Re-Entering the Age of American Regression
The chaos of the present echoes the chaos of America's regressive past
Donald Trump has been president for two weeks, and it should be clear that America’s second Reconstruction has forcefully come to a close, and that America’s second Regression has well and truly begun.
In a little over two weeks, Trump has already attacked DEI, commenced a large-scale mass deportation agenda, challenged the legitimacy of birthright citizenship, instigated trade wars with Mexico and Canada, attempted to fire thousands of federal employees, handed over sensitive information from the Treasury Department to Elon Musk, gutted USAID, and threatened to abolish the Department of Education. And while this list is long, I’m sure that I have left out many other regressions.
As Americans of all political persuasions grapple with the regressions that have already arrived and those to come, we must learn from America’s first Regression from 1877 to 1896 so that we can anticipate and rise above our looming descent. The nuances of America’s first Regression that erased the progress of Reconstruction and created Jim Crow are numerous, but with regard to our present era it is incredibly important to understand how the merging of branding, erasure, and racial division create social regression.
Essentially, if your society is committed to destroying good things, they must also be able to control the narrative so that they can brand good things as “bad” and bad things as “good.” Once bad things become “good” it becomes inevitable that people will excitedly and joyfully commit bad actions. And once our understanding of “good” and “bad” has become muddled and untethered from reality, it becomes much easier to brand a race or group of people as “bad” and blame them for all of our problems.
Trump is a master of branding, destruction, and division, so America’s second Regression could be even more effective than the first if we are not prepared, aware, and engaged.
Additionally, we must also become aware of the effectiveness of the branding and erasure from America’s first Regression because not only has American society largely dismissed the significance of Reconstruction, but we also call the regressive era that followed it, the era of Redemption. American society has already branded a negative era with a positive word, so we should not be shocked when American regressors attempt to do it again.
The American Cycle & American Regression
To understand the full scope of the dangers presented by America’s second Regression, one must first understand the American Cycle that explains the trajectory of this nation since its inception.
The American Cycle has four stages: Founding, Abolition, Reconstruction, and Redemption/Regression. Thus far, America has gone through the cycle once and we are in the process of completing our second cycle. As you will see, this is not good.
The Founding era is the first stage of the cycle and it starts at the founding of the United States and is defined by America’s commitment to creating a democracy with ethnocide, and the ethnocide of the era was chattel slavery. Ethnocide is the destruction of a people’s culture while keeping the people. European colonizers engaged in ethnocide against African people during the transatlantic slave trade by systematically and intentionally destroying African culture, but keeping African people so that they could enslave them in the Americas. Cultural destruction and the violence and terror that comes with it was their means for oppressing African people, and their system of chattel slavery continued the colonizer’s ethnocidal agenda.
The Founding era was immediately followed by the Abolition era, which fought to abolish ethnocide or chattel slavery. The tension between these two eras culminated in the Civil War, and the victory of the Abolitionists over the Founders brought about America’s third era: Reconstruction.
Reconstruction attempted to recreate the United States into a democracy without ethnocide or chattel slavery. This was a bold and ambitious project that was only able to last for twelve years, and throughout Reconstruction’s twelve years, it was met with fierce and deadly resistance from former Confederates who championed slavery and celebrated America’s ethnocidal roots. During Reconstruction, the politicians who opposed Reconstruction called themselves “redeemers” because they wanted to “redeem” the South by returning it to its pre-Civil War status quo. When redeemer politicians prevailed and ended Reconstruction in 1877, they set about undoing all of the progress of Reconstruction. They called their regressive agenda “Redemption,” and it culminated in Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896 which legalized “separate but equal” in the United States. The Reconstruction Amendments prevented the redeemers from bringing back de jure slavery, so they created Jim Crow segregation instead.
By undoing the progress of Reconstruction, the Redeemers sought to return the United States to its founding values, and segregation was their means for doing so. This regression results in the American Cycle starting anew and Jim Crow becomes America’s second Founding era. Jim Crow lasted for half a century, and then America’s second Abolition era commenced in the 1950s and 1960s with the Civil Rights Movement. However, the fight to abolish Jim Crow did not end in the 1960s and 1970s, but continued into the 21st century.
America’s second Abolitionist movement differs from the first because the first focused on a singular issue: slavery. The second focused on Jim Crow and this battle was far more complicated because Jim Crow was defined by an absence of racist language—at least in law and policy—and a prevalence of racist outcomes. Poll taxes, literacy exams, segregation, redlining, and vagrancy laws never used racist language, but they were created with the explicit purpose of creating racist outcomes. America’s second wave of abolitionists, as a result, struggled to articulate everything that needed to be abolished and how non-racist language was, in fact, racist. This meant that they had to focus on the outcomes of the policies to prove the racism, and waiting for the outcomes extended the period of abolition. This is why Michelle Alexander’s book The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, published in 2010, was so groundbreaking. It showed America that we still needed to abolish major facets of Jim Crow roughly 50 years after Jim Crow supposedly ended.
As American abolitionists in the 20th century worked to destroy the vestiges of Jim Crow, Barack Obama was elected president in 2008, and this brought about America’s second Reconstruction. But this Reconstruction had a significant and tragic flaw that the first did not, namely: the Democratic Party did not have an explicit Reconstruction agenda or know that they were in America’s second Reconstruction.
