This essay is part of our American Cycle series. It is recommended that you also read “The American Cycle Part I (1776-1896)” and “The American Cycle Part II (1896-present)” to learn the basics of our theory of the American Cycle.

The Blue tsunami well and truly arrived last night, and the Democratic Party now will control the House and Senate with strong majorities in both.

When all the votes are counted in Mississippi and Alaska, the Democrats might have a 56 seat majority in the Senate and control nearly 260 seats in the House. Tuesday night saw many political firsts for America—first black female governor, first Muslim senator, first openly gay senator, first female Native American senator, first female Native American governor, first Latina governor in Texas history, first female governor in Ohio history—and as more data comes out regarding voting demographics, we’ll surely have even more firsts and will probably hear the phrase “first since Reconstruction” quite a bit.

If the Democrats seize this moment, we may look back on this historic night as the dawning of a new era. And by seize this moment, I don’t just mean holding Donald Trump accountable. I mean implementing a bold new vision for the United States: a vision on par with American Reconstruction from 1865 to 1877.

The dilemma that the Democrats face is that since Reconstruction’s collapse, American politicians have not had the boldness, courage, and ambition of Reconstruction. The boldness that this moment requires would also be another first since Reconstruction.

These midterm results have created a genuine opportunity to break the American Cycle, continue America’s second Reconstruction, and usher in what I like to call the Democracy to Come.

To adequately understand yesterday’s Blue tsunami and what the Democrats must do once they control Congress, and possibly the White House in two years, I need to explain the meaning of the Democracy to Come, and to do this, I must explain three facets of my theory: autoimmunity, the Other, and the future.

Autoimmunity & Destroying Democracy

The idea of the democracy to come was first coined by French philosopher Jacques Derrida in the 1990s. Most of Derrida’s philosophical career centered around his concept of deconstruction, but later in his life (he died in 2004), he turned his attention toward democracy and political instability. A big part of his analysis of democracies focused on the idea of autoimmunity.

In the human body, an autoimmune disorder occurs when the body misdiagnoses a healthy part as unhealthy, and then attacks the “unhealthy” part. An autoimmune disorder can result in a person’s body killing itself from within because it mistook something good as being something bad. Derrida theorized that a democracy, in a similar fashion to an autoimmune disorder, could devour itself from within.

In the 1990s, Derrida’s concept of the autoimmunity of democracies seemed counterintuitive and did not align with the political theories of the day that proclaimed the quasi-perfection of democratic societies and the inevitability of progress; but as time has passed, the accuracy of his diagnosis has become clearer.

For Derrida, the people of a democracy, the demos, will inevitably misdiagnose a part of their democracy. No person or group of people always make the right decisions, so at some point in the life of a democracy, the demos will make the mistake of trying to destroy the healthy parts of their democracy and society. This destructive regression is unavoidable and inevitable, and in American politics, Donald Trump has been our autoimmune disorder.

Trump feeds on the healthy parts of our democracy, and drags us closer and closer to authoritarianism, economic disaster, and societal collapse every day. The Republican Party’s complicity and empowerment of Trump has also made them part of the disorder. These midterm election results were thus a repudiation of the sickness and harm that Trump’s policies have caused the American people in the name of “making America great again.”

Destroying the Affordable Care Act was a fixation of his first presidency and, in his second, he made Robert F. Kennedy Jr. the Secretary of Health and Human Services. A key part of his political ambitions has been to literally make more Americans sicker and unhealthy.

Beyond the literal, physical sickness that he has fostered, Trump has also crippled the economy, launched a pointless war with Iran, attacked the Constitution, shattered environmental protections, destroyed the East Wing of the White House, and empowered ICE to lawlessly kidnap and imprison thousands of people residing in the United States. He has also normalized vulgarity and unabashed corruption.

And as he does all of this, he proclaims that he is making America great again.

MAGA and Trump are a misdiagnosis by the American people. In the name of greatness, Trump, the Republican Party, and his supporters have made America into a sicker and more diseased place to live as we attempt to destroy ourselves from the inside.

Tuesday’s Blue tsunami was an emphatic attempt to flush out the illness, cure our society of this disorder, and get healthy again.

The Other & Saving Democracy

Derrida could diagnose that democracies suffered from autoimmunity, but he struggled to figure out the cure.

Eventually, he concluded that the cure would arrive from the Other, but he could not describe the Other (which could be a person, many people, or something else) because if he could describe and predict the arrival of the Other, then it would no longer be an Other. If it was predictable it would just be the same as everything else.

Derrida’s work was also shaped by that of French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas who theorized that justice occurred through the face-to-face interaction with the Other. Levinas also could not predict or control the Other, but he could recognize it when he saw it, and through recognizing the humanity of the Other, justice would emerge.

As white European men, Derrida and Levinas could only wait for the Other’s arrival to prevent democratic collapse and bring forth the arrival of justice, but as a Black man in America, I have interpreted their work differently—and in a way that they never could—because my people’s existence in America has always been that of the Other.

As a person of color, Derrida’s dilemma—or what he would call “aporia,” meaning an insurmountable impasse—was not a dilemma at all. The arrival of the Other as an equal human being with dignity has always been the connective tissue and soul of my community as we have fought against the inequality, racism, oppression, and dehumanization that has defined American society and democracy since the birth of this nation.

My community’s purpose has always been to bring forth our—or the Other’s—arrival. We exist as America’s cure to the autoimmunity of our democracy. And in the United States, the white majority has repeatedly misdiagnosed equality as a poison and inequality—via race, class, ethnicity, religion, gender, sexual orientation—as a cure.

In 1851—only a year after the Fugitive Slave Act—American physician Samuel A. Cartwright coined the term “drapetomania” to describe the “mental disorder” that had been spreading upon America’s enslaved population that had suddenly caused them to try to escape enslavement. In Greek, drapetēs means “runaway slave” and mania means “madness.” According to Cartwright, white Americans could usher in civility’s return and cure Black Americans of their disease by more aggressively, but not too aggressively, beating the enslaved to suppress their yearning for freedom while preserving their ability to labor for the enslaver.

The freedom of the Other has long been described as a sickness and disease in America, but the arrival of the Other has also saved our democracy, and, I would say, also laid the foundation for authentic democracy in America during Reconstruction.

Reconstruction was the arrival of the Other as equal human beings with dignity under the law. The Fourteenth Amendment represented the first time that human equality became a part of the U.S. Constitution, and it created the foundation for equality to spread beyond the Black community and into other communities who existed as an Other in America.

With Tuesday’s Blue tsunami came this generation’s far more diverse coalition of the Other. Black voters turned out at levels that, I suspect, were on par with Barack Obama’s two elections, which is also on par with Black voter turnout during Reconstruction.

Latinos, however, turned out at unprecedented levels, too. Trump’s deployment of ICE agents to kidnap and destroy Latino families was akin to the slave catchers during the Fugitive Slave Act; unsurprisingly, Latinos and their desire to preserve their culture and live with dignity was described as a disease. This was drapetomania in its modern form.

Rampant dehumanization, demonization, and the branding of Latinos as “illegals” made it abundantly clear that, under Trump, Latinos are definitely an Other in his America.

The disease of Trump’s America made many American communities—women, LGBTQ, Muslims, and even the white working class and farmers in the Midwest— and not just Black Americans and Latinos feel like the Other.

On Tuesday, the Other showed up in unprecedented numbers to save our democracy, but saving our democracy is not enough. If we don’t seize this opportunity to defeat autoimmunity altogether, we could just make another misdiagnosis in 2028 and resume the devouring of our democracy from within.

Going forward, the Democrats must courageously create a sustainable, nurturing, and equitable democracy akin to the boldness of Reconstruction and the spirit of Obama’s presidency. This is how we will continue America’s second Reconstruction and create the Democracy to Come.

“The Future to Come”

In Derrida’s concept of the Democracy to Come, the Other’s arrival was unpredictable and unplanned, and this made him think profoundly about the future – what it could bring and our relationship to it. And to express this new relationship, Derrida coined the term l’à venir meaning “the future to come.”

In French, the words le futur and l’avenir both mean “the future,” but Derrida considered both of them to describe the planned, predictable, and inauthentic future. They were the future of calendars and day planners. We need this form of the future to help make sense of our world, but the real, authentic future exists beyond our calendars and day planners.

Derrida coined this word so that it sounds like l’avenir because it is hard to predict that the same sound could create two different words. In French, the verb venir means “to come,” so the combination of l’avenir and venir creates “the future to come.”

The real, authentic future is unpredictable. This future is l’à venir or “the future to come,” and the unpredictable arrival of the Other also creates the future to come. When their arrival saves a democracy from its autoimmunity, it also creates the democracy to come.

Derrida’s framework was entirely theoretical, but it has repeatedly manifested in the United States.

Reconstruction was a future that America’s founding fathers never would have predicted. Few Americans in the 1850s would have foreseen that the upstart Republican Party, which was founded in 1854 on a platform of stopping the expansion of slavery into the northern states, would have won the 1860 presidential election and then won the Civil War. It would have been inconceivable to believe that that party would also ratify the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments by 1870.

Reconstruction was America’s unpredictable, unplanned future, and it saved our democracy.

Similarly, the presidency of Barack Obama—132 years after the collapse of Reconstruction—was also unpredictable and unplanned. In 2008, many Americans still wondered if the United States was ready for a Black president, and America’s predictable, planned, and progressive trajectory indicated that Hillary Clinton would win the Democratic nomination and eventually the presidency.

I still vividly remember a conversation that I had with my grandfather in 2008, and he explained to me why he was supporting Clinton and not Obama. My grandfather told me that he had already seen white people take away so much from Black people that he could not imagine that they would allow for a Black person to become president. He loved Obama and what he represented, but he could not support him because he feared that if Obama rose too high, white America would take him away from us. Medgar, Malcolm, and Martin had all been taken away in his lifetime. He supported Clinton not because he liked her more, but because she was the predictable future that he believed America would allow to occur.

When Obama won on election night, my grandfather thought that a miracle had occurred. The impossible had now become reality. The real, authentic future had arrived. Within my framework of the Democracy to Come and the American Cycle, Obama’s presidency started America’s second Reconstruction.

Yet Obama’s arrival and the beginning of America’s second Reconstruction creates a paradox: how can the unpredictable arrival of the Other also fall within a predictable American Cycle?

The predictable unpredictability of the Other’s arrival in America derives from what is professed to be normal in the United States, and the now-unspoken belief that the Other can be controlled and “kept in their place.” America’s founding fathers created a nation with legalized chattel slavery that was intended to enslave African people in perpetuity. For most Americans, the United States’ expected norm since the nation’s inception was the perpetual oppression and exploitation of the Other, so even though the Other’s arrival may be predictable, it will always come as a surprise until we have a new normal.

America’s first Reconstruction was the future to come and the democracy to come and it created a new normal—which racist Americans worked to destroy—and the unpredictability of Tuesday’s Blue tsunami that resulted in countless firsts and the elevation of unplanned politicians whose rise has shocked the Democratic establishment amounts to another future to come and democracy to come.

