What We Fail to Repair, We Repeat

The United States has spent 250 years asking the same unresolved questions: who belongs, who governs, and whose humanity deserves protection under the law?

Every defining conflict in American history has revolved around these questions. The nation fought a Civil War over them. Reconstruction briefly answered them before white supremacist retrenchment reversed those gains. The Civil Rights Movement challenged them again, expanding both democracy and full citizenship through landmark legislation. Today, amid democratic backsliding, renewed voter suppression, attacks on civil rights protections, and deepening political polarization, we are once again confronting those same questions under a different name.

This repetition is not a coincidence.

The prevailing explanation of America’s democratic crisis is polarization. Yet polarization is better understood as the symptom rather than the disease. Beneath today’s partisan conflict lies a much older struggle over political equality itself: Who counts as a full member of the political community? Who has meaningful influence over public institutions? What is the minimum floor of human dignity that democracy guarantees?

A multiracial democracy cannot exist without repairing institutions that were designed to produce racial hierarchy. White supremacy is not merely an extremist ideology or a collection of individual prejudices. It is an institutional system that has repeatedly concentrated political and economic power among a select few by defining who can participate fully in American democracy. As long as those institutions remain substantially intact, democratic progress will be undone by retrenchment. 

What we fail to repair, we repeat. American history demonstrates this pattern with remarkable consistency.

The abolition of slavery did not automatically produce a multiracial democracy. Reconstruction did. For a brief period following the Civil War, Black men voted in significant numbers, held public office across every level of government, helped rewrite state constitutions, expanded public education, and fundamentally reshaped Southern politics. Our democracy radically expanded during this period precisely because of racial inclusion.

Yet Reconstruction also exposed the limits of political change without institutional repair. The constitutional abolition of slavery was not accompanied by a comprehensive dismantling of the political, economic, and social architecture that had sustained racial hierarchy. White supremacist violence, economic coercion, judicial retreat, and political compromise ultimately destroyed Reconstruction and ushered in nearly a century of Jim Crow.

More than a tragedy, the collapse of Reconstruction marked one of the greatest episodes of democratic backsliding in American history. History is repeating itself. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 did more than protect Black voters. It transformed American democracy by making political equality enforceable. When the Supreme Court weakened its preclearance provisions in Shelby County v. Holder, states rapidly enacted restrictive voting laws, closed polling places, and accelerated racial gerrymandering. Subsequent decisions—including this year’s Louisiana v. Callais decision—have further narrowed the ability of Black communities to challenge discriminatory racially gerrymandered electoral maps. These developments are often discussed as isolated disputes over election law. They are better understood as another iteration of a recurring pattern: when political equality for Black Americans contracts, democracy itself contracts.

This recurring pattern raises a deeper question: What would it actually take to break it? The answer, increasingly, has turned toward the idea of reparations. It is a controversial topic to be sure. It is often reduced to compensation for historical injustices, a necessary but insufficient framework. 

International human rights law offers a more comprehensive vision. The United Nations’ Basic Principles on the Right to a Remedy and Reparation identifies five complementary forms of repair: restitution, compensation, rehabilitation, satisfaction, and guarantees of non-repetition. Together, they recognize that repairing systemic injustice requires far more than acknowledging the past. It requires transforming the institutions that allowed those injustices to occur and ensuring they cannot continue to reproduce themselves. Viewed through this framework, democratic reform is not separate from reparations.

It is reparations.

Political equality is not merely one democratic value among many; it is itself a form of reparative justice.

If racial hierarchy has historically been reproduced through the denial, dilution, and suppression of Black political power, then democratic repair must respond to those injuries in different ways. Some rights must be restored: returning the franchise to formerly incarcerated citizens, for example, can function as restitution for a form of political exclusion whose racial disparities are inseparable from the broader history of disenfranchisement. Some continuing violations must be stopped and acknowledged: restoring robust Voting Rights Act protections can serve as satisfaction. And some institutions must be redesigned so the injury cannot simply recur: reforms to representation, electoral rules, and the distribution of political power can function as guarantees of non-repetition. In this sense, the reparations framework does more than supply labels for familiar democracy reforms. It asks what injury each institution continues to produce, what repair that injury demands, and what structural changes would prevent its recurrence.

