In 1972, I taught at a Boston prep school where one of my students, Chantal, had been sent from Haiti by her privileged family to complete her secondary education. She was poised, serious, and ambitious. But what I remember most was her fear — and her warning.
"You Americans don't know how lucky you are," she would say, speaking in hushed tones about people who disappeared without warning under Jean-Claude "Baby Doc" Duvalier's brutal regime. She'd describe how neighbors would simply vanish. Not political activists, just ordinary people who'd said the wrong thing to the wrong person.
"The smart ones learn to be quiet," she'd say, "but quiet people can't save a country." Even the privileged, she explained, were not immune when danger lived in silence.
Fifty years later, watching American democracy strain under unprecedented pressures, I finally understand what Chantal knew instinctively: that constitutional protections mean nothing without the institutional will to enforce them, and that authoritarianism rarely announces itself with jackboots. It arrives quietly, through normalized corruption and rewritten rules.
The Supreme Court's July 2024 ruling in Trump v. United States granted presidents broad immunity from prosecution for official acts, a dramatic expansion of executive power. Combined with the Heritage Foundation's Project 2025, which the ACLU describes as authored by "140 former Trump staffers" as "a roadmap for how to replace the rule of law with right-wing ideals," and research showing the US is on track to lose its democracy status within six months, we're witnessing a fundamental challenge to American democratic institutions.
This moment feels unprecedented to many Americans. But Chantal would recognize it immediately, and so should we if we remember our own history correctly.
The Gilded Age We Never Fully Left Behind
Americans often invoke the Gilded Age as a period of entrepreneurial greatness, but we rarely reckon with its systematic brutality. From 1870 to 1900, government wasn't captured by wealthy interests — it was designed by them, for them. Railroad barons wrote transportation policy. Steel magnates controlled labor law. Political machines brokered democracy behind closed doors while children lost limbs in unregulated factories.
The parallels to today are instructive. According to inequality researchers, the top 0.01% of families now control 10% of the country's wealth, surpassing even Gilded Age levels. More concerning is institutional capture—contemporary movements systematically placing allies throughout the federal judiciary, election systems, and regulatory agencies.
The difference is scale and sophistication. Where Gilded Age corruption was often transactional---direct bribes, patronage jobs---today's influence operates through legal structures: dark money networks, regulatory capture, and constitutional interpretation that
This is what Chantal recognized instinctively. The real danger isn't dramatic coups, but the quiet rewriting of rules. In the 1970s, Haiti's Duvaliers maintained a constitutional facade while ruling through fear and patronage, illustrating how formal protections can be meaningless without genuine institutional safeguards.
Unlike the original Gilded Age's limited voting rights, today's crisis unfolds within the context of universal suffrage. This makes the current moment both more concerning and more hopeful—democratic tools are accessible to far more people than robber barons ever faced.
But there's a crucial lesson from that earlier era: what feels permanent can change rapidly when enough people refuse to accept it as usual.
When Silence Broke
The Progressive Era didn't begin with Theodore Roosevelt's "Square Deal" or with landmark legislation. It started with journalists, activists, and ordinary citizens who refused to accept that inequality was natural or that corruption was inevitable. Ida Tarbell exposed Standard Oil's monopolistic practices through rigorous investigation. Jane Addams created models for how government could serve public welfare rather than private interests.
These reformers understood something crucial: democracy isn't a system you inherit. It's something you build, continuously, through institutions that distribute power rather than concentrate it. Their innovations laid the foundation for 20th-century American governance, including antitrust law, workplace safety regulations, public health systems, and civil service reforms.
What We're Building Now
Today's democratic innovations are emerging at the state and local level, where federal gridlock has created space for experimentation. From ranked-choice voting to participatory budgeting to proportional representation, communities are testing reforms that distribute power more broadly and create incentives for coalition-building rather than polarization.
More significantly, a new generation of reformers is tackling structural problems the Progressive Era left unfinished, developing frameworks for constitutional democracy and building movements that don't rely on traditional party structures.
Chantal would have understood the fragility of these experiments. In Haiti, she'd seen how quickly democratic innovations could be dismantled when power was concentrated in the wrong hands. "It's not enough to build good things," she might have said, "you have to build them strong enough to survive the people who want to tear them down."
But unlike the Progressive Era's reforms, which ultimately required federal legislation and presidential leadership, today's innovations face a more challenging landscape. The Supreme Court's current composition appears hostile to voting rights and campaign finance reform. Congressional gridlock makes it nearly impossible to pass major legislation. And the information environment makes building consensus around shared facts increasingly difficult.
The Work of Democracy
Chantal understood that democracy isn't passive; it's something you do continuously. Progressive Era reformers created new forms of democratic accountability for industrial capitalism; however, we now need innovations designed to address today's challenges, including global capital flows, digital systems, and political polarization.
What Chantal Would Say Now
I think Chantal would recognize both the danger and the opportunity in this moment. She understood that authoritarianism succeeds not only through dramatic coups but through the gradual normalization of corrupt practices, and that it can be stopped by people who refuse to accept that normalization.
I wonder what Chantal would make of Americans who dismiss concerns about democratic backsliding as "alarmist." She'd recognize that dismissal. It's precisely what privileged Haitians told themselves right up until the moment their privilege couldn't protect them anymore.
She also understood that privilege provides no protection when institutional guardrails collapse. In Haiti, wealth and status held little value when the rule of law was absent. In America, constitutional rights mean nothing without institutions willing and able to enforce them.
But Chantal also knew something else: that people who understand the fragility of democracy can become its most effective defenders. She didn't flee Haiti because she was powerless. She was sent away precisely because her family understood how quickly any remaining freedoms could vanish entirely.
That's the choice facing Americans now. We can assume our democracy is self-sustaining, or follow the example of Progressive Era reformers and people like Chantal, who understood that democracy is something you build, not inherit.
The work begins with refusing normalized corruption. Support the Fair Representation Act, proportional representation, ranked-choice voting, and participatory budgeting. Contact your representatives about the Freedom to Vote Act. Join organizations like FairVote, RepresentUs, or the Participatory Budgeting Project. The innovations essential to preserving democracy are happening now. The question is whether we'll scale them fast enough.
You Americans, Chantal might say today, still don't know how lucky you have been, but you might be starting to learn.
Edward Saltzberg is the Executive Director of the Security and Sustainability Forum and writes The Stability Brief.
