I’m working on putting together an online American government course intended for homeschoolers and adult learners – think high school senior AP class that would look like a college freshman class – and my research on the Reconstruction era got me into The Rise and Fall of the Second American Republic, by Manisha Sinha. The title borrows from Shirer’s The Collapse of the Third Republic, an examination of the fall of France to the Nazis in 1940. This framing of French history refers to the series of democratic (more or less) revolutions that ended monarchies and established something resembling parliamentary democracy.

Sinha frames American history in a similar way without the monarchy part, with the First Republic established by the original Constitution and the Second Republic she refers to coming through Reconstruction and the Reconstruction Amendments ratified after the Civil War ended in Confederate defeat. I’ll try to write a more comprehensive review once I’ve read the book, but the short version of her argument as I understand it now is that Reconstruction established, for a time, a true multi-ethnic democratic republic based on the abolition of slavery. In her reading reconstruction also opened a pathway for women’s suffrage and greater independence from husbands and fathers, in part at least as a result of the role women played in the abolition movement. Sadly, this Republic died at the hands of Black Codes, Jim Crow laws, and segregation.

This has me wondering if we can usefully frame American politics today as the imminent fall of a Third American Republic which came to life as the Great Depression gave birth to new ways of thinking about and regulating capitalism. World War II and its aftermath drastically changed America’s international social role as well as creating the conditions for expanding minority and women’s rights. Think Rosie the Riveter and the claim that serving during the war gave black people and other minorities to the American Dream of true freedom. It seems to me that the Conservative project to end this regime and reestablish pre-1940s social roles amounts to the destruction of a Third Republic and the establishment of a Fourth.

Conservatives have given us the blueprint for this next iteration of the American Experiment with Project 2025 and other documents. It’s not difficult to find a tracker that lists the goals of this effort and their progress so far, and I’ll say more about the specifics in future posts. For now I’ll just say that the reactionary movement behind this project appears to have achieved the ability to accomplish most of their goals with the capture of the US Supreme Court since Trump’s first term. The broad outline looks like an ur-fascist movement (to borrow Umberto Eco’s term) intended to establish an oligarchy in the US. Eco outlined 14 “features” of fascism that he says cannot be organized into a system but any of which can “allow fascism to coagulate around it.” The Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement aligns very closely with these features, and displays all of them in one form or another.

The MAGA movement has formed a cult of tradition around the nuclear family and a preference for factory work as the key to the economy. It rejects modernism and science of all kinds, particularly vaccine and climate/environmental science. MAGA leaders create the conditions for fear of outsiders (e.g., claiming immigrants kidnap and eat pets) and center their social identity on citizenship and patriotism. They appeal to a frustrated middle class by making them feel humiliated by “liberal elites” who they say mock them and don’t seem to cherish their privileges. Life is permanent (economic) warfare, only the strong deserve to survive, and pacifism (rejection of unregulated capitalism) and disagreement is treason. Because life is a constant struggle, masculinity is prized, everyone is taught they can be a hero through gun culture, and alternate forms of sexuality must be repressed. Their leaders undermine the education system to limit the instruments and space for complex and critical reasoning so they can themselves interpret the popular will without regard to whether individuals wish to dissent.

This is fascism all the way down, and the basis for the Fourth Republic today’s conservatives want to construct in the US. Those who wish to push back will need to think about the various MAGA factions and their motives. These include Christian nationalists who wish to create a government guided by Biblical principles as interpreted by evangelical leaders who fly around in private jets. It includes the super wealthy billionaires who believe that their ability to amass obscene wealth by meeting specific market needs demonstrates the ability to solve problems outside their area of expertise and have a need to protect the wealth they have amassed and the power that flows from it. Reactionary Americans who resent social change and fear a community that can openly flout their preferred social and sexual norms make up much of the base.

The problem is that once established – and the Fourth American Republic is all but in place now – regimes tend to survive until great social upheaval brings them down. The Civil War ended the First American Republic, and the Great Depression ended the Third. Popular sentiment, albeit a sentiment based on acceptance of segregation and oppression, ended the Second Republic discussed in Sinha’s book. What will it take to end the Fourth?