The remaining principles, compensation and rehabilitation, underscore why democratic reform must be situated within, rather than substituted for, a comprehensive agenda of reparations. Compensation addresses economically assessable harms such as stolen property, lost earnings, and lost opportunities, while rehabilitation encompasses medical, psychological, legal, and social services responsive to the injuries communities have suffered. These forms of repair are indispensable. But their realization is also inseparable from political power. A society is unlikely to marshal the resources necessary to compensate for generations of dispossession or sustain the institutions necessary for rehabilitation while the communities owed that repair remain systematically disadvantaged in deciding how public resources are distributed and political priorities are set. Material repair and democratic repair must proceed in tandem: Political equality creates the power necessary to secure and protect material repair, while material repair addresses the economic inequalities that themselves distort political equality.

Consider the House of Representatives. Congress capped its membership at 435 nearly a century ago, even as the American population continued to grow and urbanize. The politics behind that decision were themselves bound up with representation. After the 1920 Census documented a major shift in population from rural to urban America, rural representatives resisted reapportionment out of fear that political power would move to the cities. Today, the combination of a fixed House and the constitutional guarantee that every state receives at least one representative produces substantial differences in district populations across states. In a country where racial geography remains pronounced, these disparities matter: Predominantly rural states can receive greater representation per resident than densely populated urban communities that are disproportionately people of color.

Expanding the House offers one form of institutional repair. Increasing its membership would reduce population disparities produced by fitting more than 330 million people into only 435 seats and make representation more responsive to population growth. Paired with multi-member districts and voting rights protections, expansion could also create additional opportunities for communities historically denied political power to translate their votes into representation. Through a reparative lens, House expansion becomes more than an abstract exercise in institutional design: It asks how representation might be redesigned to move closer to the democratic principle that political power should follow people equally.

The same reparative analysis can be applied to campaign finance, ranked-choice voting, independent redistricting, the Electoral College, Senate malapportionment, and other features of American democracy. The framework does not require claiming that each was created exclusively to produce racial inequality. Instead, it asks a series of more useful questions: Where do our institutions continue to reproduce unequal political power? What historical injuries produced those inequalities? What forms of repair are necessary to prevent their recurrence?

The democracy reform and reparations movements need one another. Too often, democracy reformers discuss participation, representation, and institutional legitimacy without confronting the racial hierarchy that has shaped those institutions. At the same time, reparations advocates frequently emphasize historical and material injustice without articulating democratic redesign as an essential condition for achieving and sustaining repair. Political equality without material repair leaves intact enormous inequalities in wealth and opportunity that translate directly into political influence. Yet material repair without political equality remains vulnerable to the same political institutions that have repeatedly blocked, diluted, or reversed efforts toward racial justice.

The United States has just commemorated its 250th anniversary. The question before us is larger than whether our democracy can survive another election cycle. It is whether it can thrive for another two and a half centuries. Simply defending existing democratic institutions will not secure that future. Many of those institutions were constructed in ways that exclude large portions of the American people from equal political standing.

The unfinished work of the Abolitionist Movement and the Civil Rights Movement has never been solely about expanding rights. It requires transforming institutions to ensure those rights cannot be withdrawn whenever political winds shift. Only by embedding repair into the architecture of democratic governance can we break the recurring cycle in which democratic expansion is upended by racial retrenchment and democratic decline. 

Without a comprehensive agenda of repair, every effort to rebalance political power will remain vulnerable to reversal. 

With it, we can finally build a democracy capable of sustaining pluralism, equality, and shared power for generations to come.