Like today’s timorous Democratic leaders, moderates in the Johnson-impeaching Congress believed that ... opposing the racist president too vigorously would lead to a politically damaging national backlash.

Today’s congressional Democratic leaders know as an article of faith that they must, at all costs, refrain from awakening the electoral giant of white reaction. There were men, too, in Johnson’s time, who believed in something very much like House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s utterly incoherent idea of “self-impeachment”—a mystic process by which the president is allowed to run amok while the opposition holds very still, waiting for him to go away on his own. And they advocated this dangerous fantasy for much the same reason that Pelosi did: Like today’s timorous Democratic leaders, moderates in the Johnson-impeaching Congress believed that a favorable-looking presidential election was on the horizon, and knew with utter assurance that opposing the racist president too vigorously would lead to a politically damaging national backlash by his supporters. This faux-savvy posture was and remains an abdication of both political and moral responsibility, particularly when the president isn’t just a criminal, but is actively using government power to entrench racialized despotism—even if permitting him to go ahead and do so is electorally advantageous over the near term.

At the time of Johnson’s impeachment, the Democratic Party very much was what Steve Bannon hoped Donald Trump could turn the Republican Party into: a white worker’s party, mixing outspoken defense of white supremacy with something much closer to a populist economic agenda than anything today’s Republican Party has ever managed. This has always been a heady brew in American electoral politics, especially when combined with state and local regimes dedicated to restricting the franchise, and an opposition that is only weakly committed to true multiracial democracy.

This set of arrangements described the United States for decades after Reconstruction ended. More than a few left-of-center observers, echoing Thaddeus Stevens’s warnings about the implications of a Johnson victory, have wondered if it also describes the United States after Donald Trump’s 2016 election. Then, as now, this dark political vision depends on the continued suppression of popular democracy—something enabled in part by our archaic Constitution, which every year looks less reasonable than Charles Black imagined it to be. The U.S. constitutional order is certainly less reasonable now than it was in the days when Congress could force through multiple revolutionary civil rights amendments at a pace shocking to modern observers. The Founders, in their infinite wisdom, created a government that was designed to perpetuate white supremacy, that allowed men like Andrew Johnson and Donald Trump to ascend to the most powerful role in that government without anything resembling majority support. The Constitution’s sage authors also created as the only recourse to those men’s abuses of power a process that requires the opposition party to hold both houses of Congress and embrace hard-core partisanship. It’s hard to believe such a lopsided arrangement could ever produce a just result.

Perhaps we’ll know soon if it can. Trump, like Johnson before him, is very much one of the architects of his own impeachment—and he’s belligerently made that case in the face of a Congress that wanted more than anything to allow a few quiet investigations to play out in the background while presidential candidates talked kitchen-table issues and congressional leaders passed bipartisan retirement security legislation. Because of who Trump is, and how he’s spun his abiding flaws of character into ideological selling points for his base, he was simply unable to help himself from indulging in ridiculous, scandalous behavior. House Democrats had their hand forced, but as long as Rudy Giuliani is shouting at Howard Kurtz on Fox News instead of sitting in the Capitol basement room that once held Charles Woolley, it’s difficult to imagine today’s Democratic leaders in Congress acting with the same zeal in pursuit of justice as their Radical Republican forebears. The Radicals had a clear understanding of what they were fighting for—Johnson had to be stopped, not for the sake of restoring a comfortable status quo, but in order to allow the Radicals to remake the country itself. Today’s congressional Democrats are hoping to pass a bill to allow annual price negotiations for 250 prescription drugs. Expecting them to go to war with a president who will go to any length he can to shield himself from scrutiny of his activities or consequences for his actions seems a lot to ask. As the consensus has long held, impeachment is a political process, and many of the leaders of today’s Democratic Party long to hold power in a world without politics.