OPINION: Anti-democratic action has a deep history in U.S. politics. We must continue to resist it.

In 1799, President John Adams, the subject of a 2001 Pulitzer Prize-winning biography by David McCullough and an Emmy-winning 2008 HBO television miniseries, showed his tenuous respect for the U.S. Constitution’s protection of free speech by instigating the prosecution of 126 journalists — all supporters of Thomas Jefferson, his opponent for re-election in 1800. Prosecutors used the Sedition Act, one of four widely unpopular measures Adams had encouraged Congress, dominated by his Federalist Party, to enact the year prior. Several of the editors prosecuted had published reliable information that Adams’ party loyalists in Congress had planned to refuse to certify electoral votes for Jefferson when these were presented by the states. The biography and miniseries elided the full story of the prosecutions.

A number of those convicted and jailed continued writing, their papers publishing the truth of their prosecutions, support for Jefferson and his party, embarrassing Adams and the Federalists. When he was inaugurated in 1801, Jefferson indicated his intention to allow the Sedition Act to expire.

John Adams was not the only president to ignore the rule of law in attacking his political opponents. In 1866, Andrew Johnson, the proud white supremacist who succeeded to the presidency after Abraham Lincoln’s assassination, faced strong opposition in Congress to his intention to allow former Confederates to resume power in the southern states, which he was determined to welcome back into the union without recrimination.

He embarked on a speaking tour of the country hoping to generate support for his policies. It didn’t work. Heckled badly at a speech in Cleveland, Johnson responded to calls to hang Jefferson Davis, the imprisoned former president of the Confederacy, with retorts that it was Congressman Thaddeus Stevens and the abolitionist Wendell Phillips who should be hung. Stevens (an ancestor of Alaska state Sen. Gary Stevens) was a leader of the Reconstructionists in Congress who wanted the southern states purged of former Confederate leaders and those states to declare allegiance to the Constitution before being readmitted to the union. Phillips was a gifted orator and tireless activist who supported equal rights for Blacks, for Indigenous Americans and for women. When Johnson was impeached in 1868, his advocacy of violence against his enemies was one of the articles. He survived conviction by a single vote, but was never an effective administrator again.

More familiar is President Richard Nixon’s engineering of criminal activity by his group of “plumbers,” operatives who attempted to burgle Democrat headquarters in the Watergate office complex in Washington, D.C. Less well known is Nixon’s determination that his criminal team should break into a safe in the offices of the liberal Brookings Institute in D.C., which he believed held documents that would incriminate him in illegal activities. Nixon also sought to ruin the career of the military analyst Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the “Pentagon Papers” to the press, directing the team to burgle Ellsberg’s office and spread misinformation about him. In addition to Nixon’s impeachment for his and his advisers attempting to cover up these activities, the impeachment articles cited the “plumbers” directly. As for Ellsberg, he was only emboldened in his political activism by Nixon’s attempts at intimidation.

These examples of official malfeasance are included in a new book by Brown University professor of constitution law and politics Corey Brettschneider, “The Presidents and the People: Five Leaders Who Threatened Democracy and the Citizens Who Fought to Defend It.” His book, with many others, confirms that there has been an anti-democracy strain in American political culture from the beginning of the republic. The thrust of Brettschneider’s book is an optimism that, because that strain has been successfully resisted and constrained repeatedly, it can be again. In the examples cited here, the convicted journalists continued to write, exposing Adams; advocates of equality maintained their exposure of Andrew Johnson and Congress impeached and tried him; the House impeached Nixon, forcing him to resign, and Ellsberg continued to work for transparency in government.

Former President Donald Trump has lied about his participation in Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s plan for crippling the federal government’s capacity to ensure people’s basic rights, such as free speech, assembly and voting, to protect consumers from rapacious and deceptive marketing and business practices, to protect immigrants and to otherwise guarantee equal opportunity. But numerous information outlets have explained in detail the project’s schemes, and Trump’s deep involvement with its designers and their plans. I hope, though it may take time, that with enough citizen engagement, the anti-democracy strain in our culture can be thwarted again. It’s up to us.

Steve Haycox is an emeritus professor of history at the University of Alaska Anchorage.

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