Towards a Third Reconstruction

This article was previously published as part of The Reconstruction Papers. The entire book is available in print and as a PDF.

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The Trump administration, and the broader conservative movement that swept Trump into power, is a segregationist movement bent on hobbling non-white political power.¹ The administration has attempted to destroy or undermine the post-Civil Rights era reforms that, for the first time, made the country a multiracial democracy and led to substantive—if incomplete—integration in schools and workplaces.²

Dismantling Civil Rights protections is one of the administration’s top priorities. On the second day of his second term, President Trump rescinded a Johnson era Executive Order banning discrimination among federal contractors. Nearly 70% of the lawyers in the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division have claimed that they will quit in response to the regimes’ decision to move away from Civil Rights enforcement and focus, instead, on alleged anti-white discrimination (a problem not supported by empirical evidence).³ The administration’s segregationist moves have been augmented by a series of Supreme Court decisions that are hostile to the racially ameliorative policies that helped to integrate the American mainstream. The Supreme Court banned affirmative action in higher education, a move that will reduce the number of students of color at highly selective universities. The downstream effects of ending affirmative action will ensure that the leadership of American organizations remains overwhelmingly white. In a series of decisions that threatens the very foundations of our young multi-racial democracy, the Supreme Court weakened, and then largely⁴ invalidated, the protections of the Voting Rights Act. Following the Louisiana v. Callais decision, Southern states such as Tennessee and Louisiana rushed to disenfranchise Black voters by eliminating majority minority districts. The resegregation of mainstream institutions has been coupled with a racialized immigration policy reminiscent of early 20th century restrictionism grounded in eugenicist notions of racial purity.

A hypothetical post-Trump Democratic trifecta designing a true multi-racial democracy needs to counter the administration’s all-of-government approach to segregation with a massive and comprehensive integration program. To do this, the trifecta should learn from the failures of the first post-Civil War Reconstruction and the second Reconstruction following the Civil Rights Movement. True multi-racial democracy should include a bold economic vision to counter the theft, plunder, and exclusion that has created relative nonwhite impoverishment. Democracy-enhancing anti-discrimination policies should be rethought and reinvigorated, using evidence-based policy to desegregate workplaces, schools, and universities. And if the Democratic Party hopes to survive, it should put voting rights at the center of their reconstruction agenda. Black voters are the most loyal part of the party’s base, and meeting Black voter’s legitimate representational needs is both pragmatic politics and the moral position. Beyond Black voters, the party is a broad multi-racial coalition whose long-term viability depends upon creating a shared political vision for coalition members.

Learning from the failures of Reconstruction

The Trump administration’s ability to so quickly reverse civil rights protections flows, in part, from America’s always tentative commitment to desegregation. Following the Civil War, the political and social flowering of Reconstruction led to an era of profound racial progress. Newly emancipated Black people were elected to Southern legislatures, started businesses, and created a system of public education across the region. The nation’s burgeoning multi-racial democracy was betrayed when northern whites tired of the cost of fighting for racial justice and federal troops were recalled from the South. Federal withdrawal allowed white supremacist mobs to carry the logic of their night-riding terrorism into Southern legislatures. Across the South, newly free Black Americans’ nascent liberties were snatched away as voting rights were rescinded. Without federal protection, the daily rituals of racial debasement known as Jim Crow forced Black folks to unfailingly defer to whites in public life. A near century of Jim Crow violence threatened the lives of any Black Americans who challenged their political disenfranchisement and economic exclusion.

