Meltdown 2.0
Daniel Lazare argues that America's second catastrophe is historically bad
Since George Washington took office some 245 years ago, the United States has seen two great constitutional crises. One was secession, while the other was Donald Trump's 2024 election. How do they compare?
Quick answer: they don’t. This one is worse.
This no doubt seems counterintuitive given the sheer bloody awfulness of a civil war that claimed one American life in 40 and left an entire region in ruins. Given that no one has been killed as far as the latest crisis is concerned, the two events don’t seem to be in the same league. How can Meltdown 2.0 possibly be worse?
One reason is age. The U.S. constitutional structure was just 70-odd years old when secession began and, therefore, was not yet weighed down by tradition, ultra-legalism, and social decay. The South’s “original hope [was] that the Government would fall to pieces under the shock of their treason,” the historian Henry Adams observed a few years after Appomattox. Yet secession did the opposite, paradoxically, by freeing Radical Republicans to begin creating a new political structure that would be far more powerful and centralized. By the 1870s and 80s, the result was a new state that was stunning the world with its industrial might. Rather than killing the new republic, the Civil War was thus a salutary blow that, in good Nietzschean fashion, only made it stronger.
A century and a half later, the picture is very different. Rather than youthful and self-confident, the U.S. constitutional structure is decrepit and paralyzed. Inequality is soaring, Congress has been gridlocked for a generation, and rampant use of the filibuster allows senators representing a few million people each to hold up the rest of the country for ransom. Four years ago, Democrats were convinced that Trump was an aberration and that Joe Biden would soon return the country to normal. But now it’s clear that Biden was the aberration and that the system is resuming its “normal” course downward.
Democracy in America was never more than a crude facsimile. With its weighted voting, indirect elections, and dozens of separate chambers at both state and federal levels, America’s ancien régime resembled the Holy Roman Empire or the Venetian Republic (both of which existed when America was founded) far more than a modern democracy. But now that shopworn pseudo-democracy is disintegrating before Trump even takes office, a “hyper-presidential” authoritarian state is emerging in its place. If you want to know what that means, take a good look at Argentina under Juan Perón or the Philippines under Rodrigo Duterte. It’s not pretty.
Trump’s strategy has become increasingly clear since he started unveiling his cabinet picks early last week. Matt Gaetz for attorney general (subsequently withdrawn), Pete Hegseth for secretary of defense, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for secretary of health and human services — nominees like these were not merely shocking but deliberately shocking. They were designed to send senators a clear and unmistakable message that Trump doesn’t care what they think and that he will do as he pleases, no matter how outrageous. Immediately after, his transition team floated something even worse: a scheme to force the Senate into recess so that Trump could appoint such people to two-year terms each on his own authority.
Checks and balances were thus out the window. So were “advise and consent.” Eminent authorities were aghast. Matt Glassman, a constitutional expert at Georgetown, said Trump was “pushing the very boundaries of the separation of powers,” while Edward Whelan, holder of something called the Antonin Scalia chair in constitutional studies at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, accused Trump of “eviscerating” the Senate. They’re correct, of course, although it’s hard to think of anything more deserving of evisceration than Congress’s upper chamber. However, the important thing is that Trump is not the one causing checks and balances to collapse. Rather, they’re collapsing on their own.
Confirmation is a perfect example. With some 2,000 presidential appointments subject to Senate review, the system has metastasized over the years to the point where a process that once averaged 56.4 days under Reagan subsequently ballooned to 115 days — almost exactly double — during Trump’s first term. Corporate media outlets love it because it’s a scandal machine that spits out stories about sex, drinking, and tax dodging that inflate the bottom line. Investigators and lawyers love it, too, as do attention-seeking politicians desperate to pass themselves off as moral crusaders on behalf of all that is holy and true. But the more hypertrophied the process becomes, the more ordinary legislation grinds to a halt, which is why fed-up voters increasingly side with rightwing berserkers eager to take an ax to the entire mess.
