Tag Archives: Republican Party

Why the Republican Party Is Abnormal and Dysfunctional

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It’s good to keep in mind that the Republican Party isn’t normal or functional and why that’s the case. Jamelle Bouie of The New York Times explains:

The extent to which the Democratic Party operates as a normal American political party can shed light on how and why the Republican Party doesn’t. Take the overall strength of Democratic moderates, who hold the levers of power within the national party. One important reason for this fact is the heterogeneity of the Democratic coalition. To piece together a majority in the Electoral College, or to gain control of the House or Senate, Democrats have to win or make inroads with a cross-section of the American public: young people, affluent suburbanites, Black, Hispanic and Asian Americans voters, as well as a sizable percentage of the white working class. To lose ground with any one of these groups is to risk defeat, whether it’s in the race for president or an off-year election for governor.

A broad coalition also means a broad set of interests and demands, some of which are in tension with one another. This has at least two major implications for the internal workings of the Democratic Party. First, it makes for a kind of brokerage politics in which the most powerful Democratic politicians are often those who can best appeal to and manage the various groups and interests that make up the Democratic coalition. And second, it gives the Democratic Party a certain amount of self-regulation. Move too far in the direction of one group or one interest, and you may lose support among the others.

If you take the internal dynamics of the Democratic Party and invert them, you get something like those within the Republican Party.

Consider the demographics of the Republican coalition. A majority of all voters in both parties are white Americans. But where the Democratic Party electorate was 61 percent white in the 2020 presidential election, the Republican one was 86 percent, according to the Pew Research Center. Similarly, there is much less religious diversity among Republicans — more than a third of Republicans voters in 2020 were white evangelical Protestants — than there is among Democrats. And while we tend to think of Democrats as entirely urban and suburban, the proportion of rural voters in the Democratic Party as a whole is actually greater than the proportion of urban voters in the Republican Party. There is, in other words, less geographic diversity among Republicans as well.

Most important, where nearly half of Democrats identify themselves as either “moderate” or “conservative” — compared with the half that call themselves “liberal” — nearly three-quarters of Republicans identify themselves as “conservative,” with just a handful of self-proclaimed moderates and a smattering of liberals, according to Gallup. This wasn’t always true. In 1994, around 33 percent of Republicans called themselves “moderate” and 58 percent said they were “conservative.” There were even, at 8 percent, a few Republican liberals. Now the Republican Party is almost uniformly conservative. Moderate Democrats can still win national office or hold national leadership. Moderate Republicans cannot. Outside a handful of environments, found in largely Democratic states like Maryland and Massachusetts, moderate Republican politicians are virtually extinct.

But more than the number of conservatives is the character of the conservatism that dominates the Republican Party. It is, thanks to a set of social and political transformations dating back to the 1960s, a highly ideological and at times reactionary conservatism, with little tolerance for disagreement or dissent. The Democratic Party is a broad coalition geared toward a set of policies — aimed at either regulating or tempering the capitalist economy or promoting the inclusion of various groups in national life. The Republican Party exists almost entirely for the promotion of a distinct and doctrinaire ideology of hierarchy and anti-government retrenchment.

There have always been ideological movements within American political parties. The Republican Party was formed, in part, by adherents to one of the most important ideological movements of the 19th century — antislavery. But, as the historian Geoffrey Kabaservice has observed, “The conversion of one of America’s two major parties into an ideological vehicle” is a “phenomenon without precedent in American history.”

It is the absence of any other aim but the promotion of conservative ideology — by any means necessary, up to and including the destruction of democratic institutions and the imposition of minority rule — that makes this particular permutation of the Republican Party unique. It helps explain, in turn, the dysfunction of the past decade. If the goal is to promote conservative ideology, then what matters for Republican politicians is how well they adhere to and promote conservatism. The key issue for conservative voters and conservative media isn’t whether a Republican politician can pass legislation or manage a government or bridge political divides; the key question is whether a Republican politician is sufficiently committed to the ideology, whatever that means in the moment. And if conservatism means aggrieving your enemies, then the obvious choice for the nation’s highest office is the man who hates the most, regardless of what he believes.

The demographic homogeneity of the Republican Party means that there isn’t much internal pushback to this ideological crusade — nothing to temper the instincts of politicians who would rather shut down the government than accept that a majority of Congress passed a law over their objections, or who would threaten the global economy to get spending cuts they could never win at the ballot box.

