We Need a Re-Founding
250 years into the American experiment, it’s time for the radical hope to imagine better.
“The…anniversary of our National Independence is close at hand; and…in spite of the recent aggressions of…power, it is about to be celebrated with the usual enthusiasm. What a pity, and…shame it is, that our Nation’s holiday, instead of being, as it should be, a renewing of a people’s vows in behalf of human liberty, should only exist as a stupendous monument of a nation’s inconsistency and disgrace.”1
Frederick Douglass wrote those words in 1856, but they could easily have been written this morning. I know I’m not alone in noting the hypocrisy of a people celebrating our nation’s founding principles at a time when those principles are eroding by the day.
Key voting rights protections have been reduced to ashes, in a grim and painful dismemberment of the Voting Rights Act that began 13 years ago with the Supreme Court’s decision in Shelby County v Holder, and received its most recent staggering blow eight weeks ago in Louisiana v Callais. The law, once heralded as the “crown jewel” of the civil rights movement, has now been rendered largely toothless by an extremist majority of the Supreme Court that has effectively abandoned the project of multiracial democracy.
Marginalized communities are being disenfranchised and disempowered in real time as a result of this administration’s ongoing campaign to purge from influence anyone who unsettles their narrow, distorted vision of who this country is for. LGBTQ-plus people. Immigrants. Young people demanding basic needs to thrive. Black people and, especially, Black women in power.
Trump is wielding grossly expanded executive authority not to serve the public, but to punish perceived political enemies; not to defend democracy, but to intimidate its guardians; not to govern a free people, but to persecute anyone who dares resist his corruption and openly white supremacist ideology.
The free press is under attack. Inconvenient facts are being scrubbed from the public record. Wealth disparities are ballooning.
How we got here is instructive and points the way out. Since our founding 250 years ago, our country has repeated a familiar pattern: bursts of progress followed by bouts of backlash. Enormous advancement followed by violent retrenchment.
The promise of Reconstruction followed by the pain of Jim Crow. The peaks of the Civil Rights Movement followed by the slow unraveling we’re living through today.
It’s worth remembering that in moments of past darkness we have triumphed not by moderating our opinions or softening our asks, but by dreaming big and daring boldly. Reconstruction — and the idea that Black people, just years removed from bondage, could become American citizens, could vote, could hold elected office — was a radical idea, until it wasn’t.
When everything in his lived experience taught him otherwise, Martin Luther King, Jr. dared to dream of a time when the content of one’s character mattered more than the color of one’s skin.
What we need now is that same radical hope and daring vision: a reimagining, a rebirth, a refounding. We cannot settle for half measures that nibble around the edges of our deep-rooted, structural problems. We cannot prop up without critique what remains of our tattered and flawed political system that carries forward vestiges of slavery in such consequential structures as the senate and the electoral college, for example. And, we cannot compromise with those who seek to destroy the very idea of equal rights and democracy.
As Lincoln observed on the eve of the Emancipation Proclamation, “broken eggs cannot be mended.”
No, instead we must build anew. We must create institutions that are accountable to the people — including a Supreme Court that is bound by exacting ethical standards and unwavering fidelity to justice and the rule of law. This starts with reforms like term limits, curbing the abuse of the emergency docket, and a close examination of the merits of court expansion.
We must overhaul our election system by expanding vote-by-mail options, limiting aggressive purges of voter rolls, codifying same-day and automatic voter registration, and ending the pernicious practice of racial and political gerrymandering. And we must begin socializing the use of alternative voting systems like ranked choice, instant runoff, and cumulative voting, which, with necessary investments in turnout, give voters more options to exercise their power to elect representatives of their choice.
And, most immediately, we must demand with our vote a Congress that actually legislates, instead of serving as a rubber stamp for a lawless, vindictive President. Reversing deep cuts to healthcare and food assistance, ending military terror of American cities, making Washington, DC the 51st state, imposing binding ethics on the Supreme Court, and restoring the key tenets of the Voting Rights Act that the Supreme Court has gutted are five things that the 120th Congress can and should do on day one of 2027.
That will be progress worth celebrating. And it is within our grasp. So, on this day, as we mark 250 years of nationhood, let’s mark it as Douglass urged us to do: by renewing our vows of liberty and by committing to the hard work of reimagining, rebuilding, and refounding.
Janai Nelson is the President and Director-Counsel of LDF (NAACP Legal Defense & Educational Fund, Inc.), the nation's first civil and human rights law organization.
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