We now have the chance to create a new normal, yet we need to look to the past to plan our future.

Reconstructionism & Back to the Future

The bludgeoning that the Republican Party took on Tuesday amounts to an unprecedented defeat whose closest parallel may be the post-Civil War Congress, when Republicans refused to seat the treasonous Confederates who brazenly attempted to return to Congress and act as though nothing had changed.

The progress of Reconstruction did not occur because of bipartisanship, but because a political party that valued equality, improving people’s quality of life, and preserving our democracy no longer had to compromise with an opposition party that wanted to violently shatter their principles.

Going forward, the Democrats need to have a boldness of agenda and vision that has been unprecedented since Reconstruction. The Democrats must ride the wave of the Blue tsunami and pursue their agenda as if the Republican Party has become nearly irrelevant. This is the scale of the political devastation that occurred on Tuesday.

Most significantly, the Democrats cannot focus on trying to find common ground with Republicans and building bipartisan support.

During Reconstruction, Republican President Andrew Johnson opposed the bold agenda of his Republican colleagues and attempted to find common ground with the weakened Democrats. To curry favor with the Democrats, he pardoned every Confederate soldier and not even Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederacy, was convicted of treason.

Johnson’s amnesty of Confederate soldiers allowed them to form white supremacist militias such as the Ku Klux Klan and it empowered an essentially powerless Democratic Party. By 1877, the Democratic Party had ended Reconstruction and reclaimed control of the South.

Johnson was eventually impeached by his own party and is regarded as one of America’s worst presidents.

Today’s Democrats cannot afford to be the modern-day Andrew Johnson of our second Reconstruction. Instead they must have the boldness of Radical Republican Reconstructionists such as John Bingham, Thaddeus Stevens, Charles Sumner, Hiram Revels, Robert Smalls, and P.B.S. Pinchback.

This is what the moment calls for. This is what the Democracy to Come looks like.

Following Tuesday’s results, the Democrats now control enough state legislatures and governorships to pass the National Voter Compact and effectively abolish the Electoral College. This is something that the Democrats must do. Republican politicians discussed abolishing the Electoral College during Reconstruction, and if Reconstruction lasted more than twelve years, it is entirely possible that the Electoral College would have been abolished more than a century ago.

This is what thinking like a Reconstructionist looks like.

The absence of an opposition party during Reconstruction made it possible to amend the constitution three times in five years, so amending the U.S. Constitution and also state constitutions should become part of the Democrats’ agenda. My colleague Michael Pates and I have already drafted a proposed Twenty-Eight Amendment that continues the spirit of the Fourteenth Amendment. Our hope is that one day an iteration of our large, comprehensive amendment (over 1,600 words and nearly four times the length of the Fourteenth Amendment) becomes part of the U.S. Constitution, but we also hope that it inspires laws, policies, and amendments to state constitutions.

Reconstruction created the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments, but it also created new constitutions for all of the defeated Confederate states.

The boldness and vision that the present moment and the future to come requires can be found by learning about, and drawing inspiration from, Reconstruction: America’s long forgotten and ridiculed past that also happens to have built the foundation for our true, authentic, and unprecedented democracy.

We are in the Democracy to Come, and knowing our past can help guide our future.

Phase 2 of the American Cycle has always been far more controversial than Phase 1.

The American Cycle from 1776 to 1896 is pretty obvious and not controversial. It is clear that America had a Founding era created by our founding fathers that legalized slavery then had an abolitionist movement that prevailed and abolished slavery. Reconstruction followed the abolitionist movement and then following Reconstruction’s end in 1877 much of the progress of Reconstruction was erased in the last two decades of the 19th century. Almost no one disputes these facts, but many people have been very prone to disputing the idea that this regressive pattern has repeated itself.

Most people want to dispute the legitimacy of the American Cycle because it counters the progressive narrative that we have been taught to believe. The American Cycle does not proclaim that the moral arc of the universe bends towards justice and that progress is inevitable. In fact, it proclaims that the arc of the United States bends towards injustice and that regression is America’s most likely outcome. This can be a hard pill to swallow, and ever since I first wrote about the American Cycle in my book The Crime Without a Name: Ethnocide and the Erasure of Culture in America I have had countless people challenge me on the legitimacy of my theory.

Many people disagreed with me (and I address their arguments in this essay), but I have been most fascinated by those who have agreed with me but wanted me to be wrong. The American story that I had to tell was not a story that they wanted to be true. Intellectually, they agreed with me, but emotionally they could not. However, Donald Trump’s second presidency has changed many people’s emotional response to the American Cycle. Trump’s return has proven that the regression that I predicted was, in fact, possible and now people have become more interested in breaking the American Cycle than denying its existence.

Prior to 2024, most people challenged the legitimacy of the American Cycle via challenging if each new stage mirrored the previous one, and much of my energy was spent listening to and responding these concerns. This essay addresses these critiques.

However, the biggest challenge has always been people’s belief that Reconstruction was a “failure.” Trying to save America’s democracy by embracing the ideas and philosophy of a “failed” era did not compute to many people.

Reconstruction was allegedly a “failure” because it was too short or did not accomplish enough, and many people argued Reconstruction’s “failure” meant that we should focus more attention on the successes of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s and 1970s. This response was perplexing because many of the successes of the Civil Rights Movement were obvious extensions of Reconstruction. How could the era that created civil rights, expanded voting rights to Black men, and established equal protection under the law for all Americans be a failure, but the era that used these precedents 100 years later to create the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Voting Rights Act of 1965, and invoked the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment in Loving v. Virginia and Roe v. Wade be a success?

This objection initially confused me, but it also reminded me that most Americans have been taught very little about Reconstruction, and that for the most part, we have been taught that it was a failure. This argument echoed the narrative of the Dunning School of the early 20th century that argued that Reconstruction failed because of Republican corruption and Black incompetence. For well over a century, Reconstruction has been depicted as a failure or minor footnote in American history, so I understood this perspective. However, I also knew that Americans had been taught a false narrative, so in order for people to see the American Cycle I had to become even more of a historian of Reconstruction so that I could educate people about America’s authentic history.

Yet despite my attempts to educate people about Reconstruction, prior to 2024, most people still remained reluctant to emotionally accept the narrative of American Cycle. Over the last year and a half, I have noticed a significant shift in people’s receptivity to my work and this theory.

With each passing year, the accuracy of the American Cycle has continued to increase, and it now should be obvious to everyone who cares about America’s democracy that we cannot afford to allow the Cycle to enter into a third phase and create a third Found era, or a second Jim Crow.

Once we accept the legitimacy of the American Cycle, we should also understand the urgency of breaking the Cycle and continuing Reconstruction. Reconstructionism and becoming a Reconstructionist consist of saving our democracy and breaking the American Cycle.

Jim Crow: America’s Second Founding 1896 - 1954 (Phase 2)

Jim Crow segregation is merely a 20th century attempt at recreating the chattel slavery of America’s first Founding era. America had created another racial caste system, and ethnocide was again the basis for the division. The role of ethnocide becomes more visible during Jim Crow so it is important to take a moment to examine ethnocide a bit further.

In 1945, Polish Jewish refugee to the United States Raphael Lemkin coined the term “genocide” to describe the atrocity being inflicted upon Jewish people by the Nazis during World War II, but he also coined “ethnocide” at the same time. For Lemkin, Jewish people were a “genos” or “people,” but they were also an “ethnos,” or “nation” or “culture.” Lemkin intended for the words to be used interchangeably, but what ended up happening was that the cultural destruction of ethnocide was subsumed into genocide. Essentially, when a society attempts to destroy or forcefully remove a people, the destruction of their culture is also part of the destruction. If you destroy a people their culture will also die with them.

Around the 1970s various anthropologists started thinking about ethnocide as independent from genocide, and as a result, ethnocide evolved into the destruction of a people’s culture while keeping the people. In my book The Crime Without a Name: Ethnocide and the Erasure of Culture in America I use ethnocide to describe the transatlantic slave trade and explain how American society was built around the normalization of ethnocide.

With ethnocide, the goal is not to live in the absence of a specific group of people. If the goal was to remove or eliminate a specific group of people that would be genocide. Genocide is an accurate term for the Black experience in the Americas because if European colonizers wanted to create a society in the Americas without African people, they would not have created the transatlantic slave trade.

With ethnocide, the goal is for the specific group of people to remain in the society, but to exist as a de-cultured mass of people that can be used and exploited by the dominant group in the society, yet to understand the pervasive and destructive impact of ethnocide—especially in relation to Jim Crow—one must have a clear understanding of what “culture” means.

Culture is often thought of as a vague and amorphous concept that all people have, but is hard to describe; when in fact, “culture” is very easy to define. Culture is simply the things that people in a shared environment create so that they can survive for as long as possible. Our language, clothes, houses, buildings, food, art, laws, freedom of movement, etc. are all examples of our cultural expression. The shared spirit of the people is also part of their culture. When examining Jim Crow, it becomes clear that white Americans constantly exerted their power to undermine Black Americans’ capacity to develop their own culture and/or create a shared culture with white Americans.

Ethnocide exists to destroy this collective culture and replace it with an unstable “culture” of division and oppression.

As Black people fought, and continue to fight, to preserve their African culture or make new culture in America, the dominant white population will attempt to destroy that culture and maintain racial inequality. Black towns will get destroy, the carceral state will destabilize Black families, low wages and a lack of government support will create housing, food, and educate insecurities, and poll taxes, literacy exams and other voter suppression methods will ensure that Black people will have little to no power or influence in America’s democracy.

This is Jim Crow segregation and it is also ethnocide. Ethnocide was the method for fueling the sustained division and inequality of Jim Crow that ensured that white Americans had the authority to destroy and undermine the culture and lives of Black Americans.

The 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre is a great example of the ethnocidal destruction of Jim Crow. In the Greenwood neighborhood of Tulsa, Oklahoma, Black Americans had made a prosperous town whose prosperity earned it the moniker of “Black Wall Street.” For the white residents of Tulsa, the problem did not reside with the existence of Greenwood. The existence of an adjacent Black community was not the problem: in fact, it was the goal. The problem arose because Greenwood had become so prosperous that white Americans may no longer be able to control the lives of the Black residents. The potential for equality was the problem. The existence of a self-sustaining and nurturing Black culture was the problem. For the racist, white residents of Tulsa, the solution was to destroy the town of Greenwood: to destroy the culture that the Black residents of Greenwood had built.

From May 31 to June 1, 1921 (only two days), the white residents of Tulsa destroyed 35 blocks of Greenwood, sent over 800 people to the hospital, and killed more than 300 people. Prior to this act of white terrorism, Greenwood was a thriving community with over 10,000 residents. Roughly 9,000 people survived, but the culture of Greenwood had been destroyed.

More than a decade later and a continent away, Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Party on November 9-10 engaged in a similar terrorist attack against German Jews that became known as Kristallnacht or “the Night of Broken Glass” when they systematically attacked Jewish culture by destroying Jewish business and synagogues across the Germany, Austria, and the Sudetenland. Nearly 100 people died during Kristallnacht and roughly 30,000 Jewish men were rounded up and sent to concentration camps.

