Reviews Lifestyle The New Sober Boom Getting Hooked on Quitting Education Liberal Arts Cuts Are Dangerous Is College Necessary? Finance Dying Parents Costing Millennials Dear Gen Z Investing In Le Creuset Crypto Investing SEC vs Celebrity Crypto Promoters ‘Dark’ Personalities Drawn to BTC

Lifestyle The New Sober Boom Getting Hooked on Quitting

Getting Hooked on Quitting

Education Liberal Arts Cuts Are Dangerous Is College Necessary?

Liberal Arts Cuts Are Dangerous

Is College Necessary?

Finance Dying Parents Costing Millennials Dear Gen Z Investing In Le Creuset

Dying Parents Costing Millennials Dear

Gen Z Investing In Le Creuset

Crypto Investing SEC vs Celebrity Crypto Promoters ‘Dark’ Personalities Drawn to BTC

Investing SEC vs Celebrity Crypto Promoters ‘Dark’ Personalities Drawn to BTC

SEC vs Celebrity Crypto Promoters

‘Dark’ Personalities Drawn to BTC

Reviews Lifestyle The New Sober Boom Getting Hooked on Quitting Education Liberal Arts Cuts Are Dangerous Is College Necessary? Finance Dying Parents Costing Millennials Dear Gen Z Investing In Le Creuset Crypto Investing SEC vs Celebrity Crypto Promoters ‘Dark’ Personalities Drawn to BTC

Lifestyle The New Sober Boom Getting Hooked on Quitting

Getting Hooked on Quitting

Education Liberal Arts Cuts Are Dangerous Is College Necessary?

Liberal Arts Cuts Are Dangerous

Is College Necessary?

Finance Dying Parents Costing Millennials Dear Gen Z Investing In Le Creuset

Dying Parents Costing Millennials Dear

Gen Z Investing In Le Creuset

Crypto Investing SEC vs Celebrity Crypto Promoters ‘Dark’ Personalities Drawn to BTC

Investing SEC vs Celebrity Crypto Promoters ‘Dark’ Personalities Drawn to BTC

SEC vs Celebrity Crypto Promoters

‘Dark’ Personalities Drawn to BTC

Restoring American democracy won’t be easy. At least we know what won’t work

Joe Biden tried to "turn the page" on Trumpism, and it failed. We need deep structural change

Published May 18, 2026 9:00AM (EDT)

At least some of the illusions of Donald Trump’s first term are gone. One hears very little of the then-prevalent chatter, coming mostly from the pundit class, about institutional “guardrails.” If they existed at all, those guardrails were constructed of papier-mâché. We are reminded of the quote by Britain’s first U.N. ambassador, Alexander Cadogan, when reflecting on mid-20th-century totalitarianism: “What forces itself to one’s attention is the degree to which everything favours the evildoer, if he is blatant enough.”

Should electoral democracy survive the next three years and more humane and decent people be charged with running the government, what can they do to reinstitutionalize democracy, or, more simply, to Trump-proof the political system? We know what won’t work: back to normal, return to the status quo, “turning the page.” That’s what Joe Biden tried to do, possibly with the advice of the same political consultants who have turned the cliché about “kitchen table issues” into a tiresome mantra. While Biden’s instincts were honorable, he, along with other administration actors like Attorney General Merrick Garland, were wrong. It couldn’t work; the status quo ante to which they wanted to return was riddled with the same flaws that led inexorably to Trump in the first place.

Public advocates like former federal judge J. Michael Luttig, journalist and historian Anne Applebaum, and university scholars Steven Levitsky and Kim Scheppele, have argued that a post-Trump America requires fundamental political reform to counter what they describe as a “fast slide into competitive authoritarianism,” whereby elections are maintained, however rigged they may be, and are accompanied by the erosion of democratic checks, institutional norms and a politically neutral civil service. Political writer and editor Josh Marshall has called for “a new civic contract” for post-Trump America; others have advocated a New Deal for the 21st century.

Trump’s authoritarian rampage exposed an existing imbalance in the American political system, and any attempt at reform must reverse not only his depredations but the gradual, decades-long accretion of presidential powers, whether legal, informal or usurped. In effect, what we now have is a presidential dictatorship, made worse by the willing or eager acquiescence of the Republican-controlled Congress. That means rebuilding the power of Congress, as advocates have urged. But there are significant practical problems even with doing that, let alone instituting a sweeping new civic contract.

For the last half-century, public approval of Congress has consistently been low; with the exception of a few spikes in approval, such as after 9/11, congressional approval ratings rarely rise above the teens. Does anyone think those numbers would increase substantially if the legislature were to enact controversial measures for fundamental reform, particularly when half the electorate has been preconditioned by decades of Fox News and right-wing radio to hate anything that resembles progressive change? That would likely activate the midterm phenomenon, whereby supporters of reform either become complacent or discouraged and stay home, while opponents of reform, along with low-information swing voters, troop to the polls as they did in 1994 and 2010.

Second, given the GOP’s electoral power in the less populous, usually gerrymandered states, along with the built-in constitutional advantage of the apportionment of U.S. senators (per capita, a voter in Wyoming has 67 times more Senate representation than a voter in California), Republicans will never be far from a majority in either house, and will have a near-permanent blocking minority in the Senate at least as long as that chamber’s current rules remain in effect.

Given the GOP’s electoral power in the less populous states, Republicans will never be far from a majority in either house, and will have a near-permanent blocking minority in the Senate as long as that chamber’s current rules remain in effect.

These constitutional, procedural and demographic roadblocks to getting an effective, reform-minded Congress on its feet would not be nearly so challenging if America had a normal center-right party that accepted the written and (often more important) unwritten rules of party behavior in a civic democracy.  But the GOP has become an authoritarian party along the lines of the United Russia Party, a mere parliamentary vehicle through which an absolute leader can rule under a façade of democracy. I recognized this trend in the Republican Party more than 15 years ago, which is why I left it; it does not seem likely to me that the GOP will “normalize” within the next 10 or 15 years. Trump is too entwined in the party’s DNA.

Beyond the need to strengthen Congress, there is a grave judicial crisis, including the ossified........

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