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WILL WE HAVE AN 1854 MOMENT?  
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Van Gosse
May 31, 2025
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_ The point here is not to replicate a particular historical episode,
but rather to suggest the urgency of breaking with conventional
thinking about what is permissible. Lethargy and pusillanimity got us
into this mess in the first place. _

Harriet Tubman, John Brown and Frederick Douglass. , Smithsonian
Institution; Boston Athenaeum; New York Historical Society

 

This era of swarming authoritarianism and the destruction of the
administrative state amid partisan entropy reflects a basic
crisis.  One major party has been taken over by a semi-fascist
clique, while the other has collapsed upon itself, incapable of
offering systematic resistance.

To halt the slide into “illiberal democracy” as a veneer for
autocracy we need a concerted response, but the conversion of the
Republicans into a personalist cult and the Democrats’ decline into
a feeble rump blocks popular action.  How can we surmount these
barriers?

Although our contemporary predicament is in many ways unique, there is
a parallel in the sustained political crisis of the 1850s.  During
that chaotic decade, one major party (the Whigs) disintegrated; the
other (the Democrats) warred internally until splitting in two,
running competing candidates in 1860; finally, a new, potentially
revolutionary party (the Republicans) confronted the crisis
head-on.  We need an equivalent realignment now, a break-up of the
existing party system to create something fundamentally new under
whatever party name is most useful.

How can we get there?  What steps can we take to push events in that
direction, where a new partisan formation challenges the wannabe
fascists, Christian Nationalists, and seedy opportunists who have
taken over the Republican Party?

The first task is to take an axe to the GOP’s trunk, to force splits
and peel off as many as possible in the name of upholding democratic
and constitutional norms.  These moves should take two forms:  _ _

_First_, _we need to foment a schism._ Republican politicians in
Blue States (e.g. New England, New York, and along the West Coast)
should be systematically pressured to disassociate themselves from the
Trump machine and run for election as “Independent Republicans.”
Such a move will require the active cooperation of Democrats in those
states. The decisive step will come when those figures, if elected,
refuse to caucus with the MAGA diehards in their legislatures or
Congress. An example of what this could look like is Vermont Governor
Phil Scott, who publicly backed Biden in 2020 and Harris in 2024,
repeatedly wins re-election with over 70% of the vote, and is
emphatically his party’s main leader.  If he, Lisa Murkowski, and
even Susan Collins, were to formally break with what Murkowski calls
“the party of Trump,” it would send a signal._ _

_Second_, we need to break up the Red States.  Where Republicans
dominate, Democrats should seek out independents and dissident
Republicans to run hard against MAGA officeholders, along the lines of
Evan McMullin, who won almost 43% in Utah’s 2022 Senate race, or Dan
Osborn’s 47% in Nebraska’s 2024 Senate contest.  This is clearly
what Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (and also
Representative Ro Khanna) seek to whip up in their barnstorming
Republican-held districts. More power to them.

Neither of these strategies will work as just a few marquee runs,
however.  They need to happen at every level of our exceedingly
complex electoral system: county commissioners, mayors, city councils,
and state legislatures, to start notching up wins and build
momentum.  We cannot wait for November 2026, as if regained
Democratic congressional majorities are just low-hanging fruit, ready
to drop.  The work needs to happen how, so that state and local wins
intimidate fence-straddling Republicans into defecting; the
Republicans’ shocking loss in March of a “safe” state senate
seat in Lancaster County, PA is an example of how this process might
unfold.

The second task will be to anticipate when opportunities will suddenly
appear to break through the existing “good order.” Here are some
episodes that steadily built an antislavery electorate in the
antebellum North, and finally the emergence of a new party committed
to using every constitutional means to suppress the South’s
“peculiar institution”:

In 1842, the fiercely antislavery Ohio Whig Joshua Giddings was
censured by Congress after he defended rebellious slaves who had
seized the ship _Creole_ and taken it to freedom; he promptly
resigned, went home and won re-election with 95% of the vote, an
unalloyed triumph. _Who in Congress is willing to face censure and
demand re-election today?_

In 1850, the newly-elected Whig Senator from New York, William Seward,
gave a maiden speech declaring there was “a Higher Law than the
Constitution” and demanding, in the name of freedom, no more slave
states. His challenge to what was then called “the Slave Power”
anticipated the sudden emergence of the Republicans four years
later.  _Who will give such a speech today?_

In 1854, when a Democratic Congress passed the Kansas-Nebraska Act
permitting the extension of slavery into all of the western
territories, parties in the North came together on “Anti-Nebraska”
tickets, defeating dozens of Democrats in that fall’s election, and
laying the basis for the new party. _Where can we build bipartisan
Anti-Trump tickets?_ _And where can we recruit Independent
Republicans to primary the MAGA-ites? _

