The Way to Stop Autocratic Slide Is Staring Us in the Face

Sept 08, 2025 3:16 PM

Police in flak jackets walking down the steps of the Lincoln Memorial toward the reflecting pool, with the Washington Monument in front.

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There has been accelerating doomer sentiment in recent days that democracy may be cooked, with President Donald Trump's threats to deploy the National Guard in Chicago, extrajudicial bombings of foreign vessels at sea, and preening about ending mail-in voting exacerbating these fears. But historian, writer, and quasi-optimist Jill Lepore has thoughts about where the American constitutional experiment went astray and what might be deployed in order to save it. Lepore has a new book coming out, called We the People , and it's her effort to pull the constitutional conversation out of the dead, frozen earth of the Founders, and to reignite a national conversation about how Americans wish to be governed. On this week's Amicus podcast, Lepore joined Dahlia Lithwick to think about a Constitution frozen in amber, as opposed to a constitution capable of repair. This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Dahlia Lithwick: The book is deliberately rooted in this paradox of permanence and impermanence. You write about the Constitution as “brittle as bone, hard as stone.” This animating question of: How do you have an immutable roadmap for democratic self-governance that also contains the seeds of its own demise? One of the themes that you pull out is that the amendment process, like mending, like hemming, was seen as a part of a natural, long progression of repair, refinement, alteration. It wasn't seen as sandblasting out words carved into stone. It was a malleable way of thinking about governing ourselves. And that, of course, has all but disappeared.

Jill Lepore: I really wanted to reclaim and reacquaint readers with the idea of amendment, or what I call in the book “the philosophy of amendment,” as a founding American democratic and constitutional principle. And one that—if we care about history and tradition—we ought to care about the ways in which we have wandered from that tradition. We could say we don't believe in amendment anymore as a people, and amend the constitution to kill Article 5, the amendment provision of the Constitution. We could do that. But just watching it die is, I think, a problem for the very legitimacy of a written constitution historically.

If you go back and read the state constitutional debates in the 1770s and 1780s, even before the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787, you discover that this philosophy of amendment was really central to people's willingness to even have written constitutions. It was a new technology. England still doesn't have a written constitution. Constitutionalism has really spread around the world now and we expect it and it seems normal, but it is spread with the idea of amendment.

Yet in the United States, we have this very odd situation in which, while we continue to amend our state constitutions, we haven't amended the US Constitution in several generations, and there seems no immediate prospect of doing so. I think there are real questions about constitutional legitimacy when a constitution becomes unamendable, but I also think there's something really beautiful about the idea of amendment—the faith that you could have in renewal, improvement, correcting errors, moral progress, mending your ways, making amendments, a kind of inherent notion of justice. The word itself, mend and amend, which have the same roots, expressed to something that I really believe in about people, about political orders, about fundamental law: That things can be made better.

Amendment really was this crucial 18 ^th -century idea. The ^19th century gets bound up in the idea of progress, and increasingly that comes to mean technological progress. Then it is bound up in the idea of evolution, and of course then we start thinking about the Constitution in terms of evolution. The ^20th century is obsessed with economic growth. And our new century is obsessed with disruption as a form of change.

Amendment is meant to be the thing that you can do so that you don't kill one another. That's what's so beautiful about it: The idea that this will be the protection against the United States devolving into insurrectionary politics. If we could just fix things on our own when things aren't working well, then we will be sure that we won't just start killing one another. There's a reason the most important amendments of the Constitution come out during and immediately following the Civil War.

I want to stick with this idea of amendments as a release valve for violence—the idea that the American experiment is itself born of violence, and the amendment process is in response to the trauma of violence, peaking, as you say, after the Civil War. We're in such an incredibly fraught moment, where you can't escape the feeling that we are about to tilt into violence at any moment, as a sort of corrective for the idea that everyone is stuck. Is this the opposite of constitutional imagination—is violence what happens when you can't imagine anything different?

Try to cast your mind back to 1776. We're nearing the 250 ^th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, but before that were the first state constitutions. They were written in the midst of the war. They had to write them because there was a war—their colonial charters had gone up in smoke, the provincial assemblies were appointed by the royal governors, and the royal governors had fled the war; there was no government. So people have to write these state constitutions. And they write them down because their charters were written down. But then they're sort of like, Wait, we write this down. We're in the middle of a war, which is the war that happened in order to change our fundamental law and to get rid of our charter. My son just died in battle and I want this thing that we write to not be lethal in that way. I want us to have a way to fix this without people having to die for it.