In the genocide of Nazi Germany, the survivors of the terrorist attack were sent to concentration camps, but in the ethnocide of Jim Crow America, the survivors were instructed to “know their place” and to live in a state of perpetual fear if they ever attempted to live equally with white Americans. The culture was destroyed but the people remained. This is the same underlying dynamic of chattel slavery and America’s first Founding era.

Greenwood was not the only culturally destroying race riot in America during Jim Crow, and similar race riots occurred across America. Prior to destroying entire neighborhoods, segregation, which shaped every facet of Black life, aspired to keep Black people in the “place” where white Americans wanted them to be. Any attempts at challenging this caste structure and attempting equality was met with violence. The Ku Klux Klan (which was outlawed in the 1870s during Reconstruction) came back and their terrorism became a normalized facet of American life and lynchings became commonplace across the South.

The racial terror of the American South meant that six million Black Americans fled the South during the Great Migration that lasted the duration of Jim Crow. Every decade a million Black Americans left the South and sought sanctuary in other parts of America. The Great Migration is another manifestation of the Underground Railroad. It is an act of Black abolition that precedes the commencement of the Abolition Era.

As a result of the normalized cultural erasure of Jim Crow, the narrative of the first half of the 20th century is often depicted as if Black Americans are secondary or have been removed from the narrative, when in fact, the defining feature of this era was the destruction of the equality of Reconstruction and a return to racial inequality and a facade of democracy. The story that Americans are often told of America’s Second Founding era consists of talking about the Progressive era, the Roaring Twenties, the Great Depression, World Wars I and II, the New Deal, and the nuclear family, but Jim Crow segregation, or apartheid, directly influenced all of these eras. (“Apartheid” means “separateness” or “apartness” in Afrikaans, so it is also synonymous with “segregation.”) Segregation and Jim Crow was not a secondary factor of this era, but the defining factor of the era.

At a bare minimum, it must also be acknowledged that this era was defined by America’s two political parties having little to no interest in racial equality, and the Democrat Party having a disproportionate degree of influence in American politics due to their capacity to suppress the Black vote. Due to the abolition of slavery and the creation of Black male suffrage during Reconstruction, Black Americans were no longer considered to be three-fifths of a person for congressional apportionment and electoral college delegates. Black Americans counted as full-persons or “five-fifths” during Jim Crow, but the prevalence of poll taxes, literacy exams, felon disenfranchisement policies, and the threat of white terrorist violence meant that the vast majority of Black Americans did not vote. As a result, Southern Democrats actually gained political influence–from three- to five-fifths–due to their ability to suppress the Black vote.

From 1896 to the start of the Civil Rights Movement in 1955, America’s political parties were united in their commitment towards racial inequality in America, so it is absurd to champion the ideals of this era as a means for cultivating equality in a multiracial democracy. Any semblance of cultural stability, progress, or togetherness that emerged from this era is a direct result of the political commitment from both political parties to sustain racial inequality and apartheid in America.

The demise of Jim Crow mirrors the demise of America’s first Founding era because this era exists in perpetual tension between the Americans who champion equality and authentic democracy and those who champion inequality and inauthentic democracy. This tension will inevitably result in a second Abolition era that centers on abolishing Jim Crow and starts with the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s.

America’s Second Abolition 1955 - 2009 (Phase 2)

America’s second Abolition Era began in 1954 with the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education that overturned Plessy v. Ferguson and “separate but equal” by stating that separate facilities are inherently unequal, and it continued until the presidency of Barack Obama in 2009. What was unconstitutional in 1873 in Railroad Company v. Brown was again unconstitutional nearly 80 years later, yet it still took more than 50 years to abolish the myriad of segregationist policies created during Jim Crow.

The reason why the second Abolition lasted more than 50 years is due to the fact that Reconstruction made it unconstitutional to explicitly use race as a justification for division and inequality, so unlike the first Abolition era, which could focus explicitly on slavery, the second had to tackle countless facets of Jim Crow that used race neutral language to create racist outcomes. America’s second wave of abolitionists had to wait for the racist outcomes, and this will extend the window of abolitionism. America’s second Abolition will last just as long as Jim Crow.

Also, some historians refer to the Civil Rights Movement from the 1950s to the 1970s as a Second Reconstruction, but the American Cycle framework classifies it as part of the second Abolition era because the intent of this era was the abolition of Jim Crow. However, the existence of Reconstruction can complicate this distinction because abolishing Jim Crow will eventually result in the return of Reconstruction, and you can see facets of Reconstruction’s return during this era: including the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Unlike America’s first era of Abolition, the second had a previous era that they wanted to bring back through abolition. The fight to abolish slavery in the 1840s and 1850s did not aspire to rekindle the spirit of a previous era of American life without slavery because that era had never existed. The first Abolition era was abolition without any return and then once abolition prevailed the abolitionist could become Reconstructionists and implement Reconstruction. In America’s second Abolition era, once aspects of Jim Crow were abolished components of Reconstruction had the opportunity to return, but America’s second Reconstruction will still occur after the abolition of Jim Crow. The agenda of desegregation linguistically speaks to the goal of abolishing Jim Crow segregation.

During America’s second Abolition era, America experienced many iterations of Black empowerment with the goal of abolishing Jim Crow, albeit with various and often competing methodologies. Martin Luther King Jr.’s philosophy of nonviolence coexisted alongside the Nation of Islam, Malcolm X, the Black Panthers, the Black nationalism of Marcus Garvey, and the legal strategies of Thurgood Marshall. And as in the first Abolition, the second also had a tipping point moment when prominent white Americans joined the cause for abolition. In the 1960s, President John F. Kennedy’s support for civil rights and collaboration with Black civil rights leaders helped create a multiracial Civil Rights Movement in America that included white Americans, too. JFK’s allyship was akin to John Quincy Adams representing the Mende Africans aboard the Amistad in the Supreme Court. JFK’s support for civil rights extended to his vice president and successor Lyndon B. Johnson, and his brother Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy.

Additionally, JFK’s support of civil rights radically changed American politics because neither the Democrat nor Republican parties could continue as two parties who supported the status quo of American racial apartheid. The Democrat Party of JFK decided to embrace civil rights, and as a result, Black voters, who had remained loyal to the Republican Party since Reconstruction, switched their political allegiance to the Democrats. There is an irony in this shift because in the late 1800s, the Democrats proclaimed themselves to be the party of the people, but they explicitly meant white people and they advanced their agenda of “separate but equal” in defense of the racist white people they were committed to defending. In the 1960s, JFK and the rest of the Democrat Party decided that “people” meant all people regardless of race or religion. As a result of welcoming Black Americans into the Democrat Party, the racist white members decided to leave the party.

The Republican Party, which could have also chosen to embrace civil rights, went in the opposite direction and decided to embrace the racist members of the Democrat Party–most of whom were from the South. These Democrats called themselves Dixiecrats because they embraced the racist ideals of Jim Crow and the Confederacy. There is also an irony around this political shift because following Reconstruction’s collapse, the Republican Party had become more concerned with business and industry than with racial equality, and one of the primary reasons they became less concerned with racial equality in the 1880s was because they wanted to expand northern industries into the South. Starting in the 1880s, the Republican Party became the party of business elites who openly wanted to collaborate and do business with racist Southerners, and this political identity held firm throughout Jim Crow. When the racist members of the Democrat Party were no longer welcomed within their own party, the GOP welcomed them into the fold.

Essentially, not only was the remaking of America’s political parties in the 1960s based around race and civil rights, but the identities of the Democrat and Republican parties that influenced the shift were forged in the aftermath of Reconstruction when both parties shunned racial equality and had to rebrand themselves. America’s first Abolition resulted in the collapse of the Whig Party and the birth of the Republican Party, and America’s second Abolition completely inverted the identities of America’s two parties. In the 1960s, the Republicans defended the ideals of the South, and the Democrats championed civil rights and racial equality. In the 1860s, it was the inverse.

Additionally, as Jim Crow segregation was being abolished piece by piece, American courts started invoking the principles of the Reconstruction Amendments as a means for championing civil rights. The Supreme Court invoked the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment in both in Loving v. Virginia in 1967 that legalized interracial marriage and in Roe v. Wade in 1973 that legalized abortion.

However, as Democrats and civil rights leaders worked to dismantle and abolish Jim Crow, Republicans and segregationists fought to keep it alive and their methods included one of the primary features of Phases 1 and 2 of the Founding era, the founding of America and Jim Crow: race neutral language and obfuscated intent.

The defenders of Jim Crow married their race neutral language that would serve as the bedrock of various policies, legislation, and legal theories with a resurgence of race-based terrorism. To name a few, civil rights leaders Martin Luther King Jr. and Medgar Evars were both assassinated by white supremacists, and countless other civil rights advocates were beaten, terrorized, and murdered across the nation.

Since the collapse of Reconstruction in 1877 and into Jim Crow, the United States had normalized a discourse that at face value sounded race neutral, yet existed to fuel racial division. The prevalence of a dishonest language creates a beguiling problem because one can never be sure if people are aware of the underlying division at the heart of their words. This linguistic dishonesty further complicates the task of abolitionists because the destruction of a Jim Crow era policy will then get replaced by a new policy that was created to sustain racial division but does not include racist language.

For example, during Jim Crow most white children in the South attended segregated public schools and the Southern states invested more money into the white schools than the Black schools. When school desegregation was being enforced across the South, many white families took their children out of public schools and enrolled them in private schools, and then Southern states created various policies such as tax breaks and vouchers so that white families could afford to send their children to private schools. These policies would often coincide with a reduction in funding for public schools. These policies were not explicitly racist in their language, but they were created to help sustain a segregated society. Additionally, attending one of these private schools does not make someone a racist, but this is an example of the dilemma that occurs when language is intentionally dishonest. Americans can have no racist intent or be unaware of the racist history, yet actively engage in racist institutions because the language of racial division has been erased yet the intent can still remain.

Similarly, in the late 1970s, Republican lawyers developed the legal doctrine of originalism that states that the U.S. Constitution should be interpreted according to the intent of the Founding Fathers, and they developed this doctrine to counter the progressivism of the Supreme Court and their application of the Reconstruction Amendments that resulted in Loving v. Virginia and Roe v. Wade. The premise of this doctrine is that the ideals of the Founding era, both the first and the second, should guide our interpretation of the Constitution. It is a doctrine committed to countering abolition and dismantling Reconstruction.

In the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s, the fight to abolish the vestiges of Jim Crow continued: Education, housing, policing, incarceration, and voter enfranchisement remained vital issues in the continued struggle for civil rights and equality. As the struggle to dismantle Jim Crow continued, so did the voices of Black Americans because each demand for equality equated to a micro-abolition of Jim Crow. During these decades, the influence of Black voters continued to grow in American politics, and became increasingly significant in the politics of the Democrat Party. It is not a coincidence that after JFK, the Democrats only won the presidency during this era when their candidate hailed from the South. The growing influence of Black voters in the South empowered Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton to win enough states in the South to win the presidency.