Worse, because the institutions of American democracy give a significant advantage to the current Republican coalition, there’s also no external force pushing Republican politicians away from their most rigid extremes. Just the opposite: There is a whole infrastructure of ideologically motivated money and media that works to push Republican voters and politicians farther to the right.

It is not simply that the Republican Party has politicians like Jim Jordan and Matt Gaetz and Marjorie Taylor Greene. It’s that the Republican Party is practically engineered to produce politicians like Jim Jordan and Matt Gaetz and Marjorie Taylor Greene. And there’s no brake — no emergency off-switch — that might slow or stop the car. The one thing that might get the Republican Party back on the rails is a major and unanticipated shift in the structure of American politics that forces it to adapt to new voters, new constituencies and new conditions.

It’s hard to imagine what that might be. It can’t come soon enough.

They Want a Red (as in Red State) Caesar

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Even though the 2024 election is still 13 months away, we should all be paying attention to the Republican Party’s descent into outright fascism (or to use a more contemporary term, “Trumpism”). Will Bunch of The Philadelphia Inquirer explains why: far right “thought leaders” think a dictator should take control in 2025:

The incredible scenes this week on Capitol Hill — leaving the U.S. House without a speaker and promising an autumn of sheer chaos in Congress — marked a rapid escalation of the downward spiral of American democracy…..

To a small but influential gaggle of so-called “thought leaders” on the edge of the stage — the pseudo-intellectuals of right-wing think tanks, and chaos-agent-in-chief Steve Bannon — the growing rot infecting another key U.S. institution is just more evidence for their stunning argument now flying at warp speed, yet under the radar of a clueless mainstream media.

The D.C. dysfunction is more proof, they would argue, that the nation needs a “Red Caesar” who will cut through what they call constitutional gridlock and impose order.

… Let me translate. The alleged brain trust of an increasingly fascist MAGA movement wants an American dictatorship that would “suspend” democracy in January 2025 — just 15 months from now.

The guru of this push for a president seizing dictatorial powers to overthrow what far-right activists see as a “deep state” of liberals — corrupting institutions ranging from government agencies to the media to large corporations and the Pentagon — is a professor of politics at Michigan’s ultraconservative Hillsdale College, Kevin Slack….

In War on the American Republic: How Liberalism Became Despotism, in which he rails against the “cosmopolitan class” of unelected elites he claims is running America, Slack writes that the “New Right now often discusses a Red Caesar, by which it means a leader whose post-Constitutional rule will restore the strength of his people.” In a recent Guardian article, writer Jason Wilson — who deserves enormous credit for tying together these threads — finds anti-democracy arguments like Slack’s are gaining traction in the small but influential world of far-right think tanks like Hillsdale and the Claremont Institute. That’s been tracked here in Philadelphia by another writer, Damon Linker at UPenn, who sees a dangerous conspiracy theory taking root not just with obscure professors but with the iconoclastic billionaires who back the right.

“Intellectuals play a certain kind of role, especially on the right, in legitimating actions of elites in the party and [the] movement,” Linker told me in a recent interview, adding: “They’re giving people permission to do terrible things,” labeling shameful measures as “acts of virtue”….

America should be having a robust, life-or-death conversation — when TV’s cable talkfest signs on at 6 a.m. until the last words at midnight, on the floors of the House and Senate, in newspaper editorial boards and down at the barber shop and in Starbucks — about whether we really want to end this country’s 247-year uneven experiment in democracy, and whether one man should have the power to override elections, jail his enemies, free his friends, and eviscerate federal agencies.

And yet the elites that far-right extremists claim are “all powerful” seem incapable of grasping these very real threats to constitutional government or a free press. That’s particularly true of the mainstream media and its pacesetters like the New York Times or the Washington Post, which seem determine to “both sides” the descent into dictatorship — with headlines that blame dysfunction on Capitol Hill on “Congress” instead of Republicans, or that place the 80-year-old President Joe Biden’s verbal or actual stumbles on a level pitch with rising GOP fascism.

It’s all the more remarkable since we all know who the actual “Red Caesar” is — even if he is, technically, orange….The 45th president who seems to have already locked down the Republican nomination to become the 47th, has been accused of running a rambling, ideas-free campaign — except that’s not true.

As the Los Angeles Times recently noted, [he] has been pretty specific in recent speeches and interviews about the actions he would take if he takes the oath of office on Jan. 20, 2025 — such as naming a special prosecutor to go after his political enemies, blowing up civil service protections to fill the government with his acolytes, deploying the military in a massive deportation campaign, and sending troops to “control crime” in Democratic-led cities….

