The Republic Is Sick. The Diagnosis Is Contested. The Stakes Could Not Be Higher.
Two hundred and fifty years in, the United States is celebrating its birthday — but the party feels forced. Beneath the fireworks and the flags, a serious question is circulating among political scientists, constitutional scholars, and historians: is American democracy experiencing a treatable crisis, or something far more permanent?
The country that George Washington called the “great experiment” remains, by many measures, the dominant power on Earth. Its technology and financial sectors dwarf those of any competitor. Its military reach is unmatched. And yet income inequality has returned to Gilded Age levels, public trust in institutions has collapsed to historic lows, and a sitting president is openly enriching his family, prosecuting political opponents, and reshaping the executive branch in ways that would have alarmed the Founders who designed it.
This is not a story about partisan disagreement. It is a story about whether the structural mechanisms meant to prevent democratic backsliding are holding — and whether they can hold much longer.
From Promise to Fracture: How America Arrived Here
The republic did not arrive at this moment overnight. The story begins, as it always does, at the beginning.
When the constitutional system launched in 1789, it was already fragile. Shays’s Rebellion had nearly unraveled the Articles of Confederation just years before. The Whiskey Rebellion tested the new federal government’s authority almost immediately. The Civil War — the republic’s most catastrophic internal rupture — killed more than 600,000 Americans and was followed by a century of Jim Crow apartheid that mocked the Declaration’s promise of equality.
Then came the Great Depression, McCarthyism, and the political assassinations of the 1960s that cut down a president, a presidential candidate, and a civil rights leader within five years of each other. Each time, the republic bent. Each time, it did not break.
By January 2000, Americans’ satisfaction with the country’s direction had climbed to a near-record 69 percent, according to Gallup. The Cold War was won. The economy was booming. The political temperature, while never cool, had not yet reached its current fever.
Then came September 11. Then the financial crisis of 2008. Then the slow, grinding polarization that social media accelerated and economic precarity deepened. By January of this year, just 36 percent of Americans told Gallup they were satisfied with national conditions — the lowest figure since the survey began in 2001. Only 33 percent say they are “extremely proud” to be American, down from 55 percent a quarter-century ago.
The Collapse of Institutional Trust
The numbers are not abstract. They represent something structural.
As legal analyst Sarah Isgur documents in her new book, Last Branch Standing, the erosion of confidence spans every institution Americans once relied upon. Less than half of Americans now express confidence in the police, the medical system, or public schools. Less than a quarter trust labor unions, businesses, or the media. And fewer than one in ten trust Congress — the branch of government most directly accountable to the people who elect it.
The Supreme Court, Isgur argues, may be the only institution the Founders would still recognize. Yet even the high court has hemorrhaged public trust as its decisions increasingly track the ideological preferences of the justices who hand them down rather than any coherent constitutional logic.
This week, the Court upheld birthright citizenship — a genuine check on executive overreach. But the same court has granted the president sweeping authority over federal agencies that Congress designed to be at least partially independent. As attorney Deepak Gupta put it to the New York Times: “The headline might be ‘Court checks Trump,’ but the through line is a concentration of power towards the presidency, towards the court itself and away from Congress, federal agencies and voters.”
What the Experts Actually Say
Serious scholars of democracy are not given to panic. But they are not offering reassurance either.
Larry Diamond, a democracy expert at Stanford University, acknowledges that the United States has “never, since the launch of our constitutional system in 1789, had a president so corrupt, authoritarian, and abusive of democratic and constitutional norms as Trump.” But he stops short of a terminal diagnosis, pointing to the mobilization of civil society, repeated pushback from federal courts, and the Senate Republican majority’s refusal — so far — to eliminate the filibuster and hand Trump control over election rules nationwide.
Daniel Schlozman, a political scientist at Johns Hopkins University and co-author of The Hollow Parties, reaches for a different frame. “This is not 1861, and it’s probably not 1933, but it’s not great,” he says. The illness metaphor resonates with him precisely because the crisis is not acute but chronic — “the sort of things that come along with old age,” a slow degradation of the body politic’s capacity to cope with new strains.
Barbara F. Walter of UC San Diego, one of the country’s foremost scholars of civil war and violent extremism, goes further. She believes the United States has already entered what researchers call the “anocracy zone” — a hybrid of democracy and autocracy in which leaders incrementally accumulate power while quietly dismantling the checks designed to constrain them. That, she argues, is precisely the Trump formula.
Louis Michael Seidman of Georgetown University, author of The Constitution Cannot Save Us, frames the question starkly: “I view the survival of the republic as an open question.” Much, he says, depends on whether Trump moves to prevent fair elections from occurring. “I think it is almost certain that Trump will try to overturn the elections if he loses. It’s an open question whether he will succeed.”