America’s second Reconstruction began when the influence of Black voters empowered America to elect its first Black president.

Obama’s Presidency: America’s Second Reconstruction 2009 - 2017 (Phase 2)

The election of America’s first Black president represents the beginning of America’s second Reconstruction, and demonstrates an obvious continuation of Reconstruction. However, the biggest distinction between America’s first and second Reconstructions is that the second lacked a clearly stated Reconstructionist policy and political agenda. In the 1860s and 1870s, America knew that they were engaging in Reconstruction, and the Republican Party actively created laws, policies, government departments, and constitutional amendments to further the agenda of reconstructing America. But during Obama’s presidency, Americans were unaware of the fact that they were in a second Reconstruction and the Democrats did not have an agenda of reconstructing America. America’s second Reconstruction consisted of the spirit and vibes of Reconstruction, but not the language and policy.

During America’s first Reconstruction, Black Americans were elected to the House of Representatives and the Senate, and held elected positions in state legislatures across the South. In fact, Louisiana actually had two Black governors during Reconstruction in Oscar Dunn and P.B.S. Pinchback, so if Reconstruction was allowed to continue after 1877 it should be obvious that a Black president would have occurred much sooner than 2009–132 years after Reconstruction’s collapse. Reconstruction only lasted twelve years (1865 to 1877), and if Reconstruction continued through 1896 – when the Supreme Court decided on Plessy v. Ferguson and “separate but equal” – it is not farfetched to imagine that the United States might have instead elected its first Black president by this time. (In comparison, Mexico elected their first Black president, Vicente Guerrero, in 1829 and abolished slavery that same year.)

America’s second Abolition era had abolished enough of Jim Crow to allow for the return of many of the lost rights and privileges of Reconstruction, and the election of a Black president represented the continuation of Reconstruction from where it left off in 1877.

Also, in hindsight, Obama’s presidency is often depicted as part of America’s natural progression toward equality and justice, but it is important to recognize that Obama’s success, at the time, was neither considered inevitable nor expected. Heading into the presidential primaries in 2008, Hillary Clinton and not Obama was expected to win the Democrat Party’s nomination. Obama was the outsider, upstart candidate who challenged the political establishment. At the time, many Americans, regardless of political affiliation, expressed skepticism about America being “ready” for a Black president. America’s second Reconstruction, like the first, was considered to be highly improbable, if not impossible, until it happened and then it became the new normal. Few Americans in the 1850s could have imagined that by 1865 (only eight years after the Dred Scott decision in 1857) that slavery would be abolished throughout the United States. In each epoch, Reconstruction was never viewed as inevitable.

When Obama won, his victory was largely contingent on being able to win the support of Black voters to a degree that had been unprecedented since Reconstruction. Obama not only won 95 percent of the Black vote, but Black voters also voted at a percentage that had been unprecedented since Reconstruction. Obama also lost the white vote by 12 points (John McCain won 55 percent and Obama won 43 percent), and this indicated that Democrats could still win the White House without needing too much of the white vote. This was a radical change on par with Reconstruction when the Fifteenth Amendment threatened to give the Republican Party an unassailable majority in the South due to the influence of Black voters.

Obama’s coalition of voters was unique to his presidency and was far from a replica or natural extension of the demographic breakdown that secured presidential victories for Bill Clinton in 1992 and 1996, and Jimmy Carter in 1976. Obama’s unique coalition of voters helped him win the presidency again in 2012, yet since then the Democrat Party has struggled to replicate Obama’s coalition with other candidates. The simple, yet incorrect, conclusion for this dilemma is that Obama is a uniquely gifted politician and it is impossible to replicate his appeal, but the better analysis centers on Reconstruction. A Black president embodied the spirit of Reconstruction and multiracial democracy, and a majority of Americans felt empowered by these ideals. The Democrats cannot recreate Obama and they have never articulated an agenda that focuses on Reconstruction (as of yet), and as a result, Obama’s absence means that both the spirit of Reconstruction and a multiracial electorate that can win the presidency also disappear.

Despite the absence of a clearly stated Reconstructionist policy agenda, Obama’s two signature accomplishments are an obvious continuation of the principles of Reconstruction.

The Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, was akin to the birthright citizenship provision in the Fourteenth Amendment, in that it expanded the meaning of what it means to be an American. Despite not being as far reaching in scope nor granting citizenship to the children of undocumented immigrants, it still granted legal status for this community and allowed them to live freely within the United States.

The Affordable Care Act was also in the spirit of Reconstruction in that it expanded the role of the federal government to help ensure that all Americans could obtain health insurance. Prior to Reconstruction, these concerns were the domain of the states, but the creation of the Freedmen’s Bureau, the Department of Justice, and the Department of Education during Reconstruction radically altered the roles and responsibilities of the federal government. The Freedmen’s Bureau was the precursor to Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal in the 1930s, but the Freedmen’s Bureau’s emphasis on providing housing, education, and employment for the formerly enslaved meant that the federal government was reluctant to adequately fund it. In 1866, President Andrew Johnson even vetoed the bill to continue its funding and accused the Freedmen’s Bureau of being racist against white Americans and unconstitutional because it encroached on state’s rights.

Obama’s signature accomplishments echoed the spirit of Reconstruction, and unsurprisingly, so did the opposition from the Republican Party.

An often overlooked component of the progress of Reconstruction centers on the fact that for Reconstruction’s first eight years, the Republican Party effectively had no opposition party challenging their agenda. Following the Civil War, the Democrat Party still existed, but the federal government had not yet decided on what to do with the former Confederate states. Allowing the Confederate states to rejoin the Union in 1865 was not a viable option, but following their defeat in the Civil War, many Confederate leaders who had held elected offices prior to the war did attempt to reclaim their previous seats. Vice President of the Confederacy Alexander Stephens was a member of the House of Representatives from Georgia prior to the Civil War, and after the war he did return to Washington, D.C. and attempt to reclaim his previous seat. Upon arriving in Washington, D.C., it became clear that Stephens and his fellow Confederates had not changed their views on slavery and instead planned to bring the fight over slavery from the battlefield to the halls of Congress. In response, the Republicans refused to seat the former Confederates and delayed the readmission of the Confederate states back into the Union.

Republican President Andrew Johnson provided the strongest impediment to the Republican Party’s Reconstruction agenda, and he was impeached by his own party.

Eventually, the Southern states were allowed to rejoin the Union in 1868 after they had ratified the 14th Amendment, but the Republican Party still dominated the national elections in 1868. It was not until the elections of 1872 that the Democrats began to reclaim a political foothold in the South.

During Obama’s presidency, the Democrat Party had an opposition party and the obstinance of the Republican Party echoed that of the latter stages of Reconstruction. In the absence of a Republican Party, it is entirely possible that the Democrats would have created a much bolder and more ambitious agenda that mirrored the progress of Reconstruction’s first eight years.

Additionally, the rhetoric of the Republican Party during Obama’s presidency mirrored that of the Redeemer Democrats who opposed Reconstruction. The Tea Party movement and the challenging of Obama’s citizenship were efforts to delegitimize Black Americans and also harken back to a previous era of American life that was absent of the influence of Black Americans and supposedly represented America’s true ideals. Eventually, through the candidacy and eventual presidency of Donald Trump the rhetoric and agenda of the Republican Party–both the mainstream and the fringe–became “Make America Great Again” or MAGA, and this rhetoric is the same as the Redeemers except that it speaks to a national, and not a regional, “redemption.” During Trump’s campaign, he referred to Mexicans as rapists and one of his campaign pledges was to build a wall along the southern border. Trump’s rhetoric–starting with challenging Obama’s citizenship to the demonization of Mexicans–aspired to delegitimize non-white Americans, and this is the same playbook as the Redeemers from Reconstruction.

As MAGA grew and Trump’s campaign continued to grow in 2015 and 2016, Trump started gaining the support of white supremacist and paramilitary groups including the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers. The uniting of MAGA with white, or predominantly white, militias also mirrors the partnership between Southern Democrats and white supremacist militias during Reconstruction.

Without explicitly invoking Reconstruction, both the Democrats and Republicans structured themselves after this era. Unbeknownst to both parties and the American public, 2009 to 2017 mirrored much of 1865 to 1877, and as in 1877, America’s second Reconstruction was ended by a resurgent MAGA/Redeemer movement. Except in 2017, MAGA occupied the White House and not just the South.

Lastly, it is also important to note that during the election of 1876, it was unclear who won the popular vote between Rutherford B. Hayes and Samuel Tilden. The contested elections in the South made it impossible to produce an accurate count. The winner was determined by the Republicans and Democrats making a deal and agreeing to award Hayes the necessary electoral votes from the South to win the presidency, so long as he removed federal troops from the South. In 2016, Trump did not win the popular vote when he defeated Hillary Clinton, but he did win the Electoral College, which remains a vestige of America’s first Founding era and has always given the South a disproportionate amount of influence in determining the presidency.

Trump’s First Presidency: America’s Second Regression (Phase 2)

Trump’s first presidency started America’s second Regression when we recommenced the process of moving away from multiracial democracy, and towards a more racially divided society.

Trump’s Muslim ban, promise to build a wall between Mexico and the United States, and referring to African nations as “shithole” countries all spoke to the racial division he aspired to create as part of his vision of Making America Great Again.

Trump’s rhetoric also emboldened white supremacists across the nation, and the Unite the Right march in Charlottesville, Virginia in August of 2017 highlighted the growing division and white supremacist agenda that Trump had emboldened. At the rally, white supremacists waved Confederate flags, wore Nazi paraphernalia, and chanted “the Jews will not replace us” as they marched through Charlottesville. The impetus for the rally was to protest the removal of a statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee that had been erected in 1924. This rally in Charlottesville was also a perfect crystallization of the regressive nature of the American Cycle.

During Obama’s presidency, as Black voices became more prominent, the call to remove statues and monuments that celebrated the Confederacy spread across the nation. Americans understood that it was illogical to celebrate racist Americans who waged war against the nation. Likewise, the need to authentically tell the history and story of Black Americans became the new cultural norm, and in September of 2016, the National Museum of African American History and Culture opened in Washington, D.C. These developments represented a Reconstructionist cultural shift, and MAGA’s cultural mission consisted of preventing that shift toward authenticity, multiracial democracy, and equality. The Unite the Right rally was an expression of this regressive culture. Normalizing the Confederacy and celebrating the propaganda of the Lost Cause of the Confederacy were things that supposedly made America great. The destruction of Reconstruction was supposedly what made America great.

In 2016 and 2017, many Americans believed that Trump’s victory was a fluke and an aberration, but the Unite the Right rally should have made it abundantly clear that the hatred and division of this era was actually America’s natural trajectory. The present echoed the past and they were rallying in an attempt to preserve the remnants and ideology of America’s first Regression era.

