We are going back. We usually do.

Note: I’ve been out for a few weeks, but happy to be back on the blog. This piece is the basis for a talk I gave earlier this week at St. Olaf College in Northfield, MN.

Donald Trump will take office again in about 5 weeks, and much of the focus is on how his approach differs from past presidents. It’s important to keep track of norm violations and ways in which Trump approaches power with less restraint and respect for rule of law than his predecessors. But important clues about how this administration will wield power, and where those efforts might be most successful, may actually come from actions and political forces that aren’t so new.

Throughout Trump’s first term, comparisons to Richard Nixon and Andrew Johnson were not uncommon from historically-minded columnists. Despite claims that Trump’s victory in 2016 was unprecedented, there were some important parallels. Like Nixon, Trump rode a wave of racial backlash to the presidency. Like Johnson, Trump showed unusual and public levels of contempt for his political opponents. All three ended up facing impeachment crises, though only Nixon left office because of it, resigning before the proceedings reached the Senate. All three crises were related to election interference, and to the racial politics of their time, with African American legislators or their legislative allies among the strongest critics and earliest advocates for the constitutional remedy to these lawless presidencies.

Trump’s 2024 victory would seem, at first, to be much more dramatically without precedent. In addition to being only the second non-consecutive president elected, it seems like a radical departure for a twice-impeached president who has been indicted multiple times and even convicted, to return to office. And this is certainly true, but when we compare Trump to Johnson and Nixon, we can still see some similarities, despite Trump’s singular violations of both formal and informal rules. Andrew Johnson was saved from conviction by a single vote in the Senate and presided over intense violence and destruction in the South following the end of the Civil War. He died a U.S. Senator. Richard Nixon’s political career was over after his resignation – he had already staged a major comeback in winning the presidency. But he remained a figure in Republican circles, where significant efforts to rehabilitate his image were made, and leaders still valued his foreign policy input.

In these periods following a racial transformation and an impeachment, two tendencies have defined politics. One is for the country to move on as best it can, without really grappling with the disruptions that have occurred. The end of Reconstruction, the turn away from race issues and toward other concerns, Ford’s pardon of Nixon, are all part of this tendency. The other is that both parties run away from racial transformation, and toward reestablishing an order that contains some of the same problems as the last. The transformative party – the Republicans after the Civil War, and the Democrats after Civil Rights – moves decisively away from challenges to the racial hierarchy. The more conservative party embraces the backlash and does what it can to roll back federal involvement in creating or protecting racial change – through changing language, appointments to federal positions, and making decisions about how to enforce policy.

Neither Johnson nor Nixon were reelected president after their impeachment crises, of course. But after their racial backlash presidencies, the country moved backward, away from transformation. After Johnson left office in 1869, Republican presidents backed away from the commitments of Lincoln Republicanism. Ulysses S. Grant concluded that he could not feasibly use the force of the federal government to quash racial violence in the South, and proved unable to turn his words about enforcing the 15^th amendment into reality. By the time the 1876 election was resolved by the removal of federal troops from the South, ending Reconstruction, public attention had turned to the economy and away from the difficult work of resolving the questions raised by the Civil War. States enjoyed a great deal of latitude to enact racist laws and enable racist violence. By the 1880s, when our only other non-consecutive president, Grover Cleveland, was elected, economic and social concerns had channeled into anti-immigration (aimed especially at Chinese immigrants) sentiment that swept both parties.

The period after Nixon’s resignation is different, but also instructive. Eager to reconcile and move on, Nixon’s successor, Gerald Ford, pardoned him. Jimmy Carter, the first Democrat to serve as president after Lyndon Johnson firmly identified the party as the civil rights one, came into office with no particular civil rights plan or platform. By the end of his term, several civil rights leaders were so disappointed with Carter’s performance in office that they endorsed his opponent, Ronald Reagan.

Reagan won in 1980, and set the terms of the ensuing racial order. If Nixon made electoral hay of dog whistles like crime and “law and order,” Reagan elevated them to a mainstay of political rhetoric. His use of language like “welfare queen” and employment of racial stereotypes to undermine government programs is well-known, as is his opposition to affirmative action. What gets less attention now is the appointment of personnel to the Dept. of Justice who were lax if not openly hostile to some of the civil rights programs they were supposed to enforce. Race was central to Reagan’s project to dismantle as much of the New Deal as possible. That dismantling effort was incomplete. But the effort to tie government services with racial imagery was quite successful.

Now we face not a racially transformative party watering down its values, nor a racially conservative successor honing the message of the new era. Instead, the backlash leader – after impeachment and disgrace – will also shape the new era.

This election carries different significance from 2016, but we can draw a line from there to here. The Obama coalition, Obama’s rhetoric about race, and Obama’s mere existence in office carried the promise of a reconfiguration of social power in the United States. This transformation was broad and shallow compared with the end of slavery and the Civil Rights revolution. No constitutional changes on that level were in order. But Obama’s presidency offered the promise of a more direct conversation about race, a different way of thinking about immigrants and immigration, and new opportunities for women and LGBTQ Americans. Trump’s 2016 victory was a response to the instability this brought to both parties’ coalitions. It’s probably still too early for firm conclusions about exactly how the 2024 vote totals fit in – not clear whether we’re looking at durable realignments of key group in the electorate, or simply a standard anti-incumbent election. What we do know is that the electorate remains racially polarized, but in a complex way. The country has become significantly more diverse. Immigration has emerged as a major national issue, increasingly framed in ways that disadvantage Democrats as the party understood to be more racially liberal. Gender also matters, with more women than men favoring Democrats across all groups, even as the major shift among white women has never quite materialized.

As with the eras of slavery and Jim Crow, it looks increasingly like this new normal may not precisely match the one after Civil Rights, but there is certainly some rhyming. Like that era, it looks increasingly like this one will be politically competitive but with the terms of racial politics largely set by conservatives. This leaves the Democratic Party in a perpetual bind about how to respond, how to balance a multi-faceted racial politics landscape (where racial minorities, for example, are not necessarily more liberal on immigration issues), and how to incorporate an increasingly complex set of gender and sexuality related issues as well. The 2024 election carried the hope that broad rhetorical banners like “freedom” would unite these concerns. At least in the short term, they did not.

Instead, Democrats are left with newly fortified debates about how much to discuss “identity politics,” whether to abandon vulnerable citizens, and how to deal with the cultural preferences of various constituent groups. And whatever Democrats’ impulses to abandon or downplay these commitments, they do remain the party that stands for even limited challenges to traditionally exclusive area of power. In 2025, the Senate will have two Black women for the first time – both Democrats. A Democratic representative, Sarah McBride, will be the first transgender American to serve in Congress. The slow growth of a more diverse political class hasn’t been entirely driven by Democrats, but it has been lopsided.

In the light of their 2024 losses, these conversations among Democrats have a resigned and trapped feel to them. When Trump has designated Cabinet officials with records of criticizing “DEI” efforts and blaming diversity measures for any number of problems, it can feel like Democrats have few choices. But politicians always have choices, especially when they are strategizing for national elections that are years away. And the decisions in this period will determine a great deal.