The post-Civil Rights Movement reforms fared better than those following the First Reconstruction, as the signature policies of the era (voting rights, anti-discrimination policy, and affirmative action) lasted for the better part of a century. The post-Civil Rights era saw schools and businesses partially desegregated as anti-discrimination policies curtailed blatant exclusion. Affirmative action policies helped to create openings in elite spaces, allowing some Black Americans, and other Americans of color, to ascend to the pinnacles of the media, politics, and academy. In the abstract, whites largely supported equal opportunity and diversity, but research showed that this support was often conditional.⁵ But when it came to implementing policies that ensured desegregation was more than an ideal, such as bussing or enforcement of the Fair Housing Act, a “principal policy gap” emerged. Many whites resisted any desegregation policy that would institutionalize their stated commitment to integration.⁶ Finally, civil rights reforms left the architects of America’s institutional apartheid in power helping to pave the way for the re-emergence of segregationist policy in the federal government and across organizations.⁷

America’s prior attempts at reconstruction hold a sobering lesson for contemporary would-be architects of multi-racial democracy: some white Americans will never stop fighting against integration. The realization that some white resistance to integration is intractable should not induce despair. Rather, this recognition should inspire constant vigilance among activists and policy makers who understand that once accomplished, progressive policy achievement must be ruthlessly defended against anti-democratic movements attempting to find creative new ways to enforce racial hierarchies.

Forging a shared economic vision

A reconstruction agenda needs to forge a shared economic vision that rejects zero-sum thinking. Both popular and academic accounts often pit racial and economic justice against one another. In Black Reconstruction W. E. B. Du Bois showed how this zero-sum thinking helps to turn the Black and White working classes against one another, arguing that whites receive a “public and psychological wage” that grants them symbolic gains. Under Jim Crow this relative advantage allowed poor whites entry into parks, schools, jobs, and public accommodations on relatively equal grounds with their more economically secure co-ethnics.⁸ Scholars such as Heather McGhee and Jonathan Metzl show how this zero-sum thinking continues to shape social policy, leading to meagre social services and poor health outcomes for whites who support regressive policies that end up hurting everyone.⁹ McGhee names this process “drained pool politics,” after white communities who chose to pave over their neighborhood swimming pools rather than desegregating. McGhee notes that drained pool politics has typically left most whites worse off, as politicians and oligarchs who benefit from a divided broader polity prey on racial division to ensure no one gets universal healthcare or adequate social services.

Politicians following a reconstruction agenda can correct the analytic error of pitting race against class by recognizing that structural racism is a system of distribution that ultimately disadvantages both whites and people of color.¹⁰ Structural racism harms people of color through direct exclusion from jobs, schools, and voting. Indirectly, structural racism impacts whites through the destruction of social services like access to state sponsored healthcare and the broader safety net.¹¹

Scholars like Heather McGhee and Ian Haney López have called for a program combining messaging and policy that helps various groups understand how their economic and political fates are connected.¹² Sociologist Chandra Russo calls this strategy a race conscious materialism that aims to create a cross-racial coalition based upon mutual interest.¹³ Critically, developing this understanding of mutual interest helps to undermine the zero-sum racist thinking that leads some whites to vote for regressive policies. McGhee, López and Russo all recognize that a lasting multi-racial democracy needs to be grounded in a solidarity born of mutual interest and a shared vision of the good life. Concretely, a race conscious materialism would invest in policies that benefit a broad swath of the electorate without harming people of color. Perhaps counterintuitively, developing broad-based social policies will often disproportionately benefit nonwhites who have been systematically locked out of economic opportunity.

Reinvigorating anti-discrimination policy

Forging a shared economic vision should be coupled with strong anti-discrimination policy that Democrats are willing to expend political capital to enforce. Anti-discrimination policy with an ameliorative component such as affirmative action or reparations have been poorly supported throughout US history. After all, the Civil Rights Act (1964), The Voting Rights Act (1965), and the Fair Housing Act (1968) were only necessary because states and the federal government refused to enforce the 13th, 14th, and 15th constitutional amendments. A democratic trifecta should also recognize that anti-discrimination policy is economic policy. Locking Americans of color out of jobs, housing, and voting rights ensures relative economic deprivation.