In addition to the cultural shift of Trump’s presidency, his main political agenda was to erase the work and accomplishments of President Obama, and ending the Affordable Care Act became one of the defining issues of his first presidency. Trump never created an alternative plan for providing Americans with health insurance, but our society would allegedly become better if the accomplishments of our second Reconstruction were erased. The irony of this stance was that the Affordable Care Act was still very popular amongst Democrats and Republicans. Many Republican voters said that they do not support “Obamacare,” but did support the health insurance marketplaces that their states had created without knowing that these marketplaces were part of Obamacare, or the Affordable Care Act. Due to the Affordable Care Act’s popularity, Trump never got enough support within the Republican Party to end the Affordable Care Act.

Despite not accomplishing his legislative agenda, Trump’s and the Republican Party’s biggest accomplishment was the remaking of the Supreme Court so that it is dominated by a conservative ideology.

Following the death of Justice Antonin Scalia in February of 2016, the natural process would have been to commence the nomination process soon thereafter and appoint a new justice by the end of the year at the latest, but Senator Mitch McConnell and the Republican Party refused to adhere to tradition and prevented President Obama from appointing a new justice during his last year in office. At this time, the Supreme Court had a 5-4 conservative split, and replacing Scalia–one of the founders of originalism–with a more liberal justice would have shifted the power dynamics to a 5-4 liberal split.

After Trump’s victory, conservative lawyer Neil Gorsuch was confirmed to the Supreme Court. Soon thereafter, in 2018, Justice Anthony Kennedy resigned and conservative lawyer Brett Kavanaugh was confirmed to the Court that same year. In 2020, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died and less than two months later conservative lawyer Amy Coney Barrett was confirmed to the Court. Barrett’s confirmation also occurred during the 2020 presidential race, but the Republican Party had no intention of stalling her confirmation until after the election. All three of these Justices adhere to the legal doctrine of originalism that was founded in the 1970s to counter the progress and ideals of America’s second Abolition era.

By the end of Trump’s first term the Supreme Court had a 6-3 conservative majority and an ideology that aligned with America’s second Regression era.

The 2020 presidential race pitted Trump against Obama’s vice president, Joe Biden. Biden rose to the front of a crowded Democrat presidential race after winning the South Carolina primary, which is more indicative of the political support of Black voters than the Iowa caucuses or New Hampshire primary. Despite serving in government for more than 40 years, Biden’s campaign emphasized his affiliation with the Obama presidency and he repeatedly emphasized their shared accomplishments. Without using the precise language, the 2020 presidential election pitted the ideologies of Reconstruction and Regression against each other. In November of 2020, Biden prevailed, but Trump refused to concede defeat.

From November 4, 2020 to January 6, 2021, Trump claimed that the election was stolen from him, and refused to concede defeat. On January 6th, following a rally outside the White House, thousands of Trump supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol in an attempt to prevent the counting of Electoral College votes and the confirmation of Biden as our next president. At the time, most Americans described the attack on January 6th as unprecedented and unimaginable, yet throughout Reconstruction, Redeemers and white supremacist militias waged similar attacks throughout the South.

The attempted coup d’etat in Louisiana in 1874 mirrors the attack on January 6th. In both cases, opponents to Reconstruction disputed the results of an election, and resorted to violence and terrorism in order to reclaim control. In both cases, they attacked the seat of government and they only relinquished control following military intervention. Both are textbook examples of authoritarianism. The normalization and celebration of the terrorist attack in 1874 has helped to normalize the attack on January 6th.

While it is true that an attack upon the Capitol was unprecedented, an attack of this nature upon a seat of government was not unprecedented. Under Trump, the Redeemer ideology became a national ideology called MAGA, so it is logical that the regional terrorism of the 1860s and 1870s would return and manifest nationally. January 6th was the national manifestation of the South’s “redemption.”

Trump’s and MAGA’s attempted coup d’etat did not prevail, and Biden was officially sworn in as America’s next president. This was America attempting to continue our second Reconstruction.

Biden’s Presidency: America’s False Return of Reconstruction (Phase 2)

Biden’s attempt at continuing America’s second Reconstruction was doomed from the beginning because it lacked both the spirit and the explicit language of Reconstruction.

During Obama’s presidency, neither Obama nor the Democrat Party recognized that America was in the midst of a second Reconstruction, and this lack of awareness was evident in their language and agenda. However, as a Black man, Obama’s presence equated to a manifestation of Reconstruction, and allowed for the spirit of Reconstruction to exist throughout his presidency. The racial empowerment of Reconstruction and Obama allowed him to sustain the unique electorate that ensured his victories in 2008 and 2012. Hillary Clinton could not sustain this electorate in 2016, but Biden needed it to win in 2020.

Biden, as a white man in his 70s, could not invoke the same spirit of Reconstruction as Obama could, so for America’s second Reconstruction to thrive, he needed to make up for this deficit with his policy and language. There is a tragic irony about Biden’s inability to invoke the spirit of Reconstruction because Reconstruction would have been impossible without the efforts of white male politicians who passed the laws, amended the Constitution, and championed civil rights. Tragically, America has spent more than a century working to erase these pivotal figures such as John Bingham, Thaddeus Stevens, Charles Sumner, and Albion Tourgée; and as a result, white Americans will celebrate the ideals of less progressive eras of America’s past.

Biden’s task was incredibly difficult because the Democrat Party had little to no interest in Reconstruction, and he faced a committed opposition party, which was not the case during the first half of America’s first Reconstruction. Biden won the presidency because the American public viewed him as an extension of Obama, but as president this proved to be an impossible task.

Despite campaigning as an extension of the Obama presidency, Biden’s political expertise was built in the 1980s and 1990s. In 1971, at the age of 29, Biden became a senator from Delaware, and he held that position until he became vice president in 2009. Biden might have won the presidency due to his affiliation with Obama, but his presidency was defined by his decades of experience serving in Congress. Biden was confident that his experience and capacity to work across the aisle and find common ground with Republicans could help him pass legislation and accomplish his goals. Without explicitly saying so, Biden’s bipartisan approach expressed a pre-Obama status quo, and this alienated Biden’s base.

Prior to Obama’s presidency, Black voter turnout was not significant enough that it could determine the presidency, and it was inconceivable that someone could become president while losing the white vote by 12 points. Once the white voters no longer determined the presidency, bipartisanship effectively disappeared during Obama’s presidency. Biden’s emphasis on bipartisanship harkened back to the Democrat politics of the 1990s and legislation such as the 1994 Crime Bill that Biden co-authored. The Crime Bill helped to usher in America’s expansion of mass incarceration which has disproportionately harmed communities of color. Democrat voters in 2020 wanted the version of Biden from the 2010s, and not the version of Biden from the 1990s.

Biden’s support of Israel also alienated younger voters and voters of color. In the 1990s, America’s support for Israel was absolute, but Obama and Benjamin Netanyahu had a contentious relationship throughout his presidency. Following the October 7, 2023 attack in Israel and Israel’s subsequent response against Palestine, the Democrat Party’s policy regarding Israel became a pivotal topic during the 2024 presidential race. Younger voters and voters of color objected to Biden and the Democrat Party’s support of Israel, and this further eroded the electorate the Democrats needed to win the 2024 presidential election.

Lastly, Biden’s age became a defining feature of his re-election campaign with many voters wanting him to drop out of the race. Following a disastrous debate performance and growing pressure, Biden eventually dropped out of the race on July 21, 2024. Kamala Harris then became the Democrat Party’s nominee, yet her truncated election was unsuccessful and Trump reclaimed the White House in 2025.

Trump’s Second Presidency: America’s Second Regression Continued (Phase 2)

Trump’s second presidency has been a continuation of his MAGA agenda, and Trump’s circle of advisors spent much of Biden’s presidency assessing their mistakes from the first and creating a more aggressive strategy for the second. The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 is a clear example of the right’s four years of planning during Biden’s presidency.

Trump’s immigration policy in his second presidency has been much more aggressive than his first. The Trump Administration’s deployment and expansion of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has far exceeded any of his actions during his first presidency. ICE has created large detention centers to house the immigrants that they have detained, and ICE has been allowed to use lethal force. Trump’s ICE agenda has targeted not just undocumented immigrants, but also almost anyone going through the immigration process who may be pursuing a visa or green card. The aggressive targeting of immigrants from Latin America and Africa has added a racial component to Trump’s immigration agenda, and it has drawn comparisons to the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. Again this is another example of how MAGA embraces the ideals of pre-Reconstruction America.

Trump’s second presidency has also targeted one of the premier accomplishments of Reconstruction: the birthright citizenship provision of 14th Amendment. As part of their immigration policy, the Trump Administration has sought to end birthright citizenship and their case went all the way to the Supreme Court. In Trump v. Barbara, in a 6-3 ruling, the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of birthright citizenship, but it should alarm all Americans that three Supreme Court Justices believe that part of the Constitution is unconstitutional. This is another attack on Reconstruction and it echoes the Redeemer agenda of the late 1800s.

The Trump Administration has also waged a culture war that consists of attacking diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives; erasing history that is not complimentary to white Americans; and presenting a “patriotic” approach to American history that celebrates white Americans–including Confederates. This is a modern-day application of the Lost Cause of the Confederacy.

Lastly, throughout Trump’s presidencies he has worked to undermine the legitimacy of American elections. When he lost to Biden in 2020, he claimed that the election was stolen and he still maintains that claim. Throughout 2026, Trump has also insinuated that he may interfere in the midterm elections to help ensure that the Republican Party maintains control of Congress. And despite already winning the presidency twice Trump has repeatedly indicated that he may violate the Twenty-Second Amendment and run for the presidency for a third time. Manipulating elections, undermining the Constitution, and never relinquishing power were key components of the Redeemer agenda during and after Reconstruction, and Trump remains an extension of this playbook except he is applying this regressive agenda at a national and not a regional level.

If America’s second Regression era succeeds, the United States will create a third Founding era—or a second Jim Crow—defined by ethnocide, racial division, and authoritarianism. After Reconstruction ended in 1877 it took more than 130 years for America to recommence Reconstruction during Obama’s presidency, so if the American Cycle continues and the third Founding era begins it could be another 130 years before Reconstruction recommences for the third time. If we do not break the American Cycle, America’s third Reconstruction may not occur until 2150.

If we want to save multiracial democracy in America, we must break the American Cycle. Reconstructionism exists to continue Reconstruction and break the American Cycle.

I have been thinking about the American Cycle since 2016 when I noticed that the end of Barack Obama’s presidency mirrored the end of Reconstruction, and over the next decade the American Cycle has become an integral component of my work and Reconstructionism.

In The Crime Without a Name: Ethnocide and the Erasure of Culture in America, I dedicated a chapter—Chapter 9: The Language of American Fascism—to the American Cycle, yet over the last ten years, I do not believe that it has gotten the recognition that it deserves. When I talk to people about Reconstructionism, the American Cycle is one of the first things that I mention, yet on The Reconstructionist I don’t believe that I’ve given it the same attention as when I talk with people directly. The American Cycle has thus far resided in the background as it has quietly shaped my work, but now is the moment for it to live in the foreground.

