Seth David Radwell is the author of “American Schism: How the Two Enlightenments Hold the Secret to Healing our Nation” and serves on the Advisory Councils at Business for America, RepresentUs, and The Grand Bargain Project. He Holds a Bachelor of Arts Degree Summa Cum Laude from Columbia University and a Masters’ Degree from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.
With Trump’s return to the White House, we once again bear daily witness to a spectacle which could be described as entertaining, were it only a TV series. But Trump’s unprecedented, obstinate assault on our democratic norms and institutions is not only very real, but represents the gravest peril our democratic republic has confronted in the last eighty years.
Trump’s gradual consolidation of power and authoritarian proclivities, reminiscent of an earlier era, are very frightening on their own account. But it is his uncanny ability to control the narrative which empowers him to shred our nation’s fabric while proceeding with impunity. His actions not only threaten the very republic which he now leads, but overturn the entire post-WWII world order, now in chaos. Trump has ostensibly cast aside the governing principle with the U.N. charter of sovereignty. By suggesting on multiple occasions that the U.S. will “get Greenland one way or another,” and that Canada might become our 51st state, our neighbor to the north is now developing plans to protect itself from what it views as the enemy across the border
So how did we get here?
I originally began researching this very question a few years back during the first Trump administration. My investigation culminated in a book, American Schism, 1 which argues that we cannot comprehend today’s polarized political landscape without historical context. The book’s investigative tracing of the antecedents leads us back to our founding in the late 18th century when the original seeds were planted.
In fact, today’s acrimonious split is largely derivative of that first American Schism which arose during our founding. In this era, once the Revolutionary War was won, our founders faced the daunting task of governing the new independent nation. The original Articles of Confederation formed by the thirteen former colonies were wholly incapable of addressing the urgent problems on the ground. It was in this context that the original American Schism first surfaced.
Two stories of governance
In this process of designing a blueprint, two distinctive governing visions vied for prominence.
On one hand, founders like John Adams and Alexander Hamilton believed that the mechanisms of governance were enormously complicated and required the dedication of the best and the brightest. Pressing problems such as addressing the war debt and establishing foreign allies demanded pragmatic solutions with a broader purview that transcended the governing model of any of the individual states. The most educated leaders of the day deployed a range of competencies to forge intricately complex solutions with national scope. At the time, this governing model was referred to as an “aristocratic republic” and promulgated a government by the elites.
In the other camp were Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Paine, who believed that a representative democracy in which people selected delegates as advocates was the only sustainable republican form. Having emerged from the chains of the British crown, this group’s adherents were very circumspect of centralized power, and favored governance closer to the dispersed communities and with strict limits on centralized power. Herein lie the origins of the deep distrust of elites and suspicion among what became known as “populists.”
The emergence of the first political parties
The fight between these two factions became quite rancorous and drove the formation of the first political parties in our country, Hamilton’s Federalists, and Jeffersonian Democratic-Republicans. Had it not been for the skill and foresight of James Madison, who bridged the two groups during its drafting, we might never have succeeded in ratifying the U.S. Constitution, the great compromise.
But well past our founding period, these same tensions lingered and in fact have been omnipresent throughout much of history. Frequently, during our most difficult periods, this elite-populist tension festered below the surface. Underneath the partisan policy issues lie foundational yet unresolved questions: who should have the power to govern? To whom does the phrase “we, the people” vest governing authority?
America’s history as a pendulum swing
Much of American history evinces a pendulum-like swing between the two conflicting answers to this core question. After 30 years of Federalist dominance when much of the federal government foundation was originally established, the Jacksonian movement 2 ushered in a new era of populism. Later, as the country industrialized in post-Civil War America, the elites in the Northeast accumulated tremendous wealth in what became known as the Gilded Age. However, a bottom-up populist movement in the late 19th century called the Farmers’ Alliance 3 confronted these powerful forces by educating and empowering independent farmers across the South and West. Despite limited initial success, reforms during the progressive era of the 1920s represented a pendulum swing back.
In the last decades of the 20th century, the U.S. establishment laid the foundation for a new globalist economy within which Americans could thrive. But today, the tables have turned once again as formidable populist forces strive to dismantle much of the very infrastructure built since the middle of the 20th century.
One of Trump’s great insights was to sense this latest reversal more than a decade ago. Moreover, he adeptly weaponized this trend in his ultimately successful quest for political power. By demonizing coastal elites, Trump wielded a robust cleaver and split the elite-populist wedge wide open. By characterizing working class rural Americans as “forgotten,” Trump reinforced their loss of faith in American institutions, a key theme of the MAGA era.
The globalist economic model underlying today’s schism
While the forces underlying the American Schism are omnipresent, their manifestation continues to evolve. In order to understand today’s vicissitudes, a 40-year perspective is valuable — within this timeframe the economic model we call “globalization” became dominant. Every economic model has winners and losers, and in this case many Americans connected to this new global economy prospered. However, millions of Americans in huge industrial and rural swaths of the country suffered terribly as we outsourced large sections of economic activity.
