A COVENANT,

By Jon Meacham

OR RONALD REAGAN,

the shadows were lengthening. In January 1989, as he prepared to pass power to George H.W. Bush and retire to California, the 40th president was thinking about how it had all begun. At a 50th anniversary luncheon in honor of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library on one of his final days as president, Reagan reminisced about a distant Thursday in 1936 when, as a sportscaster for WHO in Des Moines, he had hurried to the radio station’s window to glimpse Roosevelt passing by in a parade—the first president Reagan had ever seen.

“FDR knew that the history of the nation’s past is part of its charter for the future,” Reagan, who voted for Roosevelt four times, told the luncheon. “Policies come and go. Leaders will pass from the stage. The enduring sail and compass of our nation is ‘We the people.’ When the American people are strong and confident, when their leaders hear their voices, America, whatever storms it might be weathering, will make it through.”

When their leaders hear their voices: Reagan’s insight was given new life this week when American voters spoke up to protest the president and the party that has unabashedly—even gleefully— attempted to smash up the world embodied by Roosevelt and Reagan. The Trump Republican Party’s monumental midterm losses do not signal a sepia-toned return to a bygone age, but the Democratic victories are evidence that the battered heart of American democracy is still beating. Damaged yet durable, an understanding of the nation not as a blood-soaked battlefield but as a competitive covenant has been revived.

This observation is rooted not in partisan loyalty— I have voted for candidates of both parties— but from a sense of history. From 1932 to 2016, Americans inhabited a political universe largely defined by a figurative debate between FDR and Reagan. Like Jefferson and Hamilton, the Hudson Valley Democrat and the Southern California Republican set the terms of political conversation and culture beyond their lifetimes. For generations, the Roosevelt-Reagan spectrum gave us visions that were different in detail but harmonious in principle.

“This great nation of ours is a caring, loving

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land,” Reagan once said. “Its people have a zest for life and laughter, and Franklin Roosevelt shared those qualities. But we’re also a practical people with an inborn sense of proportion. We sense when things have gone too far, when the time has come to make fundamental changes. Franklin Roosevelt was that kind of a person, too.”

However imperfect, the world of Roosevelt and Reagan had virtues the country rejected in 2016 and in 2024 but which the 2026 results show we are hungry for: decency, love of neighbor and a conviction that wild swings one way or the other are unwise, distracting and depleting.

I am not making myths. The presidents from FDR to Obama were not gods; the 1932-2016 period was not Edenic. We all wish the era had been different in this way or that, and its failures gave President Trump his means of ascent. The globalized economy was not delivering for enough people. We fought wars that seemed unnecessary, overlong, or both. The institutions many of us were raised to revere were failing. Yet a political ethos that enabled the country to overcome the Depression, defeat the Axis, build the postWorld War II middle class, go to the moon, undo Jim Crow, open opportunities for women, welcome immigrants and prevail in the Cold War repays our consideration.

As do the two men who shaped the debate. Masterful architects of broad political philosophies, brilliant purveyors of partisan feeling— the New Deal and the Reagan Revolution were among our most formidable vote-getting movements— Roosevelt and Reagan were also pragmatists skilled in the art of governance. Lincoln, FDR once said, “was a sad man because he couldn’t get it all at once. And nobody can.” A big, complicated, disputatious country requires negotiation, nuance and a willingness to live with less than what you want. “I have no expectations of making a hit every time I come to bat,” Roosevelt said in 1933. “What I seek is the highest possible batting average.”

Reagan later quoted this remark, adding: “If you got seventy-five or eighty percent of what you were asking for, I say, you take it and fight for the rest later.” Hardcore conservatives, Reagan noted, weren’t

‘Every generation of Americans has faced problems and every generation has overcome them.’

PRESIDENT REAGAN

happy with his practicality—“ ‘Compromise’ was a dirty word to them,” he said—but he knew better.

