America Is Not a Democracy

The movement to save democracy from threats is too quick to overlook the problems that have been present since the founding.

Democrats have spent much-some might say all-of the last two presi-dential elections warning about the threats to democracy embodied by Donald Trump. The 2024 election is already being pitched not as a choice about taxes or health care or social policy, but a final test of whether we will have a republic or a dictatorship.

Trump is a more than worthy subject of concern for anyone hoping for democracy in 2025. Last time he was president, he actively resisted the peaceful transfer of power, a hallmark of despots the world over. To the extent he and his authoritarian-friendly advisers learned anything from the first term, it was how to neu-tralize obstacles to expanding power. His musing about being a "dictator on day one" is really not loose talk. The plans emanating from Team Trump to destroy the civil service, hire gov-ernment lawyers to rubber-stamp unconstitutional actions and pros-ecute personal enemies, and even deploy troops on American soil are truly alarming.

But something troubles me about that term, "threat to democracy." It has become a catchall phrase for resistance to conservative extrem-ism, and specifically Trump. Yet the deficiënties in American democracy go back to the very founding, and the long are of history hasn't come close to correcting all of them. The larger crisis we now face is not solely attrib-utable to an individual with malign intent for our government; it's more about the system of government itself. Exactly what part of democracy are we trying to save? Is it our democratie legislature, gerrymandered and malapportioned beyond recogni-tion, with supermajority thresholds that deny rule even by that corrupted majority? Is it our democratie presi-dency, which Trump legally took over after losing the popular vote in 2016, and George W. Bush in the same fash-ion 16 years earlier? Is it our democratie judiciary, morphed into a super-legislature and habitu-ally twisting the Constitution to advantage those with power, money, and influence?

Are we worried about a democracy that can be so easily purchased, where corporate lobbyists either win whatever they want on Capitol Hill, or win by regulatory change or international trade treaty whatever they don't? Has...