For ten years, the American Cycle has remained a controversial and contentious theory with those who I have shared it with because the theory shows that the United States is far more likely to regress into division and terror than progress into unity and civility. The American Cycle flies in the face of what we have been told about America, but as it becomes more accurate with each passing day, we all need to recognize the urgency of breaking the American Cycle. Reconstructionism exists to break the Cycle and Reconstructionist are committed to breaking the Cycle and forging a better America.

Back in 2016, when I first started noticing the Cycle my focus was primarily on the political dynamics and demographics of the 2016 presidential race and the alarming similarities between them and the presidential election of 1876.

I could see how Donald Trump had a pathway to victory and how Hillary Clinton may struggle to maintain the Obama electorate. I believed it was a slim chance, but I saw the path and it echoed the end of Reconstruction. Essentially, Black voter turnout drops for Democrats, and the Republicans stoke racial division and appeal to lower income and lower educated white voters by promising economic empowerment. Conservatives also needed to spew rhetoric that harkened back to a more idyllic and patriotic time that preceded the area of multiracial democracy implemented during Reconstruction and Obama’s presidency.

In 1876, the Democrat Party—who objected to Reconstruction—implemented a similar strategy as Trump in 2016. In 1876, the Democrats used the terror of white supremacist militias such as the Ku Klu Klan to suppress Black voter turnout, proclaimed themselves as a populist party for white Americans, and even called themselves “Redeemers” because they wanted to redeem the South by returning it to a pre-Civil War status quo. This is the same rhetoric as Trump’s “Make America Great Again.”

In 1876, the Democrat’s successful strategy resulted in multiple Southern states not being able to certify their election results. Therefore, neither Republican candidate Rutherford B. Hayes or Democrat candidate Samuel Tilden could be declared president. Eventually, a compromise was made and Hayes become president, but federal troops were removed from the South. The Democrats lost the presidency in 1876, but succeeded in their primary objective of reclaiming control of the South.

In 2016, Trump won the presidency, and now the ideology of the destroyers of Reconstruction became the agenda of the Trump presidency.

After Trump’s victory in 2016, I expected his presidency to mirror post-Reconstruction America, and when it did, I now had further confirmation on the accuracy of my theory of the American Cycle.

To understand America, and our future, we must understand the American Cycle.

Introduction to the The American Cycle

Over the past 250 years, the United States has completed the American Cycle almost twice and is on the cusp of starting a third. To preserve our democracy, we need to break the Cycle once-and-for-all.

The American Cycle consists of four stages: Founding, Abolition, Reconstruction, and Regression.

Below, you’ll see a description of the American Cycle and its two phases.

Founding Era (Phase 1)

The Founding stage, starts with the founding of the United States by way of the Declaration of Independence and runs until the 1830s and the birth of the Abolitionist movement. The Founding era is defined by the United States’ desire to construct a democracy with ethnocide.

In my book, The Crime Without a Name: Ethnocide and the Erasure of Culture in America, I detail ethnocide’s influence on the United States. Ethnocide is the destruction of a people’s culture while keeping the people, and in my book, I use the term ethnocide to describe the transatlantic slave trade because it was a multi-century campaign to keep African people while destroying their cultures.

Cultural destruction was a key part of the slave trade because a shared culture would have made it easier for enslaved people to rebel and liberate themselves from slavery. Cultural destruction was therefore a defining feature of the slave trade and American slavery. European slave traders and colonizers intentionally and systematically prevented African people from continuing their cultural practices. They broke up families and separated Africans who spoke the same language. Culture and language gave people meaning, so ethnocide attempted to make life nearly meaningless. Ethnocide meant to crush the spirit of African people because spiritless people are less likely to rebel. Cultural destruction thus defined chattel slavery in America.

Greed and wealth accumulation were the primary motivators of the slave trade. Colonizers and colonists actively destroyed the lives and cultures of African people because they believed that they could make money from the destruction. The normalization of greed, dehumanization, and systemic destruction are also key features of the Founding era.

Therefore, the creation of an American democracy that legalized slavery was the creation of a democracy with ethnocide.

Due to the contradiction of having a democracy with legalized chattel slavery, the Founding era is also defined by attempts to obfuscate slavery while strengthening the power of pro-slavery voices. Had the United States’ democracy proudly proclaimed and explicitly stated its embrace of slavery, then our democracy could never have been perceived as legitimate. Accordingly, much of the text of this era is inherently dishonest.

The U.S. Constitution does not mention slavery, but it does include the three-fifths compromise, the Electoral College, and its property protections in the Fourth and Fifth Amendments were understood to categorize enslaved people as the property of their owner.

The three-fifths compromise counted enslaved people as three-fifths of a person regarding congressional apportionment and Electoral College votes, so despite not mentioning slavery, the U.S. Constitution granted slave owning states additional representation in the House of Representatives based on the number of slaves in each state. Also, a state’s Electoral College votes were determined by their congressional representation in the House and the Senate. The larger the enslaved population in a state, the greater the influence in America’s democracy. It is not a coincidence that prior to the abolition of slavery that the majority of America’s presidents were slave owners from the South.

The foundational hypocrisy and corruption of this era mean that it was inevitable that it would implode. The pro-democracy and pro-slavery factions will fight to end the hypocrisy and reshape America according to their respective ideals. The pro-slavery faction will attempt to remove the democratic facade once it becomes an impediment and no longer an asset to their pro-slavery agenda, and the pro-democracy faction will attempt to abolish slavery and ensure that America’s pro-democracy language is no longer used to legitimize slavery and instead legitimizes democracy.

Abolition Era (Phase 1)

The second stage is the Abolition era and this runs from the 1830s to the end of the Civil War in 1865. In this stage, a national movement forms in the United States to abolish ethnocide, which at this time was slavery.

In 1831 William Lloyd Garrison first published his abolitionist publication The Liberator and in that same year, Nat Turner attempted the largest slave rebellion in American history. In 1839, the Spanish slave ship La Amistad arrived in New England carrying approximately 50 Mende Africans who had overthrown their captors and seized control of the ship. Former president John Quincy Adams argued on the behalf of the Mende Africans before the Supreme Court in United States v. The Amistad and in 1841, the Court sided in their favor and agreed to free the Africans and not return them to Spanish authorities. The case of La Amistad, which means “The Friendship” in Spanish, was a pivotal event in the early stages of the Abolitionist movement.

A key aspect of this stage is that a significant segment of white Americans have chosen to become a part of the movement to abolish slavery. The inclusion of white voices represents a quasi-tipping point where the fight for Black liberation is no longer considered an exclusively Black endeavor. A former president espousing abolitionist ideals and arguing on behalf of Black people before the Supreme Court was a tipping point moment.

Black people have always fought to abolish their enslavement (as the Mende people did on La Amistad), but American history books do not proclaim that the abolition movement started when the first Africans attempted to liberate themselves from enslavement. The Underground Railroad existed since the dawn of the United States, but the beginning of the Underground Railroad, despite abolishing Black enslavement one person at a time, has never been described as the beginning of the Abolitionist movement. Black people’s refusal to allow ethnocide to destroy their spirit, and the recognition of Black existence and spirit by white Americans, fuels what American historians call the Abolitionist movement that started in the 1830s.

Another key feature of this era was how abolitionism reshaped American politics. America’s bipartisan political system was born during this era.

In 1833, the Whig Party was formed to counter the authoritarianism and American Populism of President Andrew Jackson and his Democrat Party, but the Whig Party disappeared in 1856 because they could not agree on a unified position regarding the expansion of slavery. The Republican Party filled the void left by the Whigs and the battle between Democrats and Republicans has defined American politics ever since.

The Whigs existed as an oppositional party. You were for the Whigs if you were against Jacksonian Democracy. Despite existing for only 23 years, the Whigs succeeded in having four American presidents, and created America’s two party system. For two decades, the Democrats and the Whigs dominated American politics.

But the Whigs’ inability to oppose slavery and the authoritarianism created by pro-slavery politicians such as Andrew Jackson meant that their decline was inevitable. Outside of John Adams and his son John Quincy Adams every American president was effectively pro-slavery, so unilaterally opposing slavery seemed like a step too far for the Whigs.

Following the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850, many northern voters joined the abolitionist movement and left the Whig Party. Allowing Southern bounty hunters and slave catchers to invade the North gave northerners their first taste of the realities of slavery in America, and their outrage fueled the abolitionist movement in the 1850s. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin was published in 1852 and gave northern readers a literary depiction of the brutality of slavery in the South. The book became the most popular novel in America. The Supreme Court’s decision in Dred Scott v. Sandford in 1857 added additional fuel to the fire of the northern abolitionist movement.

The abolitionist movement grew rapidly in the North in the 1850s and eventually the abolitionist Republican Party was created in 1854. Initially, the Republican Party focused on abolishing the expansion of slavery into the North and U.S. territories, but eventually, their platform advocated for the abolition of slavery in the United States. On January 1, 1863, Republican President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation.

In six years, the Republican Party transformed from being a collection of northern abolitionist upstarts to winning the presidency with a candidate who had almost no national political experience. Prior to becoming president, Lincoln had only served one term in the House of Representatives as a member of the Whig Party from 1847 to 1849, and four terms in the Illinois State Legislature representing Sangamon County in central Illinois.

Two years after the Republican Party was formed, the Whig Party collapsed because American voters wanted a party that was for the abolition of slavery and not merely against the principles of Andrew Jackson.

The reality of a Republican president alarmed the Southern Democrats and the prospect of the abolition of slavery frightened and outraged Democrats to such an extent that they launched the American Civil War in 1861. Southern Democrats then decided to secede from the Union and form the Confederacy, and in their constitution they explicitly used the term “slavery” and championed white supremacy.

In 1865, the Union and the Republican Party prevailed over the Confederacy and the Democrats, and now American Reconstruction could begin. Yet, despite losing the war, the former Confederates refused to give up the fight.

On April 9, 1865, Confederate General Robert E. Lee surrendered to Union General Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Court House, and less than a week later on April 15, 1865, Confederate sympathizer John Wilkes Booth assassinated Lincoln at Ford’s Theatre.

The success of the Abolition era creates the third stage of the American Cycle, yet America’s regressive forces will also spend this era attempting to destroy Reconstruction.

Reconstruction Era (Phase 1)

American Reconstruction from 1865 to 1877 is the time when the United States attempted to reconstruct American democracy and society into one without ethnocide, and in so doing, it became obvious that abolishing slavery was not enough. The reach of slavery and ethnocide had corrupted the entirety of the United States’ democracy, so the removal of the corruption required a complete reconstruction of our democracy.

Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, was a precursor to the progress to come. In 1865, the Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery at the constitutional level, and the Civil Rights Act of 1866 birthed civil rights (and human rights) in America, but the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868 commenced the radical reconstruction of the U.S. Constitution.

The Fourteenth Amendment established birthright citizenship, and equal protection and due process under law for all Americans. Prior to the Fourteenth Amendment, human equality played no part in the Constitution, and inequality–especially racial inequality–remained a foundational pillar of American democracy.

