It’s never a good sign for American politics when chatter spreads about a new civil war. We seem to be in one of those moments again.
Julia Azari, a political science professor at Marquette, the writer of the newsletter Good Politics/Bad Politics and the author of, most recently, “Backlash Presidents: From Transformative to Reactionary Leaders in American History,” has thoughts about why we have come back to such an intense moment of national strife.
She focuses on two themes: the lack of a national stabilizing force, particularly in the presidency, and the bald use of state power. In an online interview, she dug a little deeper into these themes with John Guida, an editor in Times Opinion.
John Guida: Let’s assume for the moment that we are not about to enter a literal civil war. Why are so many people looking at this time through that lens?
Julia Azari: What we’re seeing is the overlap of several factors. There are the incidents of state violence, in this case the killings in Minneapolis of Renee Good and Alex Pretti. And then there are competing narratives about the reasons and meanings of those killings, pushed by different political leaders. On the left, there’s both the “abolish ICE” camp and the “better training” camp, at least coming from the Democratic establishment. On the right, you see calls for investigations of the incidents, but also efforts to lay the blame on the Biden administration and its immigration policies.
The fundamental divisions about what these incidents mean map onto so many other political divisions and identities. It feels like an unbridgeable, high-stakes gap that means the country is fighting over political power on a different level than just who controls Congress or sets the agenda on budget talks. It’s about whether we understand state violence to be legitimate or not, and who gets to make that call.
In your 2025 book, you included Donald Trump in a group of “backlash presidents” — among them, Andrew Johnson (after Abraham Lincoln), Richard Nixon (after Lyndon Johnson) and Trump (after Barack Obama).
Are we still living in a Trump backlash presidency?
The way I define backlash in the book is, I think, helpful to understand what is happening now. Periods of backlash feature very contentious politics around who has power and how it is used, and the ways that is presented politically are very in flux. What ties together Andrew Johnson, Richard Nixon and Donald Trump is that they all presented visions of victimhood in response to racial change. That’s essentially what populism is in this context — Nixon’s “silent majority,” for example.
And this describes politics in 2026 pretty well: sending ICE into cities, anti-D.E.I. measures, politicized prosecutions of Trump’s political opponents (or arresting journalists). It’s all rooted in a sense of victimhood. And that sets the terms of debate over what groups have power and what they do with it.
Since the book came out, I’ve identified a few scenarios for where we are now. One possibility is that Trump’s second term is an extension of the post-Obama backlash — the same as his first term. It marked the end of an era of “colorblindness” in which strong norms prevented most politicians from speaking honestly and directly about race and America’s racial experience. Obama’s presence in office meant it was impossible to ignore that, and he mentioned race throughout — like his statement that if he’d had a son, “he’d look like Trayvon” Martin. The fusing of the symbolic and real power of the presidency with that perspective drove intense backlash, and the 2016 election was highly racialized — attitudes about race were more important factors in voting than when Obama was on the ballot. Joe Biden’s presidency was closely linked to Obama’s, obviously, and Trump’s language in his 2025 Inaugural Address about a “colorblind and merit-based” system was a callback to the anti-affirmative action language of the Reagan administration. So we might just be seeing elaboration on that.
Another possibility is that we’re in an era now dominated by Trumpist ideas about race politics. This seems less likely than it did a year ago — the public seems to be turning against some of the hardcore principles of MAGA in that regard, especially on immigration.
The final possibility is that instead of these long cycles of racial stalemate punctuated by transformation and then backlash, the parties are sufficiently divided and motivated to keep this kind of conflict going. This has the potential to continue being very ugly, but also means that, Democrats may not find it viable politically to back away from attention to real issues of race inequity.
You have identified a shift in American politics, at the start of Trump 2.0, to one of power, where it was formerly based on legitimacy (and systems of rules and process). What has changed about the possession and use of presidential power?
A feature that links Andrew Johnson, Nixon and Trump 1.0 is that they all justified crossing institutional boundaries, violating norms and undermining their opposition in terms of their charge to protect the “true” American people, American values, tradition, etc. The degree to which this was bound up in race is both variable and constant. After the Civil War, this aim — and Johnson’s racism — were pretty explicit. For Trump, they were presented in coded but widely understood ways (accusations of voter fraud in heavily Black cities, derogatory references to African countries). For Nixon, race was bound up in these larger cultural claims about law and order, patriotism, etc. — but was still legible.
When you justify your actions in these terms, it’s easier to run roughshod over the usual boundaries and limits. (Again, this is essentially what populism is.)
In Trump 2.0, this lack of restraint has gone to a new level. Initially, some of these power claims were connected to the 2024 election — that by winning the popular vote, Trump had effectively eliminated all opposition. But the project of Trumpism in the executive branch has always been more about power than legitimacy — looking for institutional loopholes and possibilities to do what Trump and his allies want politically, undermine opponents and avoid compromise and negotiation. Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt call this a lack of “forbearance,” or exercising some restraint with the powers that you have.
