There have been several American Republics.

I know that sounds strange. The unusual stability of our constitutional system means we don’t think of our political orders in those terms — that’s for the French, now on their Fifth Republic.

But the long endurance of our constitutional text — to say nothing of our cultural reverence for the framers as oracles — obscures the structural transformations that mark our political history and experience. The American Republic of George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and James Monroe is not the Republic of Andrew Jackson, Martin Van Buren and Henry Clay, which is not the Republic of Ulysses Grant and so on.

It’s not just that with each era, Americans brought fresh eyes to the Constitution, exercising powers that their predecessors might have rejected as tantamount to tyranny. It’s that they organized themselves politically in new and novel ways and reconfigured the Republic for their own purposes. The Americans of the framers’ era could not imagine the mass politics of Jacksonian America, which could not imagine the biracial politics and unified national state of Reconstruction.

This isn’t an idle academic exercise. To recognize that there have been several iterations of these United States is to clarify the stakes for today’s election. It’s not that we’ll lose America if Donald Trump wins a second term. The United States will endure. But his victory might mark the end of one Republic and the start of another, although “Republic” may not be the right word for what comes next.

The American Republic we have was forged in the fire of the 1930s, the 1940s and the consensus that followed. It is defined by an administrative state that takes an active role in the management of the economy; by social insurance that supports most Americans with some protection from the vicissitudes of the market; by courts that restrain the power of the individual states to act on their citizens; and by the federal protection of civil rights as well as a broad interpretation of the Constitution that secures rights of privacy, including the right to contraception and the right to an abortion.

Of course, this settlement was never quite settled. It was contested from the moment it took shape. And since Trump won office in 2016 — and with it, the opportunity to remake the Supreme Court — conservatives have notched critical victories against each part of the foundation of the current Republic. In just the past two years, the court has gutted the ability of federal agencies to interpret statutes and issue rules, all but made it illegal for public institutions to directly address racial inequality, undermined federal protection of voting rights and unraveled the Constitution’s long-established protection of the right to bodily autonomy, threatening the right to privacy as a result.

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