Restoring American democracy won't be easy. At least we know what won't work

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Restoring American democracy won’t be easy. At least we know what won’t work
Joe Biden tried to "turn the page" on Trumpism, and it failed. We need deep structural change

By Mike Lofgren
Contributing Writer
Published May 18, 2026 9:00AM (EDT)


(Salon) At least some of the illusions of Donald Trump’s first term are gone. One hears very little of the then-prevalent chatter, coming mostly from the pundit class, about institutional “guardrails.” If they existed at all, those guardrails were constructed of papier-mâché. We are reminded of the quote by Britain’s first U.N. ambassador, Alexander Cadogan, when reflecting on mid-20th-century totalitarianism: “What forces itself to one’s attention is the degree to which everything favours the evildoer, if he is blatant enough.”

Should electoral democracy survive the next three years and more humane and decent people be charged with running the government, what can they do to reinstitutionalize democracy, or, more simply, to Trump-proof the political system? We know what won’t work: back to normal, return to the status quo, “turning the page.” That’s what Joe Biden tried to do, possibly with the advice of the same political consultants who have turned the cliché about “kitchen table issues” into a tiresome mantra. While Biden’s instincts were honorable, he, along with other administration actors like Attorney General Merrick Garland, were wrong. It couldn’t work; the status quo ante to which they wanted to return was riddled with the same flaws that led inexorably to Trump in the first place.

Public advocates like former federal judge J. Michael Luttig, journalist and historian Anne Applebaum, and university scholars Steven Levitsky and Kim Scheppele, have argued that a post-Trump America requires fundamental political reform to counter what they describe as a “fast slide into competitive authoritarianism,” whereby elections are maintained, however rigged they may be, and are accompanied by the erosion of democratic checks, institutional norms and a politically neutral civil service. Political writer and editor Josh Marshall has called for “a new civic contract” for post-Trump America; others have advocated a New Deal for the 21st century.

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Rebuilding a democracy that can defend itself

Americans who cherish the rule of law and common decency might want to consider whether their venerable institutions — given constitutional decay, a partisan high court and the way powerful defendants with unlimited funds can run out the clock on statutes of limitations — are up to reestablishing a functioning democracy that will not teeter on the brink of dissolution every few years. Are innovations as bold as the Nuremberg Tribunal necessary to restore the republic? ..............(more)

https://www.salon.com/2026/05/18/restoring-american-democracy-wont-be-easy-at-least-we-know-what-wont-work/