In Jennifer Hochschild’s seminal article “The Possibilities for Democracy in America,” the Harvard professor references James Madison’s fear that unchecked factionalism would tear apart the republic.

For Madison, factionalism was driven by property holdings. Simply put, the differences arising between the “haves and the have nots.” Hochschild extends this view to the factionalism related to how we choose to identify ourselves as black or white, Latino or Asian, gay or straight, etc.

This “politics of identity,” she argued in 2002, would move us in one of three primary directions: pluralism, where racial and ethnic identities dissolve as groups come into closer contact; separation, with Americans moving toward mutual racial and ethnic separation; and black exceptionalism, where Anglos, Asian Americans and Latinos intermingle but generally exclude blacks. She declined to predict future outcomes.

It has been 14 years since she wrote the article. In the interim, we have seen aspects of pluralism culminating in the election of a black president and a 10-fold increase in interracial marriages. We have also seen aspects of separation with rural America becoming older and whiter and cities remaining largely segregated. Black exceptionalism is reflected in the “Black Lives Matter” movement.

Now, with the election of Donald Trump, who has ridden a wave of white male backlash and defensiveness, the liberal assumption that pluralism had been firmly established has been seriously challenged.

Trump tapped something more than frustration with Washington. His deliberate “tweets” and slurs appealed to a very large and fixed faction of Americans that consciously and unconsciously resist the pluralism and the gender shifts taking place around them.

Combine this with a lack of meaningful work for a large segment of the population, and the very thing Madison warned about concerning large factions has come to pass.

I think Democratic Party officials have been too quick to attribute failure to a lack of attention to the economic needs of “Rust Belt America,” and have, to date, ignored the “politics of identity.”

If we fail to engage in a national discussion of these critical issues, the democracy envisioned by Madison could well be facing its greatest challenge since the Civil War.

(Philip Mead lives in Bow.)