We Have Been Here Before: Confronting the Fascist Backlash of Reconstruction to Find a New Path Forward
By Chris Melody Fields Figueredo and Jennifer Parrish Taylor
We are at a defining and dangerous moment for democracy in the United States. Authoritarian forces are accelerating–reshaping not only what our democracy looks like but who gets to be a part of it.
We find ourselves in a fight over whether, we the people, will be central figures in ensuring government works for us. Whether communities will have the power to shape their own futures.
It might be hard for some to imagine the United States falling to authoritarian forces. But the reality is, we have been here before.
In the years following the Civil War, the United States experienced one of the most radical democratic experiments in its history. During Reconstruction, formerly enslaved Black Americans didn’t just gain formal freedom—they built political power.
Thousands held public office. Black voters reshaped state constitutions. As a result, progressive policies surged: public education systems expanded, labor protections emerged, and multiracial democracy briefly took root across the South.
It was the largest expansion of democratic participation the United States had ever seen.
And it was met with severe backlash and terror.
The end of Reconstruction did not happen because democracy “failed.” It was crushed—systematically—by a homegrown authoritarian movement determined to restore racial hierarchy and elite control.
Jim Crow was not an accident of history; it was a counter-revolution. White supremacist militias, paramilitary violence, and voter suppression were deployed to roll back gains made by Black communities and their allies. The Ku Klux Klan and similar groups operated as informal enforcement arms of the state, using intimidation and murder to discipline voters and elected officials alike.
This was fascism before the word was widely used in the American context—an ideology rooted in racial purity, political violence, and the belief that only a narrow definition of “the people” deserved power.
The 13th Amendment, often celebrated as a triumph, contained the blueprint for what came next. Its exception clause—permitting involuntary servitude “as punishment for a crime”—opened the door to a new system of racial control. Black Americans were arrested en masse for minor or fabricated offenses and forced into convict leasing, chain gangs, and carceral labor. Policing became the front line of racial governance, not public safety.
This legacy is not historical—it is structural. It is embedded into the fabric of our systems, rules, and laws. It continues to shape and define us.
Modern policing practices, mass incarceration, and surveillance systems trace directly back to this post-Reconstruction order. So does immigration enforcement.
The creation of modern federal immigration control—culminating in the birth of ICE—did not emerge from neutral concerns about borders. It grew from the same impulse that animated Jim Crow: to define who belongs, who is suspect, and who can be removed from the body politic by force.
Just like the literacy tests, poll taxes, and police presence at the polls in the Jim Crow South, today’s attacks on ballot measures, voting access, and threats of ICE at the polls echo these same patterns. This is how authoritarians slowly begin to gain control.
Without intervention, millions will be too unsafe, too disenfranchised, or too disillusioned to participate fully in democracy. This is when authoritarianism wins.
The lesson of Reconstruction is not just that progress is possible—it’s that progress provokes backlash when it threatens entrenched power. Ballot measures have also shown us that progress is possible. They also threaten entrenched power.
We have been winning on issues that have been used to divide us–from marriage equality to reproductive rights and racial justice. In the last decade, states like Colorado, Nebraska, Nevada, Oregon, Tennessee, Utah, and Vermont removed the exception clause from state constitutions through ballot initiatives.
We are demonstrating that another path forward is possible, and this scares authoritarian forces. The progress made through direct democracy has also been met with severe backlash. In 2026, there are already 7 confirmed ballot measures aimed at weakening the People’s tool.
Even though we believe ballot measures can be a tool for liberation, they were born into structures designed to uphold white supremacy and systemic racism. In an effort to further disenfranchise Black voters, legislatures fought against enacting the ballot initiative process in the states with the most densely populated Black voters in the East and South.
These truths and legacy hurt.
But we cannot run away or hide from them; otherwise, we are doomed to continue this legacy. In Notes of a Native Son, James Baldwin wrote: “I love America more than any other country in the world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.”
As a descendant of formerly enslaved Black Americans and a queer Latine immigrant, we are acutely aware that we were not originally intended to be included as citizens or participants in American democracy. And like Baldwin, we know it is important in our work not only to critique America but also to strive for solutions that improve the lives of all people.
We know America can and should do better, even if at times we have not felt loved by our country. We demonstrate our love by pushing ourselves forward to build multiracial, people-powered governing strength.
It is why we believe ballot measures can and should be love letters to our people. Because ballot measures are one of the most direct expressions of people-powered democracy.
We have an opportunity to use them as seeds for our imagination to not only fulfill the promise of America but create a new world rooted in the imagination of radical love that expands the freedoms of all people. As students of bell hooks, we know, “a love ethic makes this expansion possible,” and through ballot measures, we have seen this possibility.
Now is the time to demand more.
Democracy in the United States has always advanced through expansion — of who counts, who decides, and who governs. Ballot measures themselves were an expansion of our democracy. Expansion has always been contested by forces willing to abandon democracy to preserve dominance.
Naming that conflict clearly is not divisive. It is necessary. Because the struggle we are in now is not new.
When we confront these painful truths, we will find a new path forward and finally build the world we deserve.