But the media and others struggle to understand how someone like [him] — twice impeached with 91 pending felony indictments, found in New York courtrooms to be both a rapist and a fraudster — has a 50-50 chance of returning to the White House [note: according to polls 13 months before the election]. That requires understanding the role of the right’s No. 1 chaos agent — [Steve] Bannon, who was [T’s] 2016 campaign manager — and his ability to move pawns like the foot soldiers of the McCarthy ouster, such as Reps. Matt Gaetz and Nancy Mace, across his messy chessboard. Bannon, now a popular podcaster …, understands better than anyone that creating political mayhem is laying the groundwork for a strongman to declare — as [T] did in 2016 — that “I alone can fix it”.

In a 2022 article, a former Bannon associate … wrote that t[Bannon] frequently told him “about the destiny of the United States and the role he sees for chaos and destruction — for ‘craziness’ — in it. The worldview he laid out to me was one where things he might otherwise consider harmful, like the dissolution of our electoral process or the erosion of shared understandings of truth, were to be embraced as fated stages in a process of national rebirth.”

So now that Bannon’s craziness is here, the phony intellects of Trumpism at Hillsdale or Claremont are seizing the opportunity to make their case for the “Red Caesar” to bring about that “national rebirth.” In addition to Hillsdale’s Slack, proponents of suspending the Constitution include the likes of Claremont’s Michael Anton, the leading academic proponent of Trumpism, who in a 2020 book floated a similar theory about a “form of one-man rule: halfway … between monarchy and tyranny”….

The Guardian’s Wilson noted that Anton, in an essay decrying the power of elite, liberal-minded “experts,” wrote that “the United States peaked around 1965.” What was that year’s landmark event? The passage of the Voting Rights Act, which empowered Black voters and led to the election of thousands of African American office holders.

After the cultural upheavals of the 1960s, Republicans could win elections through the backlash politics of Richard Nixon or Ronald Reagan or the demagoguery of 1988′s “Willie Horton ad.” They then turned to tactics like voter suppression or extreme gerrymandering as their electorate shrunk. In 2024, the right sees dictatorship as its final “Hail Mary” pass. And it just might work.

But in thinking about a “Red Caesar,” it’s helpful to remember what the actual Caesar said right before crossing the Rubicon: Alea iacta est, meaning, “The die is cast.” In the United States in 2023, the die is not cast, not yet. The majority of Americans do not want to live under a dictatorship, and we have the power to stop this. But America is never going to prevent the “Red Caesar” unless we start talking about it, loudly and right away.

The Tyranny of the Minority

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The authors of How Democracies Die have a new book coming out called Tyranny of the Minority. Zack Beauchamp of Vox has a review that’s worth reading in full. These are selections:

In The Odyssey, Odysseus and his crew are forced to navigate a strait bounded by two equally dangerous obstacles: Scylla, a six-headed sea serpent, and Charybdis, an underwater horror that sucks down ships through a massive whirlpool. Judging Charybdis to be a greater danger to the crew as a whole, Odysseus orders his crew to try and pass through on Scylla’s side. They make it, but six sailors are eaten in the crossing.

In their new book Tyranny of the Minority, Harvard political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt — the authors of How Democracies Die — argue America’s founders faced an analogous problem: navigating between two types of dictatorship that threatened to devour the new country.

The founders, per Levitsky and Ziblatt, were myopically focused on one of them: the fear of a majority-backed demagogue seizing power. As a result, they made it exceptionally difficult to pass new laws and amend the constitution. But the founders, the pair argues, lost sight of a potentially more dangerous monster on the other side of the strait: a determined minority abusing this system to impose its will on the democratic majority.

“By steering the republic so sharply away from the Scylla of majority tyranny, America’s founders left it vulnerable to the Charybdis of minority rule,” they write.

This is not a hypothetical fear. According to Levitsky and Ziblatt, today’s America is currently being sucked down the anti-democratic whirlpool.

The Republican Party, they argue, has become an anti-democratic institution, its traditional leadership cowed by Trump and a racially reactionary base. As such, it is increasingly willing to twist legal tools designed to check oppressive majorities into tools for imposing its policy preferences on an unwilling majority. The best way out of this dilemma, in their view, is radical legal constitutional reform that brings the American system more in line with other advanced democracies.

