U.S. President Donald Trump and the Republican-controlled Congress have set off alarm bells ahead of the November midterm elections. In a recent podcast interview, the president told former deputy FBI director Dan Bongino that Republicans should nationalize voting by taking control of election administration in 15 states. Under the Constitution, elections are administered by state and local governments unless Congress enacts legislation to alter that arrangement. Even after White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt attempted to walk back the controversial comments, Trump refused to back down.
Nor was Trump’s interview an isolated episode. His remarks were part of a broader pattern. Election experts watched in shock as the FBI seized voting records from Georgia’s Fulton County, a focal point of repeated, unproven allegations of election fraud by Trump and his allies in 2020. The presence of Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, reportedly speaking on the phone to the president, heightened concerns about this being the early stages of an effort to subvert the midterm elections. All of this has compounded fears that federal immigration agents, who have already wreaked havoc in several cities, may be deployed around voting places in Democratic strongholds to deter turnout.
Congressional Republicans have been making moves as well. Since the Supreme Court’s Shelby County v. Holder decision in 2013 struck down a key provision of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, Republicans at both the national and state levels have pushed to impose new barriers to votingoften justified by disproven claims of widespread fraud. The House of Representatives recently passed the SAVE America Act, which would require stringent photo identification using documents not readily accessible to many citizens, such as passports or birth certificates, as well as prohibit universal mail-in voting, require states to submit voter rolls to the Department of Homeland Security, and mandate states to conduct aggressive purges from their voter rolls.
If any other recent president, Republican or Democrat, were in office, it would be easy to dismiss warnings about the midterm elections as overblown. With Trump, the dangerous legacy of Jan. 6 and the campaign to subvert the legitimate results of the 2020 election offer clear and compelling evidence that these warnings should be taken very seriously.
But focusing only on Trump and the modern GOP misses the larger story. The deeper reason for concern about the health of elections is that American democracy has always been fragile. While many commentators look overseas to explain how autocratic systems can quickly take hold, there is no need to look beyond the nation’s borders. Since the nation’s founding, the expansion of voting rights has been the result of a difficult and ongoing struggle, driven by disenfranchised citizens who mobilized to demand the right to participate in choosing who should hold power.
Just as important, and too often forgotten, periods of democratic growth in the United States have often been followed by periods of deep retrenchment. One of the most devastating reversals occurred after Reconstruction, the period in the 1860s and 1870s when a set of government policies aimed to provide freed Black Americans with political and economic power. Furious with the direction of race relations, white Democratic politicians in the Deep South responded by imposing a Jim Crow system that methodically stripped Black Americans of their newly acquired rights, lasting for decades into the 1960s. The history of Jim Crow is an urgent reminder: As strong as the nation’s democratic institutions and culture have been, when there are political actors intent on severely weakening these structures, the damage can be done.
Following the Civil War, the Republican Party led the nation through one of the most transformative periods for democratic suffrage in the country’s history. With the newly freed population in mind, congressional Republicans passed the 14th Amendment (ratified in 1868), which granted citizenship to everyone born or naturalized in the United States, and the 15th Amendment (ratified in 1870), which stipulated that the right to vote could not be denied by federal or state governments on the basis of “race, color, or previous condition of servitude.”
As the historian Eric Foner wrote in his landmark study, Reconstructionthese amendments, along with federal programs administered by the Freedmen’s Bureau, produced a proliferation of Black officeholders and a surge in Black political participation. Roughly half a million Black men registered.
“Like emancipation,” Foner wrote, “the passage of the Reconstruction Act inspired blacks with a millennial sense of living at the dawn of a new era.”
The progress did not last long, however. Reconstruction came to a tragic end. Across the South, white Democrats in the one-party region adopted new state constitutions that enacted restrictive laws and relied on violence, including through the Ku Klux Klan, to roll back the gains of the 1860s and 1870s. At the national level, Republican leaders retreated from Reconstruction, a withdrawal that culminated in the Compromise of 1877. Under the deal, Republican presidential nominee Rutherford B. Hayes accepted the removal of federal troops from the South and accelerated the end of the Reconstruction project in exchange for Democrats’ acceptance of his victory in the disputed election against Samuel Tilden.
