US democracy has repaired itself before. Here’s how we can do it again.

Donald Trump is not forever.

There will be an after. It’s hard to see from the present, where everything feels frozen in place. But from history’s vantage, change is the only constant. American democracy has been remade several times — dramatically, unexpectedly, and often in ways that looked impossible until they arrived.

The question is not whether reform is coming. It’s what kind of reform.

Underneath the paralysis, pressure is rising: institutional distrust at historic lows, economic dislocation spreading, AI transforming work, and a generation increasingly locked out of housing, economic security, and political influence. The parties can’t process any of this. They’re locked in battle with each other, fighting the last war.

Gridlock may look like stability; it is actually brittleness. Eventually, it will crack. In some places, it already has. A new generation will pick up the pieces and build something new. In some places, they already are.

That’s the history of American democracy. And it is about to continue.

Political systems, like humans, are change-averse. Most of the time, the status quo prevails. After all, those in power have the most to lose from any new alternative. They know the current rules. They’ve mastered them. The old rules put them in power. Why would they want new ones?

The outsiders are always the ones who demand change. But outsider energy alone rarely succeeds. Reform movements break through when ambitious insiders start to see that the climate is changing and decide to grow new lungs before the old ones become useless.

History is full of examples. Theodore Roosevelt was an establishment party man until he wasn’t. Lyndon B. Johnson was a master of the Senate and a Southern politician until he became the president who pushed through civil rights over the objections of his own filibustering former colleagues.

This, then, is the repeated pattern of American political reform: After a long period of stasis, the political system begins to falter. Outsider pressure builds. The old order loses legitimacy. New energy gathers behind new demands. New media disrupts the old landscape. A new generation challenges an older generation that has been in power for too long.

Eventually, enough insiders switch sides to make a reform majority. The system adapts — slowly, then all at once. It happens every 60 years or so. The 1770s, the 1830s, the 1900s, the 1960s — and now, perhaps, the 2020s.

Huntington identified a tension at the heart of American political culture. The American creed — liberty, equality, individualism, democracy, the rule of law — is fundamentally anti-power. But governing requires power. This creates a permanent gap between American ideals and American institutions. Huntington called it the “IvI gap”: ideals vs. institutions.

Most of the time, Americans tolerate this gap. We’re busy. We’re cynical. We’ve learned to live with the distance between what we profess and what we practice. Change feels too hard, too unlikely, too much work.

But periodically — roughly every 60 years — tolerance collapses. The gap becomes intolerable. Americans enter what Huntington called a “creedal passion period”: an era of moral intensity, institutional questioning, and demands for reform. The 1770s (revolution). The 1830s (Jacksonian populist enfranchisement). The 1900s (the Progressive Era). The 1960s.

The reform ethos is both backward-looking and forward-looking — conservative and progressive at once.

Huntington offered a metaphor: political earthquakes. “Stresses and strains develop along the major political fault line,” he wrote, “until a political earthquake occurs, releases the tension, and produces a new equilibrium.”

The system survives these earthquakes. American democracy has weathered four creedal passion periods and emerged transformed — and, in important respects, more democratic.

But Huntington also offered a warning. “The cry is reform,” he wrote, “the result is realignment.” Reform movements don’t just fix problems. They redistribute power. The reforms of one generation become the vested interests of the next. Direct primaries, created to democratize candidate selection, gave us the primary system we’re now trying to reform.

The institutions that reformers create “reflect one constellation of political interests and purposes,” Huntington wrote. They’re built by temporary coalitions, moments of passion and mobilization. When that moment passes, the reforms become less effective, even counterproductive. They “lack a well-organized constituency to sustain and protect them.”

Reforms have enthusiasm, but enthusiasm fades. Organization endures.

The Progressive Era is the closest analog to our current moment, so close that the parallels can feel like a taunt, or a promise. It’s worth lingering there, to understand how reform eventually comes, even (especially?) when politics feel stuck and stagnant.