Tyranny of the Minority is an exceptionally persuasive book. I think it is almost inarguably correct about both the nature of the modern Republican Party and the ways in which it exploits America’s rickety Constitution to subvert its democracy.  I come to some similar conclusions in my own forthcoming book on democracy, The Reactionary Spirit ….

In the US, Levitsky and Ziblatt see a democracy made vulnerable by its own Constitution.

The Constitution’s framers were the first to take Enlightenment ideas about freedom and translate them to an actual political system. The only historical democratic experiences they looked at were from antiquity, in places like Athens and Rome. Classical sources repeatedly chronicled threats to democracy, even outright collapse, emanating from mob rule.

Though the founders knew that democracy was at heart about majority rule, they took the Greco-Roman experience seriously and designed a system where majorities were severely constrained. The tripartite separation of powers, bicameral legislature, indirect election of the president and senators, lifetime Supreme Court tenure, the laborious process for amending the Constitution: all of these were built, in whole or in part, as limitations on the ability of majorities to impose their will on minorities.

Some American counter-majoritarian institutions emerged not from well-intentioned design but political necessity. Leading founders like James Madison bitterly resented the basic structure of the Senate, where each state gets two seats regardless of size; Alexander Hamilton called it “preposterous” during a constitutional convention debate. It was included purely to mollify small states like Delaware and Rhode Island, who were refusing to join the Union absent sufficient protections for their interests.

Over time, the US shed some of these minoritarian trappings — senators are now directly elected, thanks to the 17th Amendment — but deepened others. In 1803’s Marbury v. Madison, the Supreme Court gave itself expansive power to strike down legislation that was not explicitly granted in the Constitution. More recently, the filibuster emerged as a de facto 60-vote requirement for passing legislation in the Senate — a practice similar to the supermajority vote that the founders explicitly rejected early on.

Levitsky and Ziblatt show that almost every other peer democracy went in the opposite direction.

The United States is “the only presidential democracy in the world in which the president is elected via an Electoral College,” “one of the few remaining democracies that retains a bicameral legislature with a powerful upper chamber,” and “the only democracy in the world with lifetime tenure for Supreme Court justices.” Moreover, they note, “the U.S. Constitution is the hardest in the world to change” — making it extremely difficult for reformers to do anything about America’s minority-empowering institutions.

These institutions allow the Republican Party to rule despite being a distinctly minority faction — one that holds extreme positions on issues like taxes and abortion, and has lost the popular vote in seven out of the last eight presidential elections.

So long as the party retains appeal among a hard core of racially resentful supporters, efficiently distributed around the country to take advantage of the Senate and Electoral College’s biases, it can remain nationally competitive. The right’s control over the Supreme Court will likely last decades, thanks to lifetime tenure, allowing it to remake American policy and institutions with impunity. The GOP’s disproportionate national power enables its cadres at the state and local level to pursue explicitly undemocratic policies for holding power, like felon disenfranchisement and extreme gerrymandering, without fear of federal intervention.

Hence the titular “tyranny of the minority”: The Republican Party, having broken with its core commitment to democracy, has now embraced a peculiarly American strategy for taking and wielding power undemocratically.

“America’s countermajoritarian institutions can manufacture authoritarian minorities into governing majorities,” they write. “Far from checking authoritarian power, our institutions have begun to augment it.”

Levitsky and Ziblatt are absolutely right that its outdated constitution makes it easier for the GOP to travel down an authoritarian path.

But “easier” doesn’t mean “necessary.” While Levitsky and Ziblatt ultimately take an institutions-first approach, seeing their reform as our way out of America’s crisis, I take a more society-first view: that America’s problems are primarily the result of deep social fissures exacerbated by outdated and poorly designed institutions. Even if the United States had a more authentically democratic institution, we’d still be riven by divides over race and identity that have unerringly produced the worst political conflicts in the country’s history.

It follows from this that institutional reforms are not enough: In addition to policies for political reform, we also need to think about ways to reduce the social demand for extreme politics. More bluntly: If widespread hostility to social change enables the Republicans’ far-right authoritarian lurch, we need to figure out ways to shift Americans’ beliefs in a more egalitarian direction.

But such a proposal should be considered in addition to Levitsky and Ziblatt’s proposals, not in replacement of them …

Unquote.

Fundamental changes to the Constitution are unlikely, but the success of Democrats in recent special elections justifies some optimism regarding 2024. The Republican tendency to overreach (e.g. by trying to legislate forced birth) is also a positive factor.