In the decades that followed, Southern Democrats enacted what became known as Jim Crow laws, which disenfranchised the vast majority of the Black population. Registration requirements, literacy tests—in states that did not provide adequate education for nonwhite residents—and the discretionary power of local registrars made it virtually impossible for most Black Americans in states such as Mississippi to go to the courthouse and emerge as registered voters. Some registrars were not subtle, asking: “How many bubbles are in a bar of soap?”
The small numbers of Black Southerners who were allowed to register found that there were more barriers in front of them. Poll taxes, or fees imposed as a condition of voting, made participation prohibitively expensive for any Black sharecropper living in extreme poverty. Literacy tests further narrowed access at a time when many Black Southerners still had not learned to read. White primaries, which shut out Black Americans who had managed to register, were not outlawed by the Supreme Court until 1944, in Smith v. Allwright. Even after that decision, state Democratic officials devised new methods to suppress Black political participation.
Many prohibitive laws were put on the books. In Alabama, Black voters were required to explain specific portions of the U.S. Constitution to register, while in Mississippithey had to do the same with the state constitution. In South Carolinaprospective voters could avoid literacy tests only if they owned at least $300 in property. Registrars retained almost total discretion over who passed and who failed.
As a result of Jim Crow, Black voting plummeted. In Virginia, the number of registered voters fell to 15 percent by 1910, which was better than in Alabama and Mississippi, where the figure was less than 2 percent. In AlabamaBlack voter registration declined from 100,000 in 1900 to 3,742 in 1908. As late as the early 1960s, only 6.7 percent of eligible Black voters were registered to vote.
Jim Crow involved much more than disenfranchisement. The system consisted of an entire infrastructure of norms, rules, and laws that entrenched racial segregation and relegated Black Americans to secondary status. Black and white people could not go to school togetherthey could not eat together, and in some cases, they could not even play games together.
The Jim Crow system was brutal. Beyond discrimination laws, white residents, often acting in cooperation with law enforcement, used fear, intimidation, and outright violence to deter Black Americans from even going to the courthouse to attempt registration. After Maceo Snipes, a World War II veteran, voted in the 1946 Democratic primary, he stepped outside and was shot. Hostile white mobs often surrounded Black Southerners who walked into a courthouse to register. The cost of affiliating with organizations such as the NAACP, which pursued voting rights through legal means, could be death. On May 7, 1955, in Belzoni, Mississippi, the Rev. George Washington Lee, who had led the local NAACP chapter and championed voting rights from his pulpit, was shot and killed.
Overturning the Jim Crow system did not come easily, even as the nation’s attitudes about race began to liberalize. “All types of conniving methods are still being used to prevent Negroes from becoming registered voters,” Martin Luther King Jr. said in a 1957 speech. “The denial of this sacred right is a tragic betrayal of the highest mandates of our democratic tradition.”
It required a grassroots civil rights movement that organized and mobilized for several decades, combined with a Democratic Congress and awakened president, Lyndon B. Johnson, to finally dismantle Jim Crow through the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and, more decisively, the Voting Rights Act of 1965. “Today the Negro story and the American story fuse and blend,” Johnson told the nation upon signing the bill.
The historic victories of the 1960s are not as distant as they may seem. A Black American born in Georgia or Mississippi who is 70 years old today would have spent their childhood living under these conditions. Moreover, since the Supreme Court’s 2013 decision, Republican-led states have steadily expanded the number of voting restrictions that are on the books. Now, the court is considering a case that could deliver another major blow to Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which prohibits gerrymandered voting maps that result in racial discrimination.
As the celebrations marking the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence get underway, many Americans continue to see their nation as exceptional and immune to the kinds of antidemocratic forces that have shaped so much of the world.
But most historians see a different past. There is no need to look to Hungary or Russia to see the dangers; the evidence is within the nation’s own textbooks. Democracy has never come easily, and it can be taken away. Illiberalism, as the historian Steven Hahn has writtenhas also been part of the national culture since the founding. As a result, protecting democracy has required continual struggle. One does not even have to agree with scholars who argue that the new restrictions constitute “Jim Crow 2.0” to understand that the Jim Crow South stands as a painful and permanent reminder of how far backward the nation can quickly slide under the wrong hands.
Although substantial progress has been made in laws, regulations, and cultural understandings of democracy, the potential for democratic backsliding remains very real. When Trump issues threats, that history should motivate Americans across the political spectrum to push back and insist that, despite the divisions facing the nation, democracy itself must never again be up for debate.
