For the past two years, I’ve heard various historical comparisons to the second Trump administration. To my colleague who grew up in Eastern Europe, it was to 20th century European fascism. To more than one colleague from Latin America, dictatorships of South American from the 1970s and 1980s.
To me, as an American historian, and to many others with a sensibility rooted in American history, we thought of the end of Reconstruction and the long corruption of disfranchisement, Jim Crow, lynching, and events like the 1898 coup in Wilmington, NC, 1921 attack on the Black wealth of Tulsa, Oklahoma, and the 1923 Rosewood massacre in Florida. I started telling those around me that given our own history, our job in this moment was to make the current episode of democratic backsliding as short and shallow as we could, and shorter and shallower than what followed Reconstruction.
I admitted it was a low bar.
Collectively, we have passed this test. This week, it may be tempting to see the results of the 2026 midterm elections as the primary evidence, but it started long before, in the plans of state attorneys general to file dozens of lawsuits against the Trump administration, in the mass protests that Indivisible and others organized beginning in spring 2025, in the hundreds of ordinary people like the Franciscans my mom and I met in Canada who stood witness in immigration courts while DHS played procedural games to deport peaceful immigrants, and in the thousands of ordinary people who organized locally to fight the cruel efforts of ICE officials in hundreds of communities, most visibly but not only in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area.
It was a low bar, and it was also hard. It will be harder to build back, to build anew, and to build for the future, but I have more hope today than I did two years ago.