For the Left, Obama’s presidency symbolized what they mistakenly believed was the inevitable progress of this nation. They viewed his ascension as proof that “the moral arc of the universe bends towards justice.” His presidency led many Americans to believe that it was inevitable that we would have a female president and impossible that someone like Trump could ever become president.
For eight years, the American Left felt energized that they could reconstruct the United States into a more racially just, equitable, and free society devoid of ethnocidal division, but they still lacked a clear vision of what this looked like and ultimately retreated into a defensive posture as the attacks on President Obama and his efforts gradually escalated over the course of his two terms. The left’s lack of clarity and awareness also meant that they were ill-equipped at combatting the American Right which had responded to Obama’s ascent in a similar fashion as the redeemers of the 1860s and 1870s.
During Obama’s presidency, Republicans fiercely obstructed Obama’s agenda, they cultivated a narrative of delegitimizing America’s first Black president, they passed laws making it harder for people to vote, and predominantly-white militia groups spread throughout the nation and Republican politicians (especially Trump) collaborated with them. Additionally, they also catered to the race-based and economic sensibilities of low-income and low-education white voters to solidify their base. These are the same tactics as in the 1870s, when redeemer politicians with the help of white supremacist militias like the Ku Klux Klan, reclaimed control of the South in the elections of 1876.
The Right knew that they were fighting against Reconstruction, but the Left did not know that they were supposed to implement Reconstruction. One side was prepared for the battle and the other did not even know that a battle was taking place.
Trump’s victory in 2016 ushered in America’s second Regression, but it was short-lived. Joe Biden’s presidency offered the promise of continuing Reconstruction and ending Regression, but the failures of his presidency ushered in Trump’s victory in 2024 and now American Regression has returned.
Branding, Erasure, and Racial Division
At the end of Reconstruction, redeemers and former Confederates engaged in a large-scale agenda of branding, erasure, and racial division. This agenda is commonly known as the Lost Cause of the Confederacy, but limiting it to a singular title is far too reductive. Their agenda, according to them, consisted of preserving their ethnocidal culture, and in order to do so they had to brand themselves as heroes, erase any history that proclaimed otherwise, and destroy any laws or policies that undermined racial division.
This agenda is why Robert E. Lee is often described as a great military strategist, and Ulysses S. Grant is depicted as a mediocre, at best, general and a corrupt president. This is why Black Americans, and their supposed ignorance, were blamed for Reconstruction’s collapse. Redeemers would declare that Black people were not capable of living freely and managing the responsibilities of a democracy. Confederate traitors also became heroes, and monuments and landmarks were erected to celebrate their heroism against the Union. In 1891, New Orleans even erected a monument called “The Battle of Liberty Place,” to celebrate the Confederates who overthrew the state government during Reconstruction in 1874. That monument rested in the center of town until it was finally removed in 2017.
American military bases were even named after Confederate soldiers, and redeemers also wanted a Confederate or Southern president on our money. Andrew Jackson is still on our money today, and redeemers lobbied for his face on our money.
Likewise, even the narrative regarding the cause and motivations of the Civil War shifted. The fact that the South started the Civil War became a minor footnote, and Southerners even colloquially renamed the Civil War as “the War of Northern Aggression.” The North became the aggressor despite the South instigating the war. Additionally, Southerners began claiming that the war was not over slavery, but over “states rights.”
These narratives influenced American education from grade school through university and shaped government policy and the courts throughout the 20th Century and continuing today. The theory of “separate but equal” was actually first used in 1873 in the Supreme Court case Railroad Company v. Brown when a Black woman named Katherine Brown was denied service on the train due to the color of her skin. The railroad company argued that they had specific accommodations for Black customers, but in 1873, the Supreme Court ruled that separate accommodations due to race were unconstitutional.
However, after 20 years of redeemer rhetoric, the American judiciary had regressed to such a profound extent that what was unconstitutional in 1873 had become constitutional in 1896.
America’s second Regression will follow the same trajectory and the regression of the judiciary is already well underway. The overturning of Roe v. Wade and the end of affirmative action are just two examples. We should not be surprised if our conservative-led Supreme Court also decides that birthright citizenship, gay marriage, or interracial marriage are unconstitutional and should be left to the states. These were the arguments in the 1800s and they are the same arguments that conservative regressors are using today.
As Trump implements a regression that he will brand as “greatness” or MAGA, we should anticipate the destruction of programs and policies that help people of color. Also, Democrats and especially those of color will be branded as incompetent failures that should be shunned. And as they normalize the demonization of good things, we will see America’s new regressors celebrate the January 6 attackers and proclaim that we have a patriotic duty to erect a statue on the grounds of the U.S. Capitol commemorating these “heroes.” Trump has already pardoned the January 6th rioters, and as the regressive branding (and potentially America’s history books) will say, “Trump liberated the heroes of the January 6th revolution from the tyrannical oppression of liberal Democrats.”
Additionally, it will also become patriotic to rename countless buildings after Donald Trump and to put his face on our currency. Trump will destroy the Department of Education and dismantle the Treasury, and then demand that schools get named after him and that his face should replace Abraham Lincoln’s on the $5 bill. As all of this regression occurs, the regressors will brand this era as a prosperous era defined by American greatness.
This might sound outlandish and farfetched, but all of this has happened before and if we do not pay attention and learn from history, it will happen again.