Donald Trump’s conquest of the Republican Party has placed the civic health of the country under enormous strain in many obvious ways.

Hate crimes against Muslims have soared over the past year; Trump protesters have been attacked viciously, and with impunity, in public spaces; immigrants have spent the campaign in fear of what will become of their families and their safety in the event that Trump somehow wins. Last week, arsonists torched a black church in Greenville, Mississippi, after spraying “Vote Trump” on one of its exterior walls.

There are other, less obvious but just as troubling symptoms of this national tension. For instance, there is a very high probability that we will wake up Wednesday to find that president-elect Hillary Clinton will serve her first term without control over either chamber of Congress. In that event, it’ll be easy to imagine that Antonin Scalia’s vacant Supreme Court seat will remain empty for four additional years. If an elderly liberal justice departs the Court in that time, conservatives would reestablish control over it, effectively nullifying the voters’ will.

It is commonly said that the scenario facing us is unprecedented, but that isn’t quite so. There have been two times in the nearly 200 years since Congress set the number of seats on the Court at nine when our political system became so dysfunctional that the size of the Court came into question. The first was in 1866 when, as the legal scholar John Orth has written, “an ill-conceived and short-lived judiciary act reduced the number of justices … to seven,” to void President Andrew Johnson’s appointment power. The next was in 1937, at the end of the Lochner Era, when President Franklin Roosevelt proposed adding seats to a Supreme Court that was so ideologically hostile to economic regulation that it crippled his ability to respond to the Great Depression.

This kind of procedural extremism, in other words, seems to be the byproduct of a threadbare civic fabric. If we’re experiencing a crisis of civic wellbeing that rivals either the immediate aftermath of the Civil War or the nadir of the Great Depression—when the American way of life was beset on both sides by fascism and communism—it goes without saying we’re in some trouble.