The History We Forget at Our Peril
May has meant something in this country before.
In May 1875, a lame-duck Republican Congress used one of its last sessions in the majority to pass the most ambitious civil rights legislation produced since the end of the Civil War. The Civil Rights Act of 1875, signed by President Ulysses S. Grant on March 1 of that year, declared that all persons within U.S. jurisdiction were entitled to full and equal enjoyment of public accommodations; inns, theaters, transportation, regardless of race. Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts had spent years pushing the bill before dying in 1874 without seeing it pass. His colleagues passed it anyway, partly as tribute, partly, as historian Eric Foner has noted, because they understood this was almost certainly the last time they would be able to.
They were right. Eight years later, in the 1883 Civil Rights Cases, the Supreme Court gutted it in an 8-to-1 decision, ruling that the Fourteenth Amendment authorized Congress to regulate discriminatory state action; not the behavior of private individuals and businesses. Justice John Marshall Harlan, the lone dissent, argued the Reconstruction amendments clearly forbade what the majority was permitting. He was outvoted.
The federal government would not attempt anything comparable for eighty-one years.
That gap; 1883 to 1964, is not a historical abstraction. It is the legal duration of Jim Crow. It is the architecture of deliberate, sanctioned exclusion. And the lesson it teaches is not only that moral progress is possible. It is that moral progress, once achieved, can be taken; not through a single dramatic act, but through judicial decisions, weakened enforcement, and public fatigue, piece by piece, until the unimaginable is normalized.
Ninety years after the Civil Rights Act of 1875, Congress faced another defining question: whether dignity in old age should belong only to the wealthy, or be treated as a shared national obligation. On July 30, 1965, President Lyndon Johnson flew to Independence, Missouri to Harry Truman’s presidential library to sign the Social Security Amendments of 1965 in the presence of the man who had tried and failed for two decades to establish national health insurance. When Johnson presented Truman with the first Medicare card, he told him he had “planted the seeds of compassion and duty which have today flowered into care for the sick and serenity for the fearful.”
Those amendments created Medicare and Medicaid. Nineteen million Americans enrolled in Medicare when it went into effect in 1966. Within three years, it had fundamentally reshaped American life for the elderly. Before it existed, aging Americans routinely delayed medical treatment they couldn’t afford. Elderly poverty rates were dramatically higher than they are today. Retirement could mean financial ruin.
The people who built that system weren’t acting out of generosity alone. They were acting from memory. They had lived through what happened without it.
What the Numbers Say Now
The Social Security Administration began 2025 serving approximately 73 million beneficiaries — more than one in five Americans. By mid-year, the Department of Government Efficiency had cut roughly 7,000 SSA positions, a reduction of approximately twelve percent and the largest staff reduction in the agency’s history over a six-month period.¹ Regional offices have been consolidated. Field offices have been targeted for closure, forcing some beneficiaries to travel more than 135 miles for in-person services.
Before any of these cuts, disability determinations already averaged 236 days at the initial stage. Wait times have since grown longer. As of mid-2025, nearly one million people were waiting for disability decisions. In fiscal year 2023, before the most recent reductions, 30,000 people died while awaiting those decisions.²
The administration has simultaneously floated regulatory changes that would alter how age is weighed in disability determinations, making it harder for workers over fifty to qualify. Proposed SSI rule changes would cut benefits for approximately 400,000 low-income disabled or elderly individuals living with family members.³ Medicaid cuts embedded in pending congressional legislation threaten coverage for millions more.
More than 7 million Americans over sixty-five now derive at least 90 percent of their income from Social Security. For nearly half of all elderly Americans, the program is the difference between independence and poverty.⁴ These are not abstractions. They are people who worked, paid in, and were promised something in return. The 1965 amendments represented not charity but contract; a social compact written into law, built into the demographic and financial planning of an entire generation.
That contract is now being renegotiated in federal efficiency reports, without the consent of the people it was made with.
The Civil Rights Architecture Is Also Eroding
The echoes of 1883 arrive differently in 2025, but they arrive.
Rather than a single Supreme Court decision striking down civil rights law outright, what has occurred is a methodical dismantling of the mechanisms that make those laws function. Executive orders on the first day of the new administration eliminated federal diversity, equity, and inclusion programs across agencies. In December 2025, the Department of Justice finalized a rule rescinding its disparate-impact regulations under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, eliminating more than fifty years of enforcement framework and requiring, going forward, proof of intentional discrimination before federal action can be taken.⁵
Intentional discrimination is the hardest kind to prove and the least common form it takes.
Inside the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division; the institution created in 1957 specifically to enforce the rights now under pressure, approximately 250 lawyers, roughly 70 percent of the legal staff, have departed since January 2025.⁶ The voting rights section, which once operated with dozens of attorneys, now functions with bare-bones staffing. The Social Security Administration closed its Office of Civil Rights and Equal Opportunity as part of the restructuring.
Donna Christensen, a presidential historian and CEO of the LBJ Foundation, described the scope plainly: “This is certainly the biggest rollback of civil rights since Reconstruction.”⁷
The Strategy of Slow Erosion
I want to be precise about what this pattern represents, because precision matters here. This is not the normal pendulum swing of American politics, one administration adjusting what the previous one set. The documented record, the SSA staffing cuts, the DOJ civil rights restructuring, the regulatory changes to disability determinations, the defunding of enforcement offices, describes a coordinated withdrawal of the federal government from its role as guarantor of the commitments it has made to its own citizens.
The strategy relies on a specific feature of public attention: people notice dramatic ruptures but accommodate slow erosion.