Presidential scholars have worried about the increased power in the office for a long time, and this is an inherent tension in a constitutional system: There’s what the law says about what the president/executive branch can do, but that branch is the one that, by definition, executes the law. So who’s going to stop those who control that branch? And that’s sort of been the essence of the second Trump term — not just looking for loopholes and new institutional possibilities, but governing by “who’s going to stop us?”
But does that lack of constraint ultimately in some ways limit the administration in its pursuit of its goals? That’s something the political scientist Thomas Pepinsky suggested, that Trump’s brand of highly public politics, and the very legible displays of the power you mentioned, is potentially counterproductive because it provokes a strong counterreaction. Does that ring true to you?
This depends a lot on Trump opponents’ capacity to engage in collective action and then translate that into power. We’ve seen impressive capacity in Minnesota, which commentators have linked to the civic culture there as well as the legacy of the 2020 protests and beyond. I agree with the point that Trump’s love of spectacle backfires on him more often than not, especially with these kinds of confrontations, and that this is generally good news for civil society.
Lots has been written about electoral power and Democrats and the 2026 midterms; I’ll just say that Democrats are well positioned to win congressional races when there’s an unpopular Republican president in office. It’s what Democrats have done with power that’s been, so far, inadequate to thwart the authoritarian turn. The Democratic coalition is just so complex, and no one’s been able to make real sense of it: how to integrate calls to fix institutions, to pursue major policy goals and to hold accountable public officials who violate the law or their oaths of office.
For all the attention given to the president and at least some of the policies of his administration, you have also written about the disappearance of the presidency itself. Obviously we still have a president, but your suggestion is about the presidency as a rhetorical symbol of national unity. There is something, in your view, missing in that regard. What is it?
It feels kind of dorky, especially right now, to talk about the aspirational qualities of presidential rhetoric. But I started thinking about this in response to Trump’s open hostility to critics, his unhinged response to Rob Reiner’s death and his general inability to do a good memorializing bit when a public figure dies. These moments reaffirm shared values and shared humanity. And it’s easy to say, well, what shared values? Going back to what I said before — the country is very divided.
That’s exactly when you need a leader, which is typically the president in our context, to lay out those aspirations. To be the face of the goal of being one people, even though that will never be perfectly or realistically achieved. The president explains why we’re all invested in this shared project, from our national interest in big things to our collective mourning. But for Trump, his disdain for his enemies is never put on hold for that kind of rhetoric — including and especially those in the domestic opposition.
How did what seemed like the ordinary politics of the past bring us to this extraordinary moment? Or in hindsight, were politics not as ordinary in the past as we had assumed?
I’ve wrestled a lot with the ordinary/extraordinary question, and I fall firmly in the camp that draws a straight line from the premature end of Reconstruction after the Civil War to this moment. Really intense and complicated political conflict comes not in changing the status quo — ending slavery, enacting civil rights laws, electing the first Black president — but in figuring out what normal looks like after that. And so in each iteration, what “normal” looks like is increasingly unstable as we find new ways not to confront the racial conflict that has shaped so much of what our politics and our institutions look like.
In concrete terms, we can see the roots of what is happening now in the very ordinary rhetoric of “law and order” from the 1960s and up through the 1990s that was used to justify more punitive policies, more resources for law enforcement, securitization of the immigration discussion. With ordinary political language (often coded) about welfare, crime, government programs and affirmative action, what we’ve learned is that it doesn’t take a lot of political change to turn this into a very volatile and charged politics.
Will it take the emergence of a truly stable majority party — a realignment of some kind, perhaps along the lines of a multiracial working-class party that the G.O.P. was most recently envisioning after the 2024 election — to move beyond this stage of backlash politics?
A stable majority in favor of really addressing racial issues is probably a necessary but not sufficient condition. This debate about how to address these issues wouldn’t necessarily have to be housed within one party — you could imagine, at least in theory, multiple viewpoints sincerely committed to different approaches. But this would actually require keeping the issue on the public agenda, and political leaders willing to see real changes in how power flows through society and willing to explain those changes in authentic terms to their constituents rather than take advantage of the politics of fear for political gain.
The mid-20th century had a stable political majority and an increasingly powerful presidency — and yet dodged the civil rights issue for decades. That doesn’t exactly light up a clear pathway out of the backlash cycle, but it does give us some sense of the enormousness — and importance — of the task.
Julia Azari, a political science professor at Marquette University, is the writer of the newsletter Good Politics/Bad Politics and the author of, most recently, “Backlash Presidents: From Transformative to Reactionary Leaders in American History.” John Guida is a Times Opinion editor.
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