The Roosevelt-Reagan world would certainly recognize the forces of our time: nationalism, xenophobia, extremism, reflexive partisan demonization and apocalyptic fear. The imminence of chaos, the image of a nation torn asunder, of a country irretrievably lost if a given election does not go the way we want has been a political trope from the beginning. “I conceive the republic to be in extreme danger,” Patrick Henry declared—in 1788. Such political language is ancient and familiar. It was prevalent in the 18th century and is nearly universal in our own moment. And from Joe McCarthy to George Wallace, America has been seasonally riven by a politics of fear and conspiracy.

What sets 2026 apart is what sets the past decade apart: Donald Trump. Neither McCarthy nor Wallace ever became president. Neither ever had the grip Trump so long enjoyed on a major political party.

To be fair, many conservatives have long thought the center and the left were trafficking in hyperbole about democratic erosion in the Age of Trump. The suspicion was that anti-Trump forces were cloaking their disagreements with Republican policy with false piety about constitutional norms.

Even after the 2020 election lies and the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, some respectable Reagan-Bush-McCain-Romney conservatives dismissed fears about a breakdown in the rule of law as overblown. “I don’t think Trump’s smart enough to be a fascist,” a senior Republican told me on the eve of the 2024 election. That seemed an unacceptably slender reed on which to hang one’s hopes for the republic, but the voters chose to gamble on a second Trump term, and one cannot be for democracy only when it’s convenient.

I was among those who argued that year that Trump was not worth the risk. But I also believed, with Lincoln, that all of us act on incentive, and that the only way to fortify the constitutional order was to defeat him at the polls. That did not happen two years ago. But now it functionally has.

The country has at last chosen to check Trump’s thirst for power for a host of reasons, all of which have been discussed and dissected since Tuesday night. Exit polls show voters were driven by the cost of living, tariffs, alleged corruption, Trump’s personal monetization of the presidency and a belief that the crackdown on immigration has gone too far.

Voters are creatures of interest, and their interests were not being served. The people will bear much, it seems, if their bellies are full and their minds at ease. Neither proved to be the case this year, and Americans did what Americans are supposed to do: We peaceably went to the polls, voted and will now see what the Democrats can do with the power they have been granted.

What will happen is unknowable. But we do know this: If we choose to see each other as enemies to be destroyed rather than opponents to be debated, we put the entire American experiment at risk. The genius of the founding was to insulate the new nation from a Hobbesian state of nature. As Alexander Hamilton argued, the Constitution was a test of whether a government could be formed not by force and accident but by reason and deliberation. If we are to sustain the democratic project, we must understand America as a covenant, not as a killing ground.

The country now seems to have intuitively recognized this truth, which is the best news of all. History tells us that a demagogue can thrive only when a substantial portion of the demos— the people—want him to. Writing in the Gilded Age, a British observer of America, James Bryce, warned that the followers of a potential autocrat were as much a part of the threat as the leader himself: “A bold President who knew himself to be supported by a majority in the country, might be tempted to override the law, and deprive the minority of the protection which the law affords it. He might be a tyrant, not against the masses, but with the masses.” And the masses, for now, have opted out.

“Every generation of Americans has faced problems and every generation has overcome them,” Reagan said in an East Room ceremony marking FDR’s centennial in 1982. “Like Franklin Roosevelt we know that for free men hope will always be a stronger force than fear, that we only fail when we allow ourselves to be boxed in by the limitations and errors of the past.” The president offered a toast—to “Happy days—now, again and always.” We should all raise a glass to that very American sentiment in this consequential autumn. Jon Meacham, a Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer, holds the Rogers Chair in the American Presidency at Vanderbilt University and is the author of a forthcoming biography of Dwight Eisenhower, to be published next fall.

Above: Voters line up to cast their ballots in Harlem in 1954. That same year, 18-year-olds register to vote in Atlanta, left.

The mood is celebratory at a Democratic watch party in Detroit, top, and at an event in Austin, Texas, on Tuesday.

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