Additionally, the Fourteenth Amendment ensured that the Bill of Rights was federally enforceable and not determined by the states. Prior to 1868, an American’s freedom of speech was determined by the state they resided in and one’s freedoms could radically change when crossing state lines. Essentially, almost all of our freedoms were determined at the state level before Reconstruction. The Bill of Rights as we know it today did not exist before Reconstruction. In fact, the term “Bill of Rights” to refer to our founding ten amendments was coined by John Bingham, the primary author of the Fourteenth Amendment. In more ways than one, Reconstruction created the Bill of Rights and made it integral to our democracy.

The Fifteenth Amendment that extended voting rights to Black men, which was originally intended as part of the Fourteenth Amendment, was passed in 1870. Soon thereafter President Ulysses S. Grant created the Department of Justice to ensure that the civil rights of all Americans were protected.

Also, starting in the 1870s the Republican Party began calling itself the “Grand Old Party” in recognition of preserving the Union and implementing Reconstruction.

Reconstruction birthed multiracial democracy in the United States.

Unsurprisingly, the former Confederates in the South viewed Reconstruction as an attack on their white supremacist ideals and their way of life, and they fought to destroy Reconstruction since its inception. The traditional warfare of the Civil War was replaced with guerilla tactics and legislative warfare.

Lincoln’s successor Andrew Johnson was a pro-Union sympathizer from Tennessee but he was not in favor of the Republican Party’s Reconstruction agenda. He vetoed the Civil Rights Act of 1866 and the Freedmen’s Bureau, and proclaimed that they were racist against white Americans. Johnson also pardoned the former Confederate soldiers and most of the Confederate leadership. Johnson’s commitment to obstruct Reconstruction was so unwavering that his own party impeached him, but did not have the votes to remove him from office. In 1868, Johnson ran for the presidency as a Democrat, but failed to win the party’s nomination.

Johnson was president for less than four years, but his work to undermine Reconstruction was profound. The pardoned Confederates quickly formed racist militias such as the Ku Klux Klan to help win back political support for Democrat politicians in the South. During Reconstruction, the KKK was the de facto military wing of the Democrat Party. The KKK was never just a random assemblage white supremacists who terrorized Black Americans merely for the sake of inflicting terror. The KKK terrorized Black Americans, and their white allies, for the explicit purpose of helping the Democrat Party reclaim political control of the South. Following the passage of the Fifteenth Amendment in 1870, terrorism and voter suppression were interwoven agendas for the KKK. From Reconstruction’s inception and especially from 1870 to Reconstruction’s collapse in 1877, white supremacist terror in support of a racist political agenda remained an ever-present reality of Reconstruction.

The Southerners who opposed Reconstruction, not only created terrorist militias, but also created a political movement that collaborated with the militias. Southern Democrats began calling themselves “Redeemers” during Reconstruction, and their agenda was to “redeem” the South by returning it to a pre-Civil War status quo. The KKK and other white terrorist militias would murder, terrorize, and suppress the vote of Republicans, and then a Redeemer Democrat would win the election and start rolling back the progress of Reconstruction.

In 1874, Democrats in Louisiana attempted a coup d’etat following John McEnery’s defeat to Republican William Kellogg in the gubernatorial elections. To stop the coup, President Grant sent down the military to defeat McEnery’s supporters who were a combination of Redeemer Democrats and white supremacist militias including the White League.

The failed coup d’etat was the culmination of a multi-year terrorist campaign by McEnery’s supporters that they had been waging since the disputed election results in 1872.

Prior to the attempted coup, McEnery’s supporters committed “the bloodiest single instance of racial carnage in the Reconstruction Era.” On April 13, 1873, they committed the Colfax Massacre and it is estimated that over 150 Black Americans and three white Americans died in this massacre, but the exact numbers are unknown because McEnery’s supporters threw many of the bodies into the Red River and placed the others in a large, unmarked mass grave.

In response to the Colfax Massacre, countless other instances of racist and anti-democratic terror, and the failed coup d’etat, the federal government kept a sustained military presence in the South for the remainder of Reconstruction.

The violent partnership of Redeemer Democrats and white supremacist militias is how the traditional warfare of the Union vs. the Confederacy transitioned into an agenda of guerilla and legislative warfare waged by Redeemers and white supremacist militias.

Unsurprisingly, the term “white supremacy” became a key part of the American lexicon during Reconstruction, but in the 1860s, “white supremacy” was almost exclusively used by racist white Americans to describe what they believed was the natural order of race relations. In 1868 — the same year as the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment — Dr. John H. Van Evrie published White Supremacy and Negro Subordination; or, Negroes a Subordinate Race, and (so called) Slavery Its Normal Condition, and his book is the first published reference to the term “white supremacy” in America. During Reconstruction, white Southerners would proudly proclaim themselves to be white supremacists. According to Van Evrie and the countless white Americans who supported his beliefs and adopted his terminology, white supremacy was not a toxic offshoot of white culture and white identity, but instead was the defining characteristic of whiteness in America. Whiteness was incompatible with equality, which meant that whiteness was incompatible with Reconstruction, so “redeeming” the South and returning society back to the inequality prior to Reconstruction was the only way that white culture and identity could survive.

By 1876, the unrelenting terrorism of Redeemer Democrats and their white supremacist militias had effectively made democracy untenable in the South, and as a result, it became impossible to accurately count votes and determine who would win the presidential election of 1876. Most of the election results in the South remained disputed after election day, and it was unclear if Republican Rutherford B. Hayes or Democrat Samuel Tilden had obtained enough electoral college votes to be declared the victor. To resolve this dispute, a committee was formed to determine our next president and eventually a deal was struck that would allow Hayes to become president, so long as the federal government removed their military presence from the South. Without the military protection of the federal government, Black Americans and white Republicans in the South had little to no means for combating white supremacist terror. White terrorism ended Reconstruction and democracy in the South.

The South might have lost the presidential election of 1876, but they accomplished their main goal of ending Reconstruction. Reconstruction effectively ended in 1877 with the presidency of Rutherford B. Hayes and the removal of federal troops from the South.

Regression (Phase 1)

Following Reconstruction’s collapse, the Redeemer Democrats retook control of the South and began implementing their plan to erase the progress of Reconstruction. The racist, white supremacist Southerners called the post-Reconstruction era, the era of “Redemption” because they had finally reclaimed the political authority to “redeem” the South by returning it to a way of life akin to their pre-Civil War status quo, but for all Americans who care about democracy and equality, this era should be known as the era of Regression.

The era of Regression culminated in Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896. The Regression era worked to bring back ethnocidal division into American society and government, and the legalization of separate but equal launched a second Founding Era in America known as Jim Crow. Regression is the last stage in the American Cycle before it starts anew with a “democracy” founded upon division and inequality.

From 1877 to 1896, the Redeemers engaged in not just guerilla and legislative warfare, but also cultural and narrative warfare. One of the biggest aspects of this era was the South’s campaign to remake the story of Reconstruction and the Civil War to paint the South as the heroes and Reconstruction as a failure. The agenda to repaint the South as heroes became known as the Lost Cause of the Confederacy, and throughout the South monuments and memorials were erected to celebrate fallen Confederates and members of white terrorist militias.

In 1891, a monument was erected in New Orleans called The Battle of Liberty Place that celebrated the supporters of Democrat gubernatorial candidate John McEnery who attempted the 1874 coup d’etat in New Orleans and had waged a reign of terror leading up to the attack. The monument celebrating these terrorists lived in the heart of New Orleans until 2017 until it was taken down by Democrat Governor Mitch Landrieu.

This campaign continued well into the 20th century as the Daughters of the Confederacy proclaimed the narrative of the Lost Cause and the Dunning School described the failures of Reconstruction as being the result of Republican and Black American incompetence instead of a sustained campaign of white supremacist terrorism. The impacts of this narrative still reverberate today as many Americans remain ill-informed about the authentic story of Reconstruction.

The role of language and narrative are especially important in this era because not only did the South need to create a new narrative that depicted traitorous Southerners as heroes, but also because the progress of Reconstruction meant that they could no longer rely on explicitly racist language to implement their racist agenda. The language of poll taxes, literacy exams, vagrancy laws and separate but equal became the norm of this era. Race neutral language became the new means for creating racist outcomes. Much like the Founding Era, language during the Regression Era is often used to obfuscate the intent of their anti-democratic, racist agenda.

Post-Reconstruction, the United States appeared to be race neutral based upon the language used by both Democrats and Republicans. For the Democrats, the appearance of neutrality existed primarily as a means for fueling a racist agenda, but for the Republicans, racial neutrality gave them the opportunity to shift their focus away from racial equality and toward matters of business and industrialization. American industrialization grew in that latter half of the 19th century, and Republican businessmen had grown tired of the costs related to sustaining Reconstruction. The incessant terror inflicted by white terrorists militias in the South meant that maintaining Reconstruction became an expensive endeavor and it also prevented Republican businessmen from expanding their businesses into the South. The appointment of Rutherford B. Hayes to the presidency and the removal of federal troops from the South effectively ended Reconstruction and opened the South up to northern businesses and investment.

The Republican Party post-Reconstruction argued that Reconstruction had already done enough to create equality in the United States, and now their attention could shift towards business and economic issues. This shift effectively meant that the Democrats no longer had genuine opposition to their racist agenda and this empowered the Democrats to aggressively dismantle Reconstruction.

Additionally, the Republican Party’s emphasis on business and industry helped fuel the Gilded Age and created massive income inequality across the nation. As a result of the large wealth disparities, the American public became more aware of the harsh and deadly labor conditions of many American workers, and especially children. Prior to Reconstruction and the Civil War, America’s most brutal labor conditions were reserved for America’s enslaved population and American industry was built around the expectation of having workers who could work all-day, everyday and without a concern for their well-being. The end of slavery and the progress of Reconstruction meant that brutal labor was no longer the exclusive domain of America’s enslaved population, and now poor whites and immigrant labor were also subjected to inhumane labor conditions. Industrialization and the growth of corporations also impacted white farmers across the South and Midwest, and by the late 1880s a populist movement had emerged to defend the rights of working Americans.

Despite the populist movement being a movement about American workers, it showed very little concern for the rights and labor of Americans of color, and as a result, the Populist Party (founded in 1892 and born from the populist movement) found itself to be more aligned with the Democrat Party, who supposedly represented the people, than the Republican Party, who represented the interests of big business. The Populist Party never managed to challenge the duopoly of the Democrat and Republican parties and it collapsed in 1896. Following its collapse, their former members either joined the Democrat Party or followed socialist Eugene Debs and helped to create the Socialist Party of America in 1901, but they did not join the Republican Party.