In 1857, after the Supreme Court issued its infamous _Dred
Scott_ decision authorizing slavery everywhere in the United States
and abrogating the citizenship free Black people enjoyed in parts of
the North, state legislatures and supreme courts in Maine, Vermont,
and Wisconsin nullified that decision.  _Which states today are
willing to stand up to not only the Trump Administration but whatever
permission the Supreme Court gives it?_

The point here is not to replicate a particular historical episode,
but rather to suggest the urgency of breaking with conventional
thinking about what is permissible. Lethargy and pusillanimity got us
into this mess in the first place.  Just think:  if in 2022 even a
handful of prominent Democrats had called out Joe Biden’s evident
infirmity, we might be facing a much better world now!

Unfortunately, it is now clear that any of the above strategies will
run up against the vested interests of a Democratic Party which, with
honorable exceptions, is committed to the disastrous course advocated
by that self-promoting hack, James Carville:  “Do Nothing.”
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The final task, therefore, is to challenge the stranglehold of
do-nothing Democratic “leaders” like Chuck Schumer and Hakeem
Jeffries, and forge a new party consensus, or even a new organization
or coalition, committed to all-out resistance.  But such a struggle
cannot be simply about picking better leaders. It requires leaving
behind the Democrats’ corporate wing represented by moguls like
Jamie Dimon, Mark Cuban, and Jeffrey Katzenberg.  Right now, the
action arm of that faction is groups like Democratic Majority for
Israel and AIPAC, whose “rule or ruin” practices and vast
financial resources have been (and will be) employed to defeat
progressives, in the way they took out Representatives Cori Bush and
Jamaal Bowman in 2024.  A new or renewed party must directly
confront the “billionaire class” in the explicit defense of
working people, fairness, and equality for all. And the Democratic
Party must leave behind its crippling legacy of support for Israel’s
apartheid state.  To quote Hubert Humphrey’s famous speech
denouncing Jim Crow at the party’s 1948 convention, it is long past
time for Democrats to “walk forthrightly into the bright sunshine of
human rights” for the Palestinian people.

WHO WILL LEAD THOSE CONFRONTATIONS TODAY, AND WHAT FORM MIGHT THEY
TAKE? Bernie and AOC are showing us the way with their “Fighting
Oligarchy” rallies, and J.B. Pritzker’s no-holds-barred speech in
New Hampshire denounced both Trump and his own party’s leadership.
But these efforts do not yet constitute any kind of organized mass
movement. We have a long way to go to reach “an 1854 moment,” and
seductive grandstanding by opportunists like Cory Booker, calling out
Trump but avoiding his own party’s failures and cowardice, won’t
get us there.  None of the hoped-for breakthroughs I have enumerated
may happen, and our corrupted republic may simply keep descending into
the sham hypocrisy of “illiberal democracy,” Viktor Orban’s
Hungary writ large.  In Karl Marx’s much-quoted dicta, “Men make
their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not
make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances
existing already, given and transmitted from the past. _The tradition
of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the
living_.”  Our “dead generations” are the barely-concealed
habits of racial hatred and violence built into this country’s
narrative, the ease with which our political system can be manipulated
by reactionaries and demagogues, and the moral rot and incoherence of
the Democratic Party’s leadership. 

Still, we are called to act, to “make our own history…under
circumstances existing already,” and the 1850s provide a salutary
lesson in how to assemble the kind of popular front required to defeat
MAGA.  Back then, the new party was cobbled together from local and
state Whig apparatuses and the various antislavery third parties. Its
leaders ranged from radicals like Senator Charles Sumner and
Congressman Thaddeus Stevens to moderates like Lincoln, who upheld his
party’s mandate when it mattered during the secession crisis in
early 1861, refusing to compromise with Southerners. Driving it
further in radical directions were those willing to uphold the higher
law by any means necessary, like Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman,
and John Brown, whose December 2, 1859 hanging provoked mass mourning
all over the North.

In its long history, the United States has functioned as a genuine
democracy only briefly, first during Reconstruction, and then in the
sixty years since passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965, the
culmination of what many historians call the_ Second Reconstruction_;
it will take everything we have to keep even that flawed democracy and
bring about a _Third Reconstruction_. By now it should be evident
that there will be no return to “normal” politics. Either we go
forward and seize this time, or we are done for. 

Van Gosse
Professor of History Emeritus
Franklin and Marshall College

* MAGA
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* Trump
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* U.S. history
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