The fragility of American constitutionalism
By 
Eric Schickler has a brilliant essay about how Trump’s second term has shattered complacent assumptions about the resilience of the American constitutional order:
Critics of this constitutional structure pointed out its many flaws when it came to status quo biases, entrenched race- and gender-based exclusions, and minoritarian rule. But even as incisive a critic as Robert Dahl acknowledged that the U.S. republic had proven remarkably durable. Dahl argued, however, that this resilience owed less to the Constitution itself than to the pluralistic civil society that surrounded it. A complex society with power dispersed across many centers—businesses, unions, media, and universities among them—posed an extremely high hurdle for a would-be authoritarian leader.
Indeed, until recently, our formal institutions and civil society seemed to make the obstacles to constitutional breakdown so high that most scholars of American political institutions spent little time considering what such a transformation might look like. We thought we could take certain basic rules of the game for granted and study institutional politics within that structure.
That assumption is no longer tenable. The years since the rise of Donald Trump have provided ample demonstration that the sources of countervailing power in the American political system are far less durable than most scholars of American politics had assumed. A diverse set of supposed bulwarks against president-led authoritarianism—Congress, the courts, the party system, the American state, media, business, and universities—display a common pattern of deference to Donald Trump’s efforts to move the U.S. political system away from liberal democracy and toward a regime that looks more like Victor Orban’s Hungary.
In this essay, I grapple with lessons about the workings of American political institutions that we can take from Trump’s interactions in three core areas: Congress, the American state, and civil society. The essay builds on the burgeoning literature on democratic breakdown that has emerged since Trump’s first administration, but it foregrounds developments in the first half of 2025. It is worth remembering that even toward the end of Trump’s first term, many political scientists viewed him as a relatively weak, ineffective president whose failures showed the resilience of American institutions. I suspect few would hold that view now. This shift does not mean Trump’s project will succeed; new regimes are not always consolidated. But it is very difficult to square the transformations that have already taken place with our prior understanding of American constitutionalism.
Dahl’s insight about the relative stability of American constitutionalism not being about the Constitution per se but about contingent facts about civil society is indeed particularly important here. The common assumption that it’s the Constitution doing the work probably helps to explain why so many elite institutions have quickly capitulated to Trump in his second term, even though his assertions that he was now a truly majoritarian leader have been quickly revealed as a mirage.
In his conclusion, Schickler observes that there is substantial precedent for authoritarian leadership in American political history, but the dangers of this kind of leadership at the national level are much more profound:
When I taught the Introduction to American politics undergraduate class at Berkeley in the early 2000s, I routinely showed the Ken Burns documentary on Huey Long, the Louisiana governor and senator from 1928 until he was assassinated in 1935, who created an enormously powerful, and at times lawless, political machine. The question posed to students was whether this could happen at the national level. Long was precisely the kind of leader feared by Madison. But even in the desperation of the Depression, it was highly unlikely that Long would become president—and if he did, the obstacles to him becoming a dictator seemed self-evident. The upshot was a (relatively) comforting message about the resilience of the constitutional system.
The Huey Long case, however, puts the meaning of Trump’s transformations in sharper relief. One can view Trump as a kind of modern political machine leader, one who uses the powers of his office to discipline both his congressional party and civil society actors. But the tools available as a modern president go way beyond the wildest imaginings of a Huey Long or the legendary Mayor Richard J. Daley and his political machine in Chicago from 1955 to his death in 1976. Unlike a state or local machine leader, the businesses in Trump’s territory do not have good exit options, and his tools to influence their bottom line are innumerable. The enforcement apparatus at Trump’s command, including a much strengthened Immigration and Customs Enforcement and immigration control bureaucracy, along with a highly politicized Justice Department, is well beyond the local law enforcement tools that a machine leader might count on for support. And most importantly, unlike a state or local machine leader, Trump is not embedded in a federal system with authoritative decision-makers above him. And he can overpower any state and local political—or armed—forces from below. The resulting potential for a democratic breakdown—something that very few political scientists anticipated fifteen years ago—is all too real today.
If there is any basis for optimism, it’s that the choices of the institutions of civil society remain contingent, and Trump’s cratering popularity may help to strengthen the resolve of the those that haven’t gone along while increasing the costs accrued to those who have. But his is a very dangerous place.