Regime change in America

Many people react to stories about such historical shenanigans with a worldly-wise smile and a sense that the moral of the story is that nothing so new or worrisome is happening now, even if it looks like normal order is breaking down. After all, the thinking goes, people have done things like this in politics forever. In fact, someone might say with respect to the Pennsylvania story from 1787, it’s a good thing that stuff like this happens sometimes: We wouldn’t have gotten the Constitution without it.

There’s an important piece of truth in the idea that sometimes big good things come into the world only by bending or even breaking the rules—as the Constitution certainly did. But that lens misses something equally important, which is that the big things that come about that way aren’t always good. The reason both sides went to extremes in the Pennsylvania Statehouse in 1787 was that the stakes of the issue dividing them were nothing less than regime change. One side—the pro-Constitution side—thought the old system wasn’t working and wanted a better one. The other side wanted to preserve the old system at all costs. Given the stakes, either side was willing to pull out all the stops to prevent an outcome it didn’t want.

In other words, the 1787 story doesn’t show that such antics are normal. If anything, it shows that they’re something to worry about. The parties to that conflict were right to think that their system was breaking down. That was the whole goal. We don’t worry about that breakdown in hindsight, because we celebrate the system that replaced it: the U.S. Constitution. But from the perspective of 1787, getting to the Constitution wasn’t everything is fine business as usual. It was regime change.

There is an important moral distinction between parliamentary hardball and physical violence. But we cannot understand or properly address Wednesday’s tragedy without reckoning with its relationship to Tuesday’s farce. The mob that stormed the U.S. Capitol didn’t come out of nowhere. It was nurtured and encouraged by the president and other Republican leaders and right-wing activists who refused to accept their electoral losses according to the normal rules of the game. And when national leadership communicates that one should fight by any means necessary rather than let the other side notch its electoral wins, the predictable result is a wide variety of foul play—often nonviolent, but not always.

World history contains images of regime change that involve the violent storming of government buildings; our own national history involves regime change achieved through hardball that looks more like what happened in Harrisburg. We are now experiencing both of those things simultaneously, and not by coincidence. It’s precisely when we no longer agree that the system we have is worth preserving that people are most willing to do all sorts of things—things that seem crazy in normal times—to have their views prevail. The lesson of 1787 isn’t that sometimes politicians play hardball: It’s that this is what happens when the system itself is at stake.

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Richard Primus is a constitutional law professor at the University of Michigan.