is the Paul Mellon Professor of American History Emeritus, Director of Research in American History, and Emeritus Fellow of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, UK. His books include: ‘Liberty and Coercion: The paradox of American government from the founding to the present’; ‘American Crucible: Race and nation in the twentieth century’; and ‘The Rise of Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order: America and the world in the free market era’.
Democracy in the US is under threat from within. Racial nationalism – a throwback to unresolved tensions from the American Civil War – has found new impetus under Trump, forcing civic nationalism into a corner. Will the immutable longevity of the American Constitution be its paradoxical undoing? And how might the US recover from its emerging dictatorship?