It's a very close-to-the-bone feeling of political desperation in the midst of a revolutionary war, to say we're going to write down what our rights are. Most of these state constitutions are preceded by declarations of rights: We're going to outline a frame of government. And not all the early state constitutions, but some, and most notably Massachusetts, when they send these to the people to ratify, the people say, We can't ratify this unless there's an amendment provision in here, because we do not want to die again. We do not want our sons, our grandparents, and women killed in war, we don't want our homes burned, we do not want to suffer the fate of an unamendable frame of government . And we—not you the legislature, but we the people—must have the right to do that amending. This will be how we can agree to consent to a written form of government.

Another danger you point out that arises when amending is not an option is that you just change the Constitution through presidential power. We are speaking in a week when the president has essentially said, I don't care what the Constitution says or what the Posse Comitatus or the Insurrection Act says, I'm going into Chicago . Is there anything that you can reflect on, in this moment when it does feel as though democracy is kind of drowning in this miasma of originalism and unitary executive theory? Is there anything that has surprised you about the last couple of months and the way the president has claimed this mantle of “There's one amender of the Constitution and it's this guy!”?

It 's this guy. One thing that's important to note is this is another area of its authority that Congress has abdicated. Like the power to declare war, like the power to make treaties, what Congress is doing by way of thinking constitutionally and engaging in conversation about possible amendments to the Constitution is zero.

There were years where there were a lot of constitutional amendments proposed by members of Congress; a lot of it was just showboating and trial-ballooning, but they don't even bother to do that anymore, unless it's some kind of trolling.

The power to amend the Constitution comes from the people to Congress and then back to the people. The president is no part of it. The president doesn't need to sign a constitutional amendment, they just do that sometimes as a matter of political theater. But we absolutely live in a world just now in which if the president says it's constitutional, it's constitutional, and if the president says it's not, then it's not. Nothing could be further from the constitutional order that was designed by the Framers.

I read this book as, in part, an attempt to reclaim the Constitution and constitutional history and constitutional participation from the cold dead hands of originalism. This reclamation is related to something we have explored a lot here at Slate and on Amicus—that every single one of us who is talking and listening about the Constitution gets to have an opinion and gets to have skin in the game and is part of this project. But I confess: A lot of the time, I do find myself struggling with the feeling that the ship has sailed and that nobody is interested in having that conversation anymore. But here you are telling me that the Constitution was intended as, and has been, a work of amending, of mending, of repair, of perfecting, of rethinking, and reimagining. Can you just talk me off my nihilist ledge that suggests that there's nothing left for the Constitution to do to heal this moment? Tell me what it means for people to understand that the Constitution is theirs to mend and repair.

I think there is an opportunity at just this moment. I think when we think about 2026 as the 250 ^th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, we would do well to think of it also as the 250 ^th anniversary of American constitutionalism. The earliest state constitutions date to this era.

When I drive home, I go under a highway underpass where most days of the week there are people standing there holding, from above on the overpass, a homemade banner of stitched-together bedsheets that read, in paint: “SAVE OUR DEMOCRACY. UPHOLD OUR CONSTITUTION.” It moves me every time I go through that overpass. And I think a lot about the people I met in 2009 when I was reporting on the Tea Party movement for the New Yorker and wrote a short book about the Tea Party, and how much the Constitution meant to them. I think about how similar that is to the way people at the “No Kings” rallies, some of which I've observed and listened to, talk about the Constitution.

This is a very goofy, nostalgic, possibly wildly impractical and naive suggestion, but I think if you could get the former Tea Partiers and the No Kings people to sit down together and have paragraph-by-paragraph conversations about constitutional sentences, constitutional language, constitutional amendments, in honor of the 250 ^th , there is a great deal of interest and concern about the Constitution across political parties, all over the country, in little towns, in big cities, in neighborhood parks on park benches, in YMCA basketball short. I think institutions that can host events—like public libraries and elementary schools that are unused in the evening—could really propel a revival of the kind of citizen gatherings that are necessary for a constitution to bear meaning.