Race and American Democracy: From Racial Division to Democratic Rupture

• In Event: Inequality and America's Fragile Democracy

Abstract

In a foundational 1970 article, Dankwart Rustow proposed that there was but one precondition for democracy to emerge and endure: national unity, or broad agreement about the boundaries of the political community. Without that agreement about who may participate in democratic prodedures, citizens cannot rely on those procedures to generate democratic outcomes. In the American context, since the founding, conflict over civic membership and status has been shaped profoundly by the racial structure of American society. Dominated by the background of slavery and a century of post-emancipation repression, the history of American racial division has shaped electoral and policymaking institutions, party alignments and strategy, mass popular opinion, and the stakes for inclusive and participatory policy. Critically, race is perhaps the critical axis of conflict about civic membership and status in American politics, and is therefore central to the national unity that Rustow considered the sole precondition for democracy.

This paper will use Rustow’s insight to examine the extent to which American democracy was threatened by conflict over racial inclusion and exclusion, focusing particularly on two nineteenth-century episodes: the crisis over slavery in the 1850s and the de-democratization of the South at the turn of the twentieth century. While other factors kept race out of the political debate in the United States in the country’s first decades, in the 1850s, the slavery question could no longer be contained. Untrammeled sectional conflict, secession, and, ultimately, a bloody and destructive civil war followed. Today we remember that conflict for its aim to preserve democratic government and, ultimately, to extend democratic rights. Yet the process of fighting the war entailed the growth of federal government power and the dramatic suppression of civil liberties, albeit on a temporary basis.

The aftermath of the Civil War brought significant democratic gains including voting rights for freed slaves and their descendants. Yet by the late nineteenth century, racial conflict was once again at the center of a challenge to American democracy. The former Confederate states systematically began to roll back the citizenship rights of African-Americans and to reimpose a system of repression and segregation, with the acquiescence and even the approbation of the federal government. The forcible removal of an entire people from the boundaries of the nation’s supposedly democratic political community, which ended in the violent disenfranchisement of black voters in Georgia in 1907, amounted to one of the broadest and most consequential reversals of political democracy in the history of the world.

Not until well into the twentieth century did the country finally confront and begin to reverse the damage done to American democracy in this period. We still live with the consequences of this profound democratic reversal, as is evident in the contemporary resurgence of racism and white nationalism and the stubborn persistence of racial inequality and conflict.

Author

• Robert C. Lieberman, Johns Hopkins University