The Historical Baseline: What Fallen Republics Actually Look Like
Historian Thomas Madden, whose new book The Fall of Republics traces democratic collapse from Carthage to Rome to the American constitutional moment, offers a more measured read — though not a comfortable one.
Trump, Madden notes, lost the popular vote in 2016 and 2020, and attracted just under 50 percent in 2024. January 6 was a destructive riot, but it did not suspend the transfer of power. The military has not intervened in civilian politics. Elections have not been cancelled. Political opponents have not been imprisoned or killed — though the rhetoric pointing in that direction has been unmistakable.
Based on his analysis of republics that did collapse, Madden identifies the warning signs that have not yet materialized in the United States:
What Madden does flag is the danger of hyper-partisanship born of relative comfort. “Without existential external enemies,” he warns, “the enemies become internal. A great deal of damage can be done to a republic when partisans cast their opponents as enemies of the state.” Trump has done exactly that, describing leading Democrats in precisely those terms.
Classical historian Edward Watts, author of Mortal Republic: How Rome Fell Into Tyranny, adds a longer view. Starting with Augustus, Roman emperors called themselves principes civitatis — “first citizens,” not kings — preserving the language of the republic long after its substance had been hollowed out. The illusion of democratic norms, Watts warns, can persist well past the point at which those norms have ceased to function.
The Politics of Correction — and Whether They Still Work
The deepest question is not whether the republic is sick. It plainly is. The question is whether the immune system still functions.
In the past, it has. Theodore Roosevelt broke up monopolies and reined in the Gilded Age’s most egregious concentrations of wealth. Franklin D. Roosevelt responded to the Great Depression with the New Deal — redistribution, regulation, and a reassertion of the state’s legitimate role in protecting working people. Both presidents faced fierce opposition from entrenched economic interests. Both ultimately prevailed, because the political system retained enough elasticity to absorb and respond to popular pressure.
That elasticity is now in doubt. The primary system systematically rewards ideological extremity, because primary electorates skew toward the most committed partisans. In 2016, Donald Trump won the Republican nomination with just under 45 percent of primary votes — which, given turnout, meant he was selected by roughly 6 percent of the total eligible electorate, or about 14 million voters out of 230 million eligible Americans, as Yale political scientist Ian Shapiro has calculated.
The Democratic Party faces its own version of this structural problem. Former Vice President Kamala Harris, the party’s most recent standard-bearer, appears to be positioning herself for a 2028 run by aligning with the party’s left flank — a signal that the primary incentive structure is pulling Democrats in a direction that may not serve the broader coalition they need to win.
Joe Biden’s presidency offered a partial model of what correction could look like. Responding to both Trumpian populism on the right and progressive pressure on the left, Biden assembled what became known as Bidenomics — industrial policy, green investment, and a trade posture that prioritized domestic workers over unfettered globalization. It was imperfect, and it borrowed some of Trump’s protectionist instincts. But it represented a genuine attempt to use state capacity to address economic grievance.
Biden’s decision to seek re-election at 81, and the manner in which his candidacy collapsed, effectively discredited that agenda along with his candidacy. The window he opened closed before anyone could fully walk through it.
Hamilton’s Warning, and What Comes Next
Alexander Hamilton saw this coming. In 1792, he wrote to George Washington that “the only path to a subversion of the republican system of the Country is, by flattering the prejudices of the people, and exciting their jealousies and apprehensions, to throw affairs into confusion, and bring on civil commotion. Tired at length of anarchy, or want of government, they may take shelter in the arms of monarchy.”
That letter is 233 years old. It describes the present moment with uncomfortable precision.
And yet the republic has not fallen. The courts are still functioning, however imperfectly. Civil society is mobilizing. The 2026 midterms will test whether the politics of correction retain any life. Diamond, for one, believes they do. “I think we will begin to see in the coming midterm elections a significant electoral reversal of this authoritarian trend,” he says. “It is at least as possible to argue that we are on the cusp of a new age of democratic reform as it is to wallow in democratic despair.”
Trump just turned 80. The republic he is working to dismantle is 250. Whether it outlasts him — and whether it emerges from this era with its democratic substance intact or merely its ceremonial shell — remains, as Seidman says, an open question. The answer will depend on whether Americans who believe in the state’s capacity to protect people, regulate power, and guarantee rights can build a politics capable of delivering on those beliefs before the window closes.
The fireworks will go up Saturday night regardless. The question is what they are celebrating.