Congress during the first two years of Biden’s presidency lacked the resolve to pass legislation to prevent a future president from undermining democratic institutions raises questions about how the federal government will be able to regain its legitimacy.

  What, then, is to be done? My brief review of the structure of the constitutional republic we inherited from people living 250 years ago leaves no doubt that their specific, time-bound, political circumstances—keeping the loose confederation of states together after gaining independence from a tyrannical monarchy—resulted in two inherently undemocratic institutions—the Senate and the electoral college. The only legal path to their elimination is amending the Constitution, which requires approval by two-thirds of both houses of Congress and then ratification by three-fourths of the states. That only twenty-seven amendments have passed, ten of which comprise the Bill of Rights ratified in 1791, speaks to the near-impossibility of changing the Constitution. But even if there were a collective will to take decisive action and fundamentally reform the Constitution, there is still another, more existential, threat to democracy in the United States. That is the threat that every republic faces if it expands beyond its original geographical boundaries and its population becomes too large: it can no longer properly function. Thirteen original seaboard states with a population of 4 million are now a continental empire with four standard time zones and a population of 342 million people divided by culture, ethnicity, and religion.

  In response to these seemingly insuperable obstacles to democracy, people in a number of states have begun to contemplate starting over and are exploring ways to secede from the union. In California, with a population almost the size of Canada and the fifth largest economy in the world, a group called CalExit has been trying to get a proposition on the ballot that would establish an official commission to study the viability of California becoming a sovereign, autonomous nation. In June, the Independent California Institute, an organization advocating “greater self-governance for California,” conducted a poll and found that seventy-one percent of Californians think their state would be better off with special autonomous status within the U.S. and forty-four percent would vote for a ballot measure for peaceful, legal secession. For many years, activists in Texas, with a population of 31.3 million and an economy that ranks eighth in the world, have repeatedly backed referendums that would allow the state to “reassert its status as an independent nation.” Some smaller states as well, like New Hampshire, have floated ideas of putting a referendum on the ballot to consider exiting the union, and in 2024, thirty-six percent of Alaskans told a you.gov pollster that they would support becoming a fully independent nation. Champions of secession envision peaceful negotiations with the federal government to formalize independence.

  Today, it is widely assumed that secession has always been illegal. But, in fact, the Constitution is silent on the matter. It was an open question during the early years of the American Republic; in the Northeast, two different groups attempted to secede from the union, which they believed had degenerated into an oppressive government. But it was not until the massive loss of lives and devastation of the Civil War that the precedent was set that no state could secede from the Union. A few years later, the Supreme Court addressed its constitutionality in Texas v. White(1869). The majority held that the U.S. is “an indestructible union” and states do not have the legal right to unilaterally secede, and further, “there was no place for reconsideration or revocation, except through revolution or through consent of the States.” From that time on, secession became habitually associated with slavery, racism, and violent rebellion; in consequence, any move toward secession or discussion of its legitimacy has been banished from the realm of respectability.

  Still, the possibility of states becoming different entities from what they currently are is not as remote as it might seem. A number of movements are already taking shape that suggest what the dissolution or reconfiguration of the United States by democratic means might look like. According to an article in Newsweek (August 2024), residents in conservative, rural counties, who believe their state’s liberal values and policies are making it impossible to live as they wish, are organizing to form regional alliances that would align their values with the government that represents them. Some, like two dozen counties in Illinois, have voted to break away from Illinois and create a new state, and residents in parts of Southern Oregon and Northern California have talked for decades about joining together to form a new state of Jefferson. Others, like the organizers of the Greater Idaho movement, hope to exit Eastern and much of Central Oregon and merge with the more conservative state of Idaho. So, too, with lawmakers from three Republican counties in Western Maryland, who want to become part of West Virginia. A group of Colorado residents in Weld county have the same aim: they want to merge with Wyoming. Their avowed mission is to “empower the citizens of Colorado and their local governments in the common desire to maintain a free way of life.”And then there are regional coalitions that have sprung up spontaneously to counteract federal actions that they find dangerous; these also suggest the possible contours of new sovereign nations. In early September, when the Center for Disease Control and Prevention was effectively dismantled, California, Oregon, Washington, and Hawaii organized the West Coast Health Alliance to coordinate health guidelines and provide consistent vaccine information. Almost simultaneously, the Northeast Public Health Collaborative was formed by Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and New York City (the largest municipal health department in the nation) to pursue the same goals. During Trump’s first term, when he withdrew the country from the Paris Climate Agreement in 2017, states also came together to counteract him. Almost immediately, the U.S. Climate Alliance was formed to accomplish the same standards of greenhouse emissions reduction as those set by the Paris Climate Agreement. Today, it is a bipartisan coalition of twenty-four governors representing approximately fifty-five percent of the population and sixty percent of the economy.

  Whether individual states or coalitions of states eventually achieve independence, the fact that secession and coalition movements are on the rise offers the welcome prospect of imagining something new, something beyond the dessicated, retrograde ideals and empty, backward-looking political vision provided, on the one hand, by the Republican party of returning to some unspecified prior time when America was “great,” or, on the other, by the Democratic party of staying the course with neoliberalism and some watered-down version of the welfare state. I can imagine citizens of a country where the majority views global warming as an existential crisis drafting a constitution dedicated to safeguarding the environment through democratic governance. And citizens who believe that democracy is impossible in a society where obscene amounts of wealth have accumulated in the hands of the few could write a constitution that would foster civic and social equality rooted in a rough approximation of economic equality.

  But, then, my political imagination falters and I end up picturing nations that divide along existing ideological lines, but at least have the advantage over our present political order of being in accord with the majority’s principles and values: one where citizens concerned to ensure the principles of “diversity, equity, and inclusion” construct a constitution to advance social justice; and another where citizens dedicated to the principle, “live free or die,” draft a constitution that puts libertarianism at its core. If a nation is formed to achieve the principles of progressives on the Bernie Sanders’s left, they could take existing European social democracies as models for their constitution. Alternatively, tech-billionaires, in order to realize their “anarcho-capitalist” dream, could write a constitution that would refashion the state as an instrument for exclusively securing private economic interests. Whether these nations are composed of regional groups of states or formed non-contiguously according to ideological affinity would be determined by the citizens founding them. And whether they would cooperate with one another in trade relations, continental travel, currencies, treaties, and like matters, along the lines of the European Union or NATO, would also be open to debate.

  Of course we never know what direction history is moving in, which actions and events will prove consequential and which will be lost to time. Anyone who predicts its future shape is doing little more than presuming that actions and events that seem momentous in the present will ultimately carry the day. It will take time before the chaos that Trump has unleashed on the world settles into a coherent narrative, and only then will it be revealed whether Trump’s second administration was a critical turning point in American history—in truth, its end point—when the nation changed into an “illiberal democracy” or when it broke apart into a number of new sovereign nations. Or, less dramatically, it might turn out that those of us who live into the future will find ourselves living in a country that returned, as it did after the seemingly world-shaking pandemic, to a version of its former self, though altered in unpredictable ways that continue to make themselves felt. Alternatively, the direction of American history might very well be determined by an idea whose importance went unnoticed in our own time. Which made me think of Karl Lowith’s remarks about how “Christianity, which seemed to Tacitus and Pliny an insignificant Jewish quarrel, conquered the Roman empire.”