The early 1890s looked a lot like today. By the quantitative measures political scientists use, the Gilded Age was one of the most polarized periods in American history. Party-line voting in Congress exceeded anything we’ve seen until recently. Elections were knife-edge affairs, bitterly contested, decided by tiny margins.

And the parties were fighting the last war. Politics was about group loyalties — regional, ethnic, cultural — not policy. Republicans waved the “bloody shirt” of the Civil War. Democrats were the party of “Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion.”

Meanwhile, corporate consolidation was remaking the economy — and the parties couldn’t process it. Railroads were the transformative technology of the age, reshaping commerce, enriching a few men to cartoonish degrees, leaving everyone else to adapt or be crushed. The “money power” seemed to control everything. But the two parties, locked in their zero-sum warfare over Civil War grievances, had no answers. Congress passed the the Interstate Commerce Act (1887) and the Sherman Antitrust Act (1890), but neither party made enforcement a priority, and the courts gutted both The pressure accumulated.

Reform energy was building outside the major parties. In 1892, the People’s Party — the Populists — won outright pluralities in four states. But Populism was regional, agrarian, easily dismissed by the establishment as a fever of the plains. It wasn’t enough to break the system on its own.

Then the Panic of 1893 hit — and validated everything the Populists had warned about. Banks failed, farms foreclosed, cities went insolvent. There was no polling then, but the wrong track/right track numbers were surely hell.

The crisis broadened discontent beyond the agrarian periphery and into the urban middle class, where professionals and reformers who had once dismissed Populist rhetoric now found themselves asking the same questions.

The refusal to bend invited demands to break.

The old order could not hold. The parties could not keep fighting about the Civil War while the industrial economy remade society. Something had to give — and eventually, it did. Political reform became the way to fight back: the public interest against the special interest, citizens against machines.

What emerged was not a single great crusade but a scramble of overlapping fights that confused old party lines and old class allegiances.

The unifying conviction was that the political system itself was the problem. Purify the procedures, and democratic outcomes would follow. If parties were corrupt, bypass them with direct primaries. If senators were creatures of state legislatures and the corporations that controlled them, elect them directly. If ballots were printed by parties and cast in public, replace them with secret government-printed “Australian” ballots. If legislatures were unresponsive, give citizens the initiative, referendum, and recall. If patronage was the currency of machine politics, replace it with civil service.

The reforms needed champions — insiders willing to break with their own establishment. In Wisconsin, Robert La Follette built the “Wisconsin Idea,” turning his state into a laboratory for direct democracy and expert administration. At the national level, Roosevelt became the essential figure: an establishment man who recognized the climate was changing and channeled outsider fury into his “Square Deal” — changes the system could absorb without shattering.

The ferment produced constitutional change. In 1913, two amendments were ratified within months of each other.

The 16th Amendment authorized the federal income tax — a direct assault on the plutocracy, forcing the wealthy to fund the government they had long controlled. The 17th Amendment required the direct election of senators, bypassing the state legislatures that corporations had learned to manipulate. These were structural attacks on concentrated power, written into the nation’s fundamental law.

Women’s suffrage followed in 1920, after decades of organizing — an expansion of the franchise that reformers had long demanded.

Four constitutional amendments in seven years (including, yes, Prohibition, a reminder that reform energy doesn’t always flow in benign directions.). Imagine something like that happening again.

By the 1920s, reform energy had dissipated — and darker currents filled the vacuum. The same moralizing fervor that produced Prohibition fed nativist restrictions on immigration. The Ku Klux Klan resurged. The crusading spirit curdled into reaction. Reform eras don’t end cleanly; they exhaust themselves, and what follows is not always what reformers intended.

The Progressive legacy was mixed in other ways too. The organized forces reformers had tried to smash reorganized, eventually, under the new rules. Corporations adapted to regulation; machines found new levers. And the reforms themselves carried a flaw their architects never resolved. Progressives never had a real theory of power. They put too much faith in public participation and disinterested administration, assuming that if you opened the process, virtuous citizens would flood in. Instead, hollow parties got captured by whoever was already organized.

The reforms of one generation became the vested interests of the next.

