Welcome to American Deconstruction. Our democracy is fractured, but not yet beyond repair.
A tattered American flag flies underneath a cloudy sky during May 2026 in Emporia. (Photo by Max McCoy/Kansas Reflector)
There’s an American flag hanging downtown that is frayed and ripping apart at the seams. It hangs mostly together and is recognizable as a flag when there is no wind, but with the breeze the red and white stripes flutter independently of one another. If the wind really kicks up, it all becomes a writhing mess.
I won’t identify the street it’s on, or the business that owns the property, for fear of calling scorn down upon whoever placed it there. Perhaps they left the flag up during too many seasons on purpose, hoping it will outlast our current political moment. But intended or not, I have seen few symbols that are more appropriate to where we find ourselves as a nation.
It also makes me a little sick.
As a kid the Flag Code was drilled into me, and I’m distressed at the sight of an American flag that remains displayed after its useful life is over. The code is not law but a set of advisories about the display and the handling of the flag and the respect it presumably deserves. While the flag has changed over time, with the last revision in 1960 to add a star for the admission of Hawaii, the values it stands for shouldn’t. The American flag is at once a promise of equality in our founding, something Abraham Lincoln called our “ancient faith,” and a reminder of our failures to live up to that ideal.
Americans are tested at intervals of a generation or two about what kind of country we’d like to live in. It’s seldom phrased that way, but perhaps it should be. Every now and then the consequences are clear, just as they were in the run-up to Kansas statehood.
That’s what happened 172 years ago, after President Franklin Pierce signed the Kansas-Nebraska Act. Settlement was allowed after May 30, 1854, and the residents were given “popular sovereignty” to determine whether slavery would spread to the new territories. While popular sovereignty broadly means a government’s authority is legitimated through the consent of the governed, the act specified something narrower — the new residents would vote on the issue of slavery, sparing Congress from having to do so.
Bleeding Kansas and the Civil War followed.
Historians including David W. Blight, a Yale professor and winner of the Pulitzer Prize, have persuasively argued that the American Civil War never really ended. Americans carry the conflict in collective memory and struggle with its meaning. The questions that persist concern not only the legacy of chattel slavery, but how or whether we should achieve the just and equal society the war made possible.
Other historians have said we’re still living through Reconstruction.
Among these others, Boston College historian Heather Cox Richardson has recently declared the aftermath of the Supreme Court ruling in Louisiana v. Callais amounted to “reliving” the Jim Crow politics of Reconstruction. In Callais, the Supreme Court gutted the 1965 Voting Rights Act by narrowing the ability of states to use race in drawing elective districts. This set off a rush by several GOP-controlled state legislatures, including those in Alabama and Tennessee, to silence minority populations by gerrymandering Congressional districts to ensure Republican victories.
I agree with both Blight and Richardson. One theory doesn’t nullify the other.
Keeping those historical comparisons in mind, I would go a step beyond. While our current moment in some ways resembles the past, it is also something new. We have emerged from the uncertainty of 2025 to a discomfiting reality in which our democracy is being tested brick by brick.
My wife, Kim, argues that we really haven’t emerged from anything yet, that we are simply sinking deeper into a crisis of our own making. She may be right. She’s the one, after all, who pointed out the tattered flag downtown. Whether we have emerged from uncertainty or plunged hell-bent through the prevailing dark, we have entered a new era.
Let’s call it American Deconstruction.
This implies not only demolition but a breaking apart of things to their essential elements. I studied the literary theory deconstruction as a graduate student (and I can still hear my professor at the University of Kansas jokingly referring to the “satanic mills of Derrida.”) As literary theories goes it’s one of the more difficult ones, but in essence it’s about the struggle between text and meaning. French philosopher Jacques Derrida also applied his theory to politics, especially in the years before his death in 2004. It is impossible to boil down anything Derrida said to a single point, but here I will try: What is sovereignty? Neither beasts nor kings are subject to the law, the law is both freeing and confining, and democracies face continual risk because of their capacity to choose to destroy themselves.
I don’t think of Derrida often, but the idea that we might vote ourselves out of existence has not been far from mind lately. Viewing the 2024 presidential election from a distance of 572 days feels like rummaging through a time capsule. Among the yellowing newspaper stories and the Chuck Taylors is the enduring statistic that Donald Trump won the popular vote by less than 2 percentage points.
The deconstruction of America followed.
As I write, an Ultimate Fighting Championship cage is being erected for a June 14 match on the White House Lawn, something that should only be allowed in alternate history science fiction or the Mike Judge film “Idiocracy”; there remains a hole where the East Wing once stood, where Trump plans to build his Versailles-like ballroom above a “Dr. Strangelove” military bunker; fresh strikes exchanged by the United States and Iran threaten a fragile ceasefire; a hunger strike by detainees at an ICE immigration jail in New Jersey entered another day amid sporadic violence; Trump continues with his plan to use a $1.776 billion fund from the Department of Justice to reward, among others, those convicted of assaulting police during the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot; and gas has topped $4.09 a gallon at the corner station.