By 1896, racial or social equality was no longer a concern of the Democrat or Republican Party, or America’s growing socialist movement. Once racial and social equality became a non-factor in American politics the identities of America’s political parties also changed. The Republican Party which was founded on its opposition to slavery and implemented Reconstruction had become the political party of business and industry, and this identity has stuck with the GOP into the present. Similarly, the Democrat Party’s commitment to “redeeming” the South made them into a party that focused on the interests of white Americans and not corporations. Ironically, their racist agenda turned them into a party that cared about the “people” and not corporations. The Democrat Party of the late 1800s had returned to the populism of Andrew Jackson and the racist origins of its founding.

Lastly, the culmination of Regression was Plessy v. Ferguson that legalized separate but equal.

The lawsuit that prompted Plessy v. Ferguson was created by Le Comité des Citoyens, which was a multiracial civil rights group in New Orleans, that challenged Louisiana’s Separate Car Act that required separate train car accommodations for Black and white passengers. To prevent the demise of Reconstruction a multiracial civil rights group came together to challenge the legality of “separate but equal” that had already been deemed unconstitutional during Reconstruction.

In 1868, a Black woman named Katherine Brown boarded a train in Alexandria, Virginia that was headed to Washington, D.C., but she was forcefully taken off of the train and severely beaten because she allegedly sat in a “Whites Only” train car. Brown, with the support of numerous Republican congressmen, sued the railroad company and in 1873, in Railroad Company v. Brown the Supreme Court sided in favor of Brown. During the case, the railroad company argued that they had not violated their charter because they allegedly supplied “separate but equal” accommodations to Black and white passengers. In 1873, Supreme Court Justice David Davis described the railroad company’s “separate but equal” argument as “an ingenious attempt to evade a compliance with the obvious meaning of the requirement.”

In 1896, Le Comité des Citoyens essentially attempted to prevent the demise of Reconstruction by arguing that what was deemed unconstitutional in 1873 should still be unconstitutional in 1896. The Supreme Court’s decision to legitimize and legalize separate but equal completed the Redeemers agenda and regressed America back to a pre-Reconstruction norm.

Jim Crow, America’s Second Founding, would soon commence and start the American Cycle anew.

Part 2 will be published on Thursday, September 24, 2026. You can read it here.

To understand Reconstructionism, one must first understand the American Cycle, which shows us how Reconstructionism is much more than merely looking back at the era of Reconstruction from 1865 -1877. Reconstructionism empowers us to look back at this transformative era of American democracy while also giving us the tools to look forward and transform the United States for the better. The American Cycle is this nation’s regressive cycle that exists to thwart the ideals and history of Reconstruction, and to prevent us from overcoming this nation’s white supremacist, authoritarian, and racially divisive norms.

The American Cycle consists of four stages or eras. The United States has completed the cycle twice. When the first iteration concluded around  the end of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th century, whereupon the second iteration began, it would have been impossible for the American public to recognize the American Cycle because the subsequent  stages had not yet occurred. Only now, in the aftermath of Donald Trump’s presidency, can we clearly see the cycle repeating itself. We are in a pivotal and urgent moment to disrupt it.  Today – right now – we have an historic opportunity to break the American Cycle and transcend this nation’s ingrained flaws; or we can remain unaware or indifferent and choose to continue the cycle, embarking on a third iteration that will systematically remove our rights, foster division, and embrace authoritarianism.  The 2024 presidential election is the crystallized moment where we get to set this nation’s trajectory for the next 100 years. This might sound hyperbolic, but the American Cycle shows that it may take at least another century to change course if we do not seize this opportunity.

The American Cycle consists of four eras: Founding, Abolition, Reconstruction, and Redemption, and, as noted, has completed two rounds. Later on I will give a more detailed explanation of each era, but here for now is a brief summary of each era and its repetition. 

The Founding Era happened at the founding of this nation in the late 1700s and early 1800s, and it happened again during Jim Crow at the beginning of the 1900s. Founding consists of the white Americans who created and controlled this nation building a democracy that also condoned ethnocide, which is the destruction of a people’s culture while keeping the people. In the 1700s, and before, the dominant iteration of ethnocide in America was chattel slavery. Unlike genocide, which consists of the destruction of a people and is ethnocide’s linguistic sibling, the final solution for chattel slavery was not the eradication or forced removal of African people from the United States. In fact, the final solution of ethnocide was nearly the opposite outcome because European colonizers and the founders of this nation wanted African people to be a sustained and oppressed people in the United States in perpetuity. The new agenda became the destruction of African culture as a means for oppressing African people. This is ethnocide. During the first Founding Era, chattel slavery was ethnocide; during the second Founding Era, Jim Crow and segregation became the next manifestation of ethnocide.

The Abolition Era arises immediately after the Founding Era begins because oppressed Americans and their eventual white allies fight to abolish the oppressive norms ingrained in each Founding Era. In the 1830s, the movement to abolish slavery was the first Abolition Era in the American Cycle, culminating in the Civil War. In the 1950s, the second Abolition Era emerged in the Civil Rights Movement to abolish Jim Crow.

It is important to note here that each Abolition Era has two beginnings. The first is when Black Americans fight to abolish their oppression; the second is when a significant share of white Americans acknowledge these efforts and become allies to the movement. It should be clear, however, that Black Americans have fought to free themselves from white oppression the moment it commenced, so the Abolition Era begins a moment after the Founding Era begins. However, American society generally regards such periods as ‘commencing’ when white Americans take note of them and become allies with Black Americans. 

The first Abolition Era ended after the Civil War and the beginning of Reconstruction, but the second did not end with the end of the Civil Rights Movement. Instead, this era continued until 2008 and the start of Barack Obama’s presidency.  This extension of the period resulted from an American status quo dominated by seemingly non-racist language used to cultivate racist outcomes. When the intent is to pursue racist outcomes without racist language, it can take decades to “prove” the racism that we all see and experience.

The Reconstruction Era occurs after Abolition has prevailed and the United States attempts to create a society devoid of ethnocide. This era is not defined solely by its successes, but instead by the profound philosophical and cultural shift around which it attempts to remake and reconstruct the nation. During Reconstruction, from 1865-1877, the United States adopted the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution, established civil rights through the creation of four different civil rights acts, and created the Department of Justice, among many other accomplishments. In this era, racial equality was not merely theoretical; the United States enacted numerous laws and created several institutions with the goal of manifesting and sustaining this equality.

The philosophical and cultural shift of seeing Black people as equal to white people in the eyes of the law is a radical one in American society, one that most of America’s founding fathers never intended or hoped would occur. The first Reconstruction, from 1865-1877, was therefore a tipping point in the American culture war, both literally and figuratively. One side of the war supported ethnocide and the Founding Era, and the other supported equality and Reconstruction. The existence of Reconstruction means that an American cultural and political status quo shaped by white dominance may be ending. In response, a large share of white Americans will fight, as if their lives depend on it, to end Reconstruction and establish anew the Founding Era.

Barack Obama’s presidency thus amounts to a second Reconstruction because a Black man becoming president of the United States, while championing a message of Black empowerment and racial equality, is both an obvious continuation of the ideals of Reconstruction and the logical result of the second era of Abolition. Likewise, his presidency also caused the American political and cultural right to commence a culture war to delegitimize Obama, undermine equality, and celebrate our founding fathers.

However, one of the most obvious distinctions between the first Reconstruction and Obama’s are the legislative and constitutional accomplishments.  When comparing the accomplishments of each era, it is important to recognize that during a significant portion of Reconstruction the former Confederate states had not been readmitted to the Union. The Thirteenth Amendment was passed prior to their readmission, and agreeing to ratify the Fourteenth Amendment became a requirement for readmission. Essentially, the absence of a strong opposition party within Congress allowed Reconstruction to radically change America for the better and pass legislation and amend the Constitution in ways that would have been impossible with an empowered South in Congress. 

This was not the case for Obama’s Reconstruction. The Affordable Care Act was arguably his biggest accomplishment, and by making healthcare more accessible to the American public he ‘reconstructed’ America according to the spirit of Reconstruction. When freedom is expanded, it consists not merely of the idea or rhetoric of freedom, but also must accord people the dignity (often manifested through government services) that comes with freedom. Citizenship and voting rights are part of freedom, but so is access to education, housing, and economic opportunity. Health care is also an aspect of freedom, and Obama’s Reconstruction made it more accessible to the American people.

Finally, the Redemption Era comes after the ethnocidal culture warriors have caused the end of the Reconstruction Era. In the 1800s, these culture warriors called themselves “Redeemers” because they wanted to “redeem” the South by returning it to its antebellum, pre-Reconstruction status. During the Reconstruction Era these people were white Southern Americans and former Confederates who fought to end Reconstruction as if their lives (certainly their status and identity) depended on it. After the Confederacy ended, they began establishing new groups to carry out their ethnocidal aims. The Redeemers were one of these groups, comprised of the Southern plantation elite: the landowners, businessmen, and politicians who held most of the power. The less powerful Southerners formed white supremacist militias such as the Ku Klux Klan. For the entirety of Reconstruction, the Redeemers collaborated with these white supremacist militias to regain control of the South through both terrorism and political power. When Reconstruction ended, the Redeemers regained control of the South and the Redemption Era began.

The word Redemption, moreover, highlights how this era was defined by the complete corruption of the English language. Bad actions were given good names and good actions, bad ones. The culmination of this era from a political and legal standpoint was the Plessy v. Ferguson Supreme Court decision and its endorsement of “separate but equal” social conditions. The phrase “separate but equal” implies equality while, of course, actively creating inequality. The narrative of the Lost Cause of the Confederacy that championed Confederates and demonized proponents of Reconstruction was the cultural culmination of the era. American language in this context had become essentially dishonest, its main purpose to obfuscate the truth. In order to dismantle the goodness and equality of Reconstruction, ethnocidal Americans had to coin a dystopian language to create a dystopian second Founding Era, namely Jim Crow.

Donald Trump’s presidency espoused a slogan of “Make America Great Again,” the implication being that greatness had existed before and until Obama and the second Reconstruction. Throughout his presidential campaign and while in office, Trump collaborated with white supremacist organizations to obtain or secure political power, and on January 6, 2021, he used a combination of warped political maneuvering and white terrorism in an attempt to reclaim control of the government. Trump’s presidency was thus a second Redemption Era, but his defeat in 2020 had cut it short. Now he is running again for the presidency with an agenda of continuing his truncated Redemption Era, and as American history has shown, it could take more than 100 years to repair the damage.

Biden’s Presidency is therefore a pivotal moment in American history. His 2020 campaign appealed for the continuation of Reconstruction and the work he had accomplished alongside Obama, promising to elevate Black Americans and people of color to positions of influence they had never held before. Having a Black woman as Vice President, a Black woman on the Supreme Court, and an Indigenous Woman cabinet member are clear examples of his commitment to continuing Reconstruction.

Indeed, whatever Biden’s shortcomings, when viewed through the American Cycle, the philosophical and cultural battle that the 2024 election represents is abundantly clear. Biden represents continuing Reconstruction and breaking the American Cycle, and Trump represents a continuation of the cycle and the creation of a new Jim Crow or Founding Era.  Reconstructionism is the philosophy we can use to break the American Cycle for good, transcend our regressive status quo, and establish a more equitable and just society for all.