The consequences of this vast variation in economic outcomes drove a major reorientation in the political landscape. For most of the 20th century, our partisan divisions were anchored in the post WWII “left-right” continuum, the central determinants of which pertain to the degree of prescribed government intervention in the political economy.
Today, the left-right continuum is still quite relevant, but it has been eclipsed by the elitist-populist clash described above. Millions of Americans who suffered the ravages left behind by globalization progressively became more distrustful of the policy makers on the coasts. To add insult to injury, the establishment of both political parties ignored their concerns and showed them nothing but disdain. The resulting social and ideological divisions represent yet another swing of the pendulum.
The Schism beyond America
One of the interesting questions that arises from this analysis is the degree to which this elite-populist tension exists in other liberal societies. In 2014, Christophe Guilluy penned La France Périphérique,4 and it proved to provide a prescient analysis of the polarization that has arisen in French society since the adoption of the globalist model. Guilluy describes how the schism’s fault lines are formed by those parts of France which have benefited from the global economy and those parts of France which have suffered under it. The explosion of the “gilets jaunes” movement in recent years in France is a clear manifestation of the model Guilluy describes, as is the Brexit movement, and the results of recent elections in Germany.5
One recent and comprehensive analysis presents these trends as part of one overall movement. In 2019, Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart in Cultural Backlash 6 clearly describe the interconnections across western societies. They demonstrate how the political and social fault lines form a consistent pattern across geographies, albeit with regional differences. Yet despite these differences, a common thread across all countries is a revival of authoritarianism and populism in the twenty-first century.
Moving forward
In the 2024 U.S. presidential election, the pent-up working-class rage towards the establishment erupted in a reckoning. Trump rallied his MAGA troops in cult-like fashion to “throw the bastards out,” and reclaim the White House, with promises to dismantle the elite set of institutions that have been built over decades.
Does this represent perhaps the apotheosis of the MAGA era here in the U.S.? Regardless of where we are in the cycle, we can only move forward if we look into the rearview mirror and see the complexity of the elite-populist schism in its historical context. What my analysis reveals is that in fact both the elite and populist models have made significant contributions to our republic. In fact, at times in our history, we crafted a “magic formula” for balancing these two conflicting visions to find a middle ground which led to better outcomes.
This raises a key set of questions: What are the ingredients of this formula? How did we successfully leverage elite expertise when required to solve complex problems, whilst also ensuring that egalitarian forces kept the elites in check? Tragically, what we observe in today’s environment is the grim reality that we have discarded reasoned historical analysis and abandoned the vital framework of compromise. As a society, we have yet to embrace the idea that history can act as a salve for our wounds if only we would apply it. To bestow our democratic republic to the next generation we must do better.
- Seth D. Radwell, “American Schism : How the Two Enlightenments Hold the Secret to Healing our Nation”, Greenleaf Book Group Press, 2021, 496 p. ↩︎
- The Jacksonian movement refers to the period of democratic transformation in the United States under President Andrew Jackson (1828-1836) who presented himself as the champion of the common people against the elites. This era was marked by the expansion of male suffrage, the emergence of mass political parties, and increased participation of ordinary citizens in politics. See Adam Gopnik et al., “Jacksonian democracy” in “United States”.
Encyclopedia Britannica, 2025. <https://www.britannica.com/place/United-States>. ↩︎ - “Farmers’ Alliance, an American agrarian movement during the 1870s and ’80s that sought to improve the economic conditions for farmers through the creation of cooperatives and political advocacy.” See Pat Brauer. “Farmers’ Alliance”. in “United States History”. Encyclopedia Britannica, 2019. <https://www.britannica.com/topic/Farmers-Alliance>. ↩︎
- Christophe Guilluy, « La France Périphérique », Flammarion, 2024, 165 p. ↩︎
- Editor’s note : After losing a motion of confidence in the Bundestag in late 2024, former German socialist Prime Minister, Olaf Scholz, was obliged to call early elections. On February 23, 2025, German conservatives (CDU/CSU) won the elections (28,5%) but what was notable was the far-right party (AfD)’s breakthrough, with 20,8% of the votes. Their ranking as second overall is the best score the AfD has ever gotten in history, with a gain of more than 10 percentage points since 2021. See Chloé Lippert, « Elections fédérales allemandes : tout ce qu’il faut savoir sur le scrutin », Toute l’Europe, 2025. <https://www.touteleurope.eu/vie-politique-des-etats-membres/elections-federales-allemandes-tout-ce-qu-il-faut-savoir-sur-le-scrutin/> . ↩︎
- Pippa Norris & Ronald Inglehart, “Cultural Backlash: Trump, Brexit, and Authoritarian Populism”, Cambridge University Press, 2019, 564 p. ↩︎