By the late 1950s, the old battles seemed settled. The parties had converged on a liberal consensus — welfare state, mixed economy, Cold War anti-communism — and politics had become technocratic management of a basically solved system. The great questions were answered; all that remained was administration.

But consensus breeds its own opposition. A new generation — raised in postwar prosperity, coming of age under the threat of nuclear annihilation — looked at their parents’ settlement and found it hollow.

The civil rights movement exposed a government that had tolerated segregation for a century. Vietnam exposed a government that lied to its own citizens. The military-industrial complex that Dwight D. Eisenhower had warned against seemed to run on its own logic, unaccountable to democratic control.

To young activists, the political system looked smug and self-satisfied. The technocrats had solved everything — except the question of whether what they had built was legitimate.

Civil rights became the breakthrough. The movement had been building for decades, but what translated moral witness into legislative victory was a convergence of forces: the strategic brilliance and moral clarity of Martin Luther King Jr., whose campaigns in Birmingham and Selma broadcast the brutality of segregation into living rooms across the nation; and Johnson himself, a master of the Senate who decided to spend every chip he had accumulated over 30 years in Congress on the cause his Southern colleagues despised.

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 were not inevitable. They required outsider pressure and insider champions willing to break with their own coalition.

But the civil rights victories didn’t relieve the pressure — they raised expectations. And then everything broke at once.

In 1968, King was assassinated in April and Robert F. Kennedy in June; riots engulfed the cities; the Vietnam War ground on. At the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, antiwar protesters fought police in the streets while inside the hall, party bosses nominated Vice President Hubert Humphrey — a candidate who had not won a single primary (though, to be fair, he didn’t lose any primaries either; he just skipped them entirely).

The chasm between the party’s activist base and its leadership was now undeniable, and Richard Nixon used it to propel himself to the White House. The old order had cracked open, and the question became what would replace it.

What followed was another wave of ambitious process reform, driven by the same conviction that had animated the Progressives: The system itself was the problem, and opening it up would fix it.

The McGovern-Fraser Commission rewrote the rules of presidential nominations, replacing backroom deals with primaries and caucuses, open to all who showed up — if the bosses couldn’t be trusted, let the voters decide directly.

The Freedom of Information Act was strengthened, giving citizens new tools to see what their government was doing.

After Watergate revealed the corruption at the heart of the Nixon White House, campaign finance reforms followed.

Like the Progressives, the reformers of the 1960s and ’70s achieved real things that had seemed unimaginable until they happened. They expanded inclusion. They democratized nominations. They exposed the government to unprecedented transparency. They constrained executive power after a president had demonstrated how badly it could be abused.

But also like the Progressive reforms before them, the reforms of the 1960s and ’70s bore the seeds of their own undoing.

The campaign finance reforms were steadily dismantled by courts. The diffuse “public” the reformers imagined never materialized; the well-organized and well-resourced won.

And the primaries that reformers championed shifted power from party leaders to whoever could raise money or command media attention. Without strong parties to vet candidates and enforce norms, the door opened for outsiders with no loyalty to the system — and, eventually, no loyalty to democracy itself.

And now we may be back on the verge of another reform period. For almost two decades, we’ve been trapped in a two-party doom loop of escalating partisan trench warfare. Trump’s 2016 victory revealed a Republican Party held together by resentment more than vision — a coalition defined by what it hates, increasingly radical in its grievances, unable to articulate a governing program beyond owning the libs.

Democrats, meanwhile, have spent those same years as the anti-Trump party — which means their identity has been hostage to his. Joe Biden was the transitional figure who never transitioned anywhere, a restoration that restored nothing. And now Democrats find themselves running the same play against the same opponent — oppose, oppose, oppose, and wait for public opinion to swing back.

Meanwhile, new pressures accumulate with no political home. Economic inequality has returned to Gilded Age levels, and conspicuous consumption is once again on fire. Technology is remaking the economy faster than institutions can adapt. New media forms — podcasts and short social media videos — have given a whole generation of outsiders a whole new source of narrative power. The parties can’t process any of this. They’re too busy fighting each other.