Elections have consequences, and these are the consequences of the 2024 presidential election.
Back in 1854, after Kansas and Nebraska were opened for settlement, Lincoln worried about consequences. Lincoln delivered a speech Oct. 16 from the courthouse portico at Peoria, Illinois, and his target was Illinois Sen. Stephen A. Douglas, the chief architect of the Kansas-Nebraska Act.
The act repealed the Missouri Compromise of 1820, which admitted Missouri as a slave-holding state and Maine as a free state, keeping the balance of power. It also prohibited slavery, except for Missouri, north of the 36°30′ parallel that runs from near Norfolk, Virginia, to the Texas panhandle.
During the 1850s, Congress felt pressure to organize western territory that had been won through the Mexican-American War and acquired through the Louisiana Purchase decades earlier. Many embraced the idea of “manifest destiny,” a term coined in 1845 by a newspaper editor to describe American expansion across the continent as supposedly ordained by providence.
When the Kansas-Nebraska Act was passed, Kansas Territory stretched to the Continental Divide in the Rockies and Nebraska Territory encompassed parts of present-day Colorado, Montana, South Dakota, North Dakota and Wyoming.
Lincoln’s opposition to the act revived his political career and brought him a national audience.
“The doctrine of self-government is right — absolutely and eternally right — but it has no just application, as here attempted,” Lincoln said at Peoria. “Or perhaps I should rather say that whether it has such just application depends upon whether a negro is not or is a man.”
Lincoln’s objection was that slavery was not an appropriate issue for a popular vote.
“Democracy could not survive, he warned, by leaving fundamental moral issues to be decided by majority vote,” writes historian Allen C. Guelzo in his 2024 book on Lincoln and American democracy.
“When the white man governs himself that is self-government,” Lincoln said, “but when he governs himself, and also governs another man, that is more than self-government — that is despotism. If the negro is a man, why then my ancient faith teaches me that ‘all men are created equal,’ and that there can be no moral right in connection with one man’s making a slave of another.”
At the time, Lincoln was six years away from the presidency.
With the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, Congress took a fundamental issue that had been eating away at the fabric of America and handed off the problem to the settlers of two vast new territories. It created a partisan land rush with powerful interests on both sides of the slavery question.
“Bleeding Kansas,” with its fraudulent elections, dueling constitutions, competing territorial governments and political violence, was a prelude to the American Civil War.
What Lincoln the orator — and later, Lincoln the emancipator — repeatedly addressed was the fundamental question of just who is a human being. While Lincoln’s primary objective during the Civil War was to preserve the Union, implicit was the question of just who the republic was being preserved for. His belief that there should only be one definition of humankind for the whole of the United States, instead of state-by-state interpretations, was the foundation for modern American definitions of equality.
“I also wish to be no less than national in all the positions I may take,” Lincoln said at Peoria.
During this time of Deconstruction, we are seeing that unity threatened by a great regression in political thought and action. Core values are being stripped down to the bricks and reassembled in grotesque ways that call to mind Lincoln’s definition of “despotism.” A new sectionalism has emerged, in which states have been empowered by a misguided Supreme Court to place a premium on partisanship and a penalty on equality.
From immigration policy to the attack on the rule of law to an assault on Civil Rights, the errors of this political age are legion. It will be for future historians to enumerate them.
It is up to us to recall the fundamental promise of our nation and to ask who among us is worthy of the vote, to equal protection under the law, and to a life of dignity and the unfettered pursuit of happiness.
Either all of us are — or none.
Whether democracy will survive this American Deconstruction depends on how we channel our political will. A free society depends on the consent of the governed, but despotism requires only indifference. It isn’t necessary or even desirable that we agree on all things, but we must agree upon the inherent value and rights of every human being. From that foundation, all can be accomplished.
Without it, we will continue our willful plunge into darkness.
“I doubt not that the people of Nebraska are, and will continue to be, as good as the average of people elsewhere,” Lincoln said. “I do not say the contrary. What I do say is that no man is good enough to govern another man, without that other’s consent.”
That, Lincoln said, was the “sheet anchor” of the republic.
Such consent can only be given — or rescinded — through free and equal elections. Fundamental questions of equality, choice and basic human rights should not be decided by the states cafeteria-style. It is long past the time to put the needs of the country above that of a party, of sectionalism, and of narrow single-issue agendas.
A tattered flag on a downtown street corner is just some colored cloth that has been left too long in the sun and rain. It may bring to mind our current state of affairs, as does the spectacle of a cage arena on the White House lawn, but it is not America. The ideal upon which that weather-worn whirling mess is based, the symbol that embodies the best of our hopes and dreams, the flag from our childhood classrooms and which hangs in our local courthouses, is the promise of America for which we strive.
Max McCoy is an award-winning author and journalist. Through its opinion section, the Kansas Reflector works to amplify the voices of people who are affected by public policies or excluded from public debate. Find information, including how to submit your own commentary, here.