No one repealed the Civil Rights Act of 1875 in 1883 by announcing they were doing so. The Court found a technical argument about federal authority over private actors. The result was eighty-one years of Jim Crow. No one has announced the repeal of the Social Security Amendments of 1965. The current administration has found technical arguments about administrative efficiency and fraud prevention. The result, if unchecked, is a system that exists on paper but does not function in practice; which is, from the perspective of the person who cannot get a disability determination processed before they die, exactly the same as no system at all.
Normalization is its own form of transformation. Democratic erosion rarely announces itself. Voting restrictions emerge incrementally. Courts become politicized. Oversight agencies weaken. Citizens grow accustomed to language and actions that once would have provoked alarm. The collapse of Reconstruction is the clearest American example: no single announcement ended Black citizenship. It eroded slowly through judicial decisions, weakened enforcement, racial terror, and public exhaustion, until the unimaginable became the landscape.
What Is Actually at Stake
Social Security and civil rights protections are almost always discussed in the language of budgets, policy frameworks, and partisan positioning. Beneath those debates lies a far more fundamental question: What obligations do Americans owe one another?
Programs like Medicare and Social Security are not accounting systems. Civil rights laws are not merely regulatory mechanisms. Together they reflect moral decisions about dignity, equality, vulnerability, and belonging. A society that guarantees healthcare access for the elderly communicates something about how it values human life beyond economic productivity. A society that enforces anti-discrimination protections declares that citizenship should not depend upon race, gender, or wealth.
Weakening those protections changes more than administrative structures. It changes the character of the country itself.
One of the greatest risks facing contemporary America is historical amnesia. Many citizens inherited protections they never personally had to fight for. Voting rights, workplace protections, anti-discrimination laws, retirement programs, these arrived before most Americans currently living were adults. Because those systems appear longstanding, they can feel permanent. But permanence is often an illusion created by successful institutions.
The generations who built these protections understood their fragility. Reconstruction activists witnessed violent backlash. Civil rights marchers faced arrest, beatings, and assassination. Labor organizers endured imprisonment. Elderly Americans before Medicare knew what it meant to age without healthcare security. When citizens no longer remember why institutions were created, arguments that those institutions are unnecessary find easier purchase.
What Comes Next Depends on Specific Actions
Democratic decline is not inevitable. But preventing it requires participation rather than resignation and participation requires specificity.
Know the history as instruction, not nostalgia. The people who passed the Civil Rights Act of 1875 in a lame-duck session knew they were using their last available window. The people who built Medicare in 1965 did it against organized opposition from the American Medical Association and against legislators who believed government had no place in healthcare. Neither group waited for consensus. They used the political power available to them at the moment it was available.
Demand legislative accountability by name, on specific votes. The cuts to SSA’s administrative budget, the Medicaid provisions in the reconciliation package, the executive orders dismantling civil rights enforcement infrastructure; these have sponsors and vote tallies. Representatives who cast those votes can be asked to defend them in town halls, in local newspapers, and in primaries. Making elected officials own the consequences of their choices is the basic mechanism of representative government, not activism.
Organize at the state level. When federal civil rights enforcement retreats, states become the contested ground. Some states have already moved to fill the gap — maintaining disparate impact standards in their own civil rights laws, protecting Medicaid expansion, challenging federal office closures in court. The difference between those states and the ones moving in the same direction as the federal government is organized constituent pressure.
Protect the institutions that protect you. The lawsuit filed by disability advocates against the SSA and DOGE in April 2025 argued that the mass restructuring amounted to “administrative vandalism” leaving millions of beneficiaries without legally entitled benefits.⁸ That litigation requires public attention and resources. Independent journalism, legal aid organizations, and civil rights offices operating under active defunding pressure need the sustained engagement of people who understand what is being dismantled.
Vote with historical memory not as a personality contest or a team sport, but as a choice between which version of America survives the decade.
The rights we inherited were not given. They were argued for in Senate chambers and fought for in streets and litigated in courts that did not always rule correctly the first time. They were built, incrementally, against resistance, by people who understood that the purpose of government was not merely to maintain order but to keep faith with the people it governed.
What has been built can be rebuilt. That is not optimism. It is the plain lesson of 1965, which only happened because enough people refused to accept 1883 as the final answer.
The question now is whether we understand our moment clearly enough to refuse the same.
Sources and Notes
¹ Social Security Administration workforce figures and DOGE staffing reductions, as reported in federal budget documentation and confirmed by former SSA Commissioner Martin O’Malley’s public statements, 2025.
² SSA disability determination backlogs and mortality figures: Congressional testimony and SSA administrative data, FY2023–2025.
³ Proposed SSI rule changes affecting approximately 400,000 beneficiaries: SSA regulatory filing, 2025.
⁴ Social Security income dependency figures: Social Security Administration, Annual Statistical Supplement, 2024.
⁵ DOJ rescission of disparate-impact regulations under Title VI: Department of Justice final rule, December 2025.
⁶ DOJ Civil Rights Division staffing losses: reported departures from division attorneys and confirmed by DOJ personnel records, 2025.
⁷ Donna Christensen, CEO of the LBJ Presidential Foundation, public statement, 2025.
⁸ Disability Rights advocates v. SSA and DOGE: federal lawsuit filed April 2025, citing “administrative vandalism” in mass restructuring of SSA service infrastructure.
Additional historical sources: Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution (1988); civil rights legislative history, 1875 and 1964–1965 Congressional records; Social Security Amendments of 1965, Public Law 89-97.