The public knows something is wrong. When Pew Research Center asked whether the political system is working well, 4 percent said yes. In a New York Times/Sienna Poll; 55percent want major changes; 14 percent want to tear it down entirely. Eighty percent of voters say the United States is in a political crisis. A third of Americans now say the government is the US’s biggest problem, more than the economy.

Young Americans are the most frustrated — but they haven’t given up on democracy yet. Fifty-eight percent described Democrats negatively (“weak”), 56 percent described Republicans negatively (“corrupt”), and only 16 percent to 17 percent could muster anything positive for either. Among young people who are financially struggling, 70 percent say democracy is “in trouble or failed.”

Perhaps this is the chrysalis generation. Something is dissolving in there. What emerges won’t look like what went in.

They’re locked out of housing, burdened by debt, watching the climate destabilize while Washington argues about the same things it argued about when their parents were young. They’re not asking for better messaging or more inspiring candidates. They’re asking why the system can’t seem to do anything at all.

When Politico asked Americans whether “radical change” is necessary to make life better, 52 percent said yes. That sentiment cuts across party lines. The demand for transformation is there. The question is what form it will take.

Huntington’s 60-year creedal passion cycle suggests conditions are ripe; the last such period was the 1960s. But there’s another cycle converging. The Reagan regime — built on deregulation, tax cuts, and skepticism of government — is exhausted.

If the pattern holds, reform is coming. The question isn’t whether, but what kind.

Previous reformers held out hope that they could work around parties by directly engaging mass public participation. It was a natural instinct — the parties seemed corrupt, self-serving, obstacles to the popular will. If we could just remove the intermediaries, let the people speak directly through primaries and initiatives and referenda, then democracy would flourish.

It was a mistake. Reform movements face a recurring trade-off: inclusion vs. accountability. Open the process too wide, and nobody’s in charge — which means nobody can be held responsible when things go wrong. The Progressives got anti-corruption but reduced inclusion. The 1960s expanded participation but weakened governing capacity, making it harder for new leaders to take on concentrated power. No reform era has resolved this tension, because none changed the two-party system that produces it.

Democracy at scale requires structure. Someone has to aggregate preferences, mobilize voters, vet candidates, broker compromises. That’s what parties do. When you try to remove them from the equation, you don’t get direct democracy. You get a vacuum — and the existing organized forces rush to fill it. The parties adapted and survived, but hollowed out. And hollow parties can’t deliver on the reformers’ original instinct: empowering new leaders to challenge entrenched interests.

Winner-take-all elections mechanically produce two parties. Any third force either gets absorbed or destroyed. The two mega-organizations persist no matter how dysfunctional they become, because they don’t need to be good. They just need to be less unpopular than the other one.

This creates a deeper dysfunction than mere incompetence. The coalitions are too broad, held together only by negative partisanship — by shared hatred of the other side rather than shared commitment to anything. The instinct is to leave problems unresolved, because unresolved problems are electoral weapons. Immigration, health care, housing, the debt — these fester not despite the two-party system but because of it.

This is a tough time for democracies everywhere. But European multiparty systems are adapting — old parties fade, new ones emerge, coalitions reconfigure. In America, the pressure just builds. We are distinctly dysfunctional not because Americans are uniquely polarized, but because our electoral system is uniquely rigid.

We are not short on ideas for how to reform democracy. Proportional representation, in which legislative seats are allocated in proportion to vote share rather than winner-take-all, would let more than two parties win seats, breaking the two-party doom loop at its source. Fusion voting would let new parties cross-endorse candidates and build power without acting as spoilers. Expanding the House, frozen at 435 members since 1929, would make districts smaller and representatives closer to the people they serve. These are just a few — there are many others, from the granular to the grand, that are worth pursuing.

There will be an after. There always is. The Gilded Age ended. The boss system ended. The Solid Jim Crow South gave way to voting rights. This era of dysfunction and discontent will end too. The real question is: What comes next?

This story was supported by a grant from Protect Democracy. Vox had full discretion over the content of this reporting.