Franita Tolson to Jesse Wegman on Constitutional Reform and Political Violence

This passage in Jesse’s column reallly caught my eye:

The obvious example is the Civil War, which gets invoked with alarming frequency these days. I asked Ms. Tolson, the U.S.C. law professor, whether 21st-century America could avoid a similar fate on the path to a fairer and more inclusive democracy. “There may be a way to get there without 700,000 people dying, but there will not be a way to get there without violence,” she said. “The violence is already happening. Jan. 6 was a manifestation of the political dispute in our country right now, much like the country in 1859. The question is, how many people have to die before we decide who America will be in the next generation and next century?”

If all this sounds dark, that’s because it is. “Joe Biden’s presidency suggests that way more Americans endorse the vision that we are a democracy, but there are still a lot that will not embrace a democratic vision for this country,” Ms. Tolson said. “That suggests to me that we’re in trouble. And when you have a major political party supported by millions of people and they won’t endorse democracy, we might actually lose this one.”

At the same time, she held out hope. “There’s never been consistently one path” to reform, she said. I asked her what our own path might look like. “This is going to sound so pie in the sky, but you have to vote them out,” she said. “That’s the only thing politicians respond to, of either party. That’s the one universal truth of our system.” She pointed out that the past 50 years have been among the most stable in our country’s history. “That tricked most of us into thinking that American democracy was — I don’t want to say safe, but safe — even though it’s been under attack for years.”

If there is a silver lining, perhaps this is it — that no one is fooled anymore.

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