We’ve always been in crisis

Why violence and division don’t mean democracy is breaking - they mean it’s working

Americans have always believed the sky is falling.

We’ve always killed each other over politics.

And we’ve always been convinced that our particular moment is the one that proves it’s all finally coming undone.

But if you zoom out, the story starts to look less like collapse - and more like continuity.

Democracy in America has never been peaceful, unified, or even especially stable.

It wasn’t designed to be.

Crisis is the norm - not the exception

From the start, the people who built this country expected it to be chaotic.

In Federalist 10, James Madison warned that liberty would naturally breed faction:

“Liberty is to faction what air is to fire.”

Thomas Jefferson, too, expected freedom to be misused:

“Mankind soon learn to make interested uses of every right and power which they possess.”

These weren’t flaws. They were features of the system.

The goal was never to eliminate conflict - but to contain it.
To keep the fire from burning the house down.

That’s why American democracy has always lived with violence in its bloodstream.

Violence is an American tradition

It started before the country even began.

In the 1760s and 70s, colonists tarred and feathered dozens of customs officials and loyalists across the colonies - often in broad daylight, often with community support. It was organized, symbolic, and meant to send a message.

The pattern only escalated.

The Civil War and its aftermath saw the deadliest political violence in our history - from the Draft Riots in New York to the massacres in Opelousas and the rise of the Klan.

Presidential assassinations - Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley, Kennedy - and countless attempts since are part of the same throughline.

So are the murders of Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., and Robert F. Kennedy.

The Trump assassination attempt in 2024?

It fits the pattern exactly: political grievance turned into targeted violence, followed by reactive security upgrades and national disbelief.

We’re shocked every time. But none of it is new.

Every generation thinks it’s the end

It’s not just the violence.

It’s the feeling that we’re falling apart - that we’re uniquely broken.

“These are the times that try men’s souls,” Thomas Paine wrote in 1776.

That line could’ve been written during the Depression, Vietnam, or today.

In the 1930s, people wrote to President Hoover saying they were “reduced to poverty and starving and anxiety and sorrow.”

In the 1970s, Jimmy Carter spoke of a “crisis of the American spirit,” and warned that most Americans believed the next five years would be worse than the last.

The details change.

But the emotional core - panic, disillusionment, fear of collapse - doesn’t.

Historians like Sean Wilentz and Michael Tomasky argue that this sense of doom is actually cyclical.

Each generation rediscovers what Hofstadter called “the paranoid style in American politics” - a style that thrives on conspiracies, moral panics, and the belief that democracy is teetering on the edge.

The edge, it turns out, is where democracy has always lived.

This is what democracy looks like

Conflict isn’t proof that democracy is breaking.

It’s proof that it’s breathing.

“Truth is great and will prevail,” Jefferson wrote,
“if left to herself… through free argument and debate.”

Democracy, at its root, is a system for working out irreconcilable differences without total destruction.

Not without pain, not without loss - but without surrendering the idea that multiple truths can live in tension.

And historically?

We’ve come through every one of these crises.

We came through the Revolution. Through the Civil War. Through Depression, World Wars, McCarthyism, segregation, Watergate, 9/11.

It was never clean. But we came through.

So where does that leave us?

Right now, it’s easy to feel like everything is unraveling.

But maybe we’re not unraveling.

Maybe we’re just living through the same messy, volatile, deeply human process that has always defined American democracy.

That’s not a call for complacency.

It’s a call for context.

The point isn’t that everything will be fine - it’s that this is the fire Madison warned us about.

This is the argument Jefferson believed would reveal the truth.

This is the turbulence the founders expected - and designed for.

We’re not living in a uniquely broken moment.

We’re living in the tradition.

And the tradition is hard. And violent. And alive.