So voters don’t care if Trump bypasses the robber barons on Capitol Hill. They like it, in fact, since they figure he has more democratic legitimacy by virtue of being chosen by the entire electorate as opposed to the tiny fragments that elect individual members of Congress. Although it’s not getting as much press, something similar is underway at the General Services Administration, the State Department, and the FBI. The Trump team is refusing to cooperate with the GSA, the super-agency in charge of presidential transitions, for two reasons. One is a conflict-of-interest agreement that Trump is hesitant to sign due to his diverse business interests. Another is that he’s still steaming about the thousands of emails from his 2016 transition team that the GSA turned over to special counsel Robert S. Mueller during Russiagate. (For the definitive article on that bizarre episode, see the three-part series that ex-New York Times investigative reporter Jeff Gerth published in the Columbia Journalism Review in January 2023.)
Trump refuses to use the State Department’s secure lines and official interpreters for his telephone chats with foreign heads of government out of the same concerns: The last time he allowed the State Department to listen in on his calls, anonymous staffers leaked the results to the press. As for the FBI, not only did top agents entrap Mike Flynn, Trump’s initial choice for national security adviser, in 2017 and force him out of office, but within months, the bureau was conferring with top Justice Department officials about using the 25th Amendment to force him out as well. Instead of relying on the FBI to vet Trump appointees, the transition team is doing it on its own.
“He should not trust the politicized and weaponized intelligence and law enforcement agencies that hobbled his presidency in the first time,” one pro-Trumper told the Washington Post. “It’s a hostile takeover on behalf of the American people.”
Thus, The White House is at war with Congress and with much of the executive branch. Its aim is a scorched-earth policy that will elevate the president high above official Washington so he can dictate to the survivors below. Whether or not Trump is “increasingly unhinged and unstable,” “a fascist,” or “a wannabe dictator,” to quote Nancy Pelosi, Kamala Harris, and Barack Obama respectively, it’s not his personal foibles that matter. Rather, it’s the structure. When a system is so unresponsive that it’s practically comatose, the upshot is an engraved invitation to the next strong man to step in and take over.
The U.S. constitutional system is thus tracing an arc from youthful self-confidence to senescence and decay. Where it was once able and willing to fight back so that “bristling lines of bayonets poured down from every township in the North” in defense of the Union, it now lacks any and all such ability. If it was more democratic, it would empower the people to respond rationally and democratically to the crisis by subjecting America’s decrepit 18th-century constitution to the overhaul it so obviously needs.
But thanks to the dysfunctional amending clause outlined in Article V, the Constitution is stopping them in their tracks. Unable to engage in effective self-government, voters are reduced to bringing in Trump. “America Hires a Strongman,” the Times declared the day after the election. The headline couldn’t have been more apt.
None of these are meant to be an argument in favor of passive acquiescence. On the contrary, the U.S. is entering a period of maximum danger. On Monday, for example, Trump confirmed that he will use the military as soon as he takes office to round up an estimated 11 million illegal aliens and begin herding them into detention camps. This means that soldiers and police will begin prowling through American neighborhoods in search of public enemies the way “callabos” once prowled through French or Dutch neighborhoods during World War II. If Gaetz becomes AG, legal recriminations will follow — not just against Joe Biden or Hillary Clinton, but against anti-Zionists and other leftists too. Hegseth, a self-proclaimed Christian crusader with pronounced fascist leanings, will encourage like-minded elements in the military, while an anti-vaxxer like RFK will wreak havoc with American health. Believe it or not, America’s highly flawed healthcare system is capable of getting worse, and Kennedy will see to it that it does.
All must be fought tooth and nail by the only force capable of giving Americans the democracy they deserve: the working class. It’s the only class with the social power and vision to do the job properly. But rather than defending an undemocratic constitution that paved the way for Trump in the first place, workers must mobilize in defense of democracy itself. This means defending immigrants, mobilizing against war, and, most importantly of all, pushing for a constituent assembly to create a new constitution to take the discredited old document’s place. This is not a constitutional convention as outlined in Article V, a thoroughly ineffectual body like all other efforts at constitutional reform. Instead, it’s something very different, a revolutionary body elected on the basis of one person, one vote, and strict proportional representation with full power to create a new democracy from the bottom.
If change is impossible within the existing constitutional confines, then the working class has no choice but to change it from without. There is no other alternative.
Henry Adams, The Great Secession Winter of 1860-61 and Other Essays (New York: Sagamore, 1958), 25.
Ibid., 31.