The temporary success of Civil Rights era reforms should be a starting place for a revived set of policies that can lead to true integration. Anti-discrimination policies such as affirmative action were successful in partially integrating mainstream organizations, leading to the growth of the Black middle class. Integration was most successful in public sector work, where federal enforcement and oversight of anti-discrimination policy was the most robust.¹⁴ Perhaps counter-intuitively for progressives, the United States military is often considered a model of successful integration, as the organization couples skills-based promotion with an affirmative action policy that recognizes military readiness depends upon successful co-operation between majority and minority groups. Contrary to the Trump administration’s assertions that workplaces and universities are plagued by anti-white bias, the best experimental evidence shows that people of color are more likely to face hiring and housing discrimination.¹⁵

At the federal level, the Justice Department’s Civil Rights division should return to, and expand, its historic focus on protecting marginalized groups. Beyond reinstating various anti-discrimination enforcement mechanisms hobbled by the Trump administration, reformers should create facially neutral integration policies that disproportionately help people of color. So-called “race conscious,” anti-discrimination policies (such as affirmative action) are likely to be challenged in a legal environment warped by the Supreme Court’s hostility to integration, or any policy designed to help racially marginalized groups. The post-Civil War Supreme Court helped destroy the first Reconstruction by swatting down laws meant to protect the newly emancipated. Recognizing this history and current judicial hostility, integrationists should assume that court reform is a necessary pre-requisite for any lasting progress. The Court should serve—not thwart—multi-racial democracy.

Integrationist reforms could be race neutral in form, but disproportionately benefit racially marginalized groups. Senator Elizabeth Warren’s student loan plan—which became the model for President Biden’s plan—understood this principle. Warren’s policy analysts settled on the $40,000 debt relief target because it was the maximum amount of forgiveness that would provide substantial relief without increasing the Black/White wealth gap. Warren’s 40k provision did not make it into Biden’s plan, but his policy was still officially colorblind but designed with racial equity in mind. By focusing on Pell grant recipients, who are disproportionately people of color, Biden created a policy that lessened racial inequality in the burden of student loans (or at least didn’t increase it) allowing more students of color to complete college. Such race neutral policies have the ability to generate wide support among multiple groups by simultaneously distributing benefits broadly while disproportionately benefitting historically marginalized groups.

Corporations could adopt similar race neutral policies that don’t run afoul of the segregationist Supreme Court. Scholars committed to integration were often some of the most trenchant critics of failed diversity policies. These critiques were not because diversity policies supposedly discriminated against whites. Rather, many diversity polices were a kind of public relations exercise that did little to integrate organizations, especially as one moved up the hierarchy. Programs that helped de-segregate allowed managers hiring discretion, coupled with transparency around anti-discrimination policy. Recruiting from Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) or Hispanic Serving Institutions (HSIs) would allow for a colorblind policy that, because of the demographics of these organizations, would provide a surfeit of qualified candidates of color.¹⁶

Voting rights reforms

American democracy rests upon the Black vote. None of the above reforms will be possible if Black Americans are disenfranchised by the recent neutering of the Voting Rights Act. Given that rights flow from the ballot the mass disenfranchisement of Black Americans threatens the rights of all Americans. Once built, the repressive apparatuses of authoritarian states invariably spread, terrorizing ever larger swaths of the population. Jim Crow poll taxes disenfranchised some poor white voters, who were considered acceptable collateral damage by anti-democratic politicians. And the current raft of voter suppression policies, from voter ID laws that target college students to January 6th-like attempts to overturn elections, attempt to thwart the will of Black and White voters alike.

Voting rights experts have put forward a number of possible ways to reinvigorate American democracy, including calls for proportional representation that would end single member legislative districts and abolishing the Electoral College and electing the President by national popular vote.¹⁷ These reforms are no small task given that establishing proportional representation would require overturning the 1967 Uniform Congressional District Act and nixing the electoral college would take a Constitutional Amendment. Nonetheless, restoring multi-racial democracy requires bold, and difficult, reforms.

Proportional representation, which distributes legislative seats among multiple representatives relative to vote share, is a democracy enhancing reform that would better reflect on the ground politics and, to paraphrase the title of Lee Drutman’s 2020 book, help break the “two-party doom loop.”¹⁸ Like the economic reforms outlined above, it is in the collective self-interest of most voters to expand ballot access. Ending the Electoral College would rid the country of a counter-majoritarian relic that empowered the slave states and regularly sends the loser of the popular vote to the world’s most powerful executive office. Getting rid of the Electoral College would also move America into the ranks of peer democracies that directly elect their presidents.

America was pushed into its second nadir by a well-funded anti-democratic movement that spent several decades building the social and legal infrastructure of American fascism. Digging ourselves out of the competitive authoritarian pit will likely be a slow process. The first Reconstruction became a possibility after a bloody Civil War that more than a century and a half later, remains the nation’s most deadly conflict. The post-Civil Rights Movement Reconstruction was followed by a mass social uprising that convulsed the country and set the stage for endless reactionary culture war.

Nonetheless, the sacrifices (and occasional martyrdom) of pro-civil rights activists and thinkers who drove prior eras of reform provide both inspiration and a roadmap for creating lasting change. And because of their sacrifices, those of us interested in lasting multi-racial democracy have an easier task. Realizing the democratic vision of the Reconstruction amendments requires a strong multi-racial coalition united by shared economic interest, building upon and expanding evidence-based integration policies, and reforming the anti-democratic structures of electoral politics.

The Trump era has made it clear that his reactionary coalition is ruthless, willing to trash norms and convention to make the world a worse place. Pro-integration activists should be equally ruthless in their commitment to creating a full democracy.

1. Ray, Victor. 2025. “Eliminating DEI Isn’t Just Racist — It’s Segregationist.” The Emancipator, January 28.
2. Levitsky, Steven, and Daniel Ziblatt. 2018. How Democracies Die. Broadway Books.
3. Hannah-Jones, Nikole. 2025. “How Trump Upended 60 Years of Civil Rights in Two Months.” New York Times, June 27.
4. Ray, Victor. 2019. “Why So Many Organizations Stay White.” Harvard Business Review, November 19.
5. Warikoo, Natasha K. 2016. The Diversity Bargain: And Other Dilemmas of Race, Admissions, and Meritocracy at Elite Universities. University of Chicago Press.
6. Smith, Candis Watts, and Sarah Mayorga-Gallo. 2017. “The New Principle-Policy Gap: How Diversity Ideology Subverts Diversity Initiatives.” Sociological Perspectives 60 (5): 889–911.
7. Crenshaw, Kimberle, Neil Gotanda, Gary Peller, and Kendall Thomas, eds. 1996. Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings That Formed the Movement. The New Press.
8. Du Bois, W.E.B., and David Levering Lewis. 1998 [1935]. Black Reconstruction in America, 1860–1880. The Free Press.
9. McGhee, Heather. 2021. The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together. Random House Publishing Group. Metzl, Jonathan. 2018. Dying of Whiteness: How the Politics of Racial Resentment Is Killing America’s Heartland. New York: Basic Books.
10. Brown, Tyson H., Patricia Homan, and Victor Ray. 2025. "Advancing the Scientific Study of Structural Racism: Concepts, Measures, and Methods." Annual Review of Sociology.
11. Edin, Kathryn, and H. Luke Shaefer. 2016. $2.00 a Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America. Mariner Books.
12. López, Ian Haney. 2019. Merge Left: Fusing Race and Class, Winning Elections, and Saving America. The New Press.
13. Russo, Chandra. 2026. White Flank: Organizing White People for Racial Justice. Stanford University Press.
14. Wilson, William Julius. 1978. Declining Significance of Race: Blacks and Changing American Institutions. University of Chicago Press.
15. Pager, Devah, and Hana Shepherd. 2008. “The Sociology of Discrimination: Racial Discrimination in Employment, Housing, Credit, and Consumer Markets.” Annual Review of Sociology 34 (1): 181–209.
16. Dobbin, Frank, Daniel Schrage, and Alexandra Kalev. 2015. “Rage against the Iron Cage.” American Sociological Review 80 (5): 1014–44.
17. Levitsky, Steven, and Daniel Ziblatt. 2023. Tyranny of the Minority: How to Reverse an Authoritarian Turn, and Forge a Democracy for All. Penguin Books Limited.
18. Drutman, Lee. 2020. Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop: The Case for Multiparty Democracy in America. Oxford University Press.