Today’s oldest voters are more conservative than the Baby Boomers who will soon replace them. Young voters are more motivated than they’ve been in years. There may come a time when there are enough sensible Democratic senators to change the Senate’s various anti-democratic procedures. Two more Democrats on the Supreme Court would make it a very different institution (the two oldest Supreme Court justices, Thomas and Alito, are especially evil Republicans).

But our antiquated Constituion is a major stumbling block. So is the corporate news media:

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You Are Not the Only One Who Feels This Way

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Perhaps it’s presumptuous of me to assume you have this feeling. I sure do. So does David Roberts, as he explains: 

Contemplating the latest [Orange Menace] revelations, the chaos in the US House, the bullshit hearings, the servicing of Putin … it just makes me feel genuinely crazy that anyone is voting for a Republican for anything. I barely even know how to argue. I just wanna say: LOOK AROUND.

Look at this motley collection of dimwits, apparatchiks, back-biters, liars, grifters, and narcissists. You want to be on their side? You want them in charge? I’ll never understand it. It’s crazy-making trying to pretend there’s some normal political dispute happening here.

To be a normie, news-following Democrat is basically to feel gaslit all the time, all day every day. I know pundits are supposed to affect this world-weary, seen-it-all attitude — actually having feelings is unforgivably naive — but some days it just all gets to me.

Like, we find out that [the Menace] is repulsed at the sight of a wounded soldier and instructs a general to hide the soldier away. That … should be it, right? Discussion over. Horrible person. No place in public life. Obviously. Wait. What? You say we’re just gonna roll on?!

You say House Republicans are mounting an impeachment based on nothing, purely out of revenge? OK, well, that’s that. Clearly wildly irresponsible people with no business being near the levers of power. Surely will be universally denounced. Wait. What? We’re just rolling on?

Hearings full of demonstrable lies, slandering longstanding public servants? Hostage-taking that could destroy the economy, with no coherent demands? Open corruption on the Supreme Court? Senators voting against impeachment out of fear for their safety? Just roll on.

It does something to a person, being forced to pretend that this is normal, just something else to scratch our chins about and debate on the morning shows. Just one more thing to slipstream into a both-sides template. The cognitive dissonance is corrosive.

Unquote.

While I’m here, amid all the right-wing anti-immigrant hysteria, this news might have been widely reported, but wasn’t (I wasn’t able to find the actual Census report it’s based on, but I doubt the libertarian Cato Institute made up the numbers).

  • the number of immigrants in 2022 was nearly 2 million immigrants lower than the Census Bureau’s 2017 projection for 2022;
  • over the last decade, the United States has seen the slowest growth in the immigrant share of the U.S. population since the 1960s;
  • the immigrant share is growing slowly, even while the United States faces the lowest total population growth in its history.

A Republican Admits the Terrible Truth

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Mitt Romney was the Republican candidate for president in 2012. Barack Obama beat him. The election wasn’t very close. Six years later, Romney was elected to the Senate. After one term, Romney has decided not to seek re-election. The Atlantic has an excerpt from an upcoming biography of the Utah senator. Here’s what New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie’s wrote about it in his newsletter:

Reading the recent excerpt from McKay Coppins’s forthcoming biography of Mitt Romney of Utah, I was struck by the depth of the senator’s contempt and disdain for much of the Republican Party, including many of his colleagues in the Senate.

He condemned their vanity, their venality, their cowardice. “Every time he publicly criticized [the Orange Menace], it seemed,” Coppins writes, “some Republican senator would smarmily sidle up to him in private and express solidarity.” Romney made note of the “rank cynicism” of his Republican colleagues and their almost total refusal to stand up for anything that might harm their future electoral prospects. He saved his harshest words, however, for those Republican senators who would do or say anything for political power and influence.

What bothered Romney most about [Senator Josh] Hawley and his cohort was the oily disingenuousness. “They know better!” he told me. “Josh Hawley is one of the smartest people in the Senate, if not the smartest, and Ted Cruz could give him a run for his money.” They were too smart, Romney believed, to actually think that [the loser] had won the 2020 election. Hawley and Cruz “were making a calculation,” Romney told me, “that put politics above the interests of liberal democracy and the Constitution.”

As for the latest crop of Republicans, Romney had this to say: “I don’t know that I can disrespect someone more than [Senator] J.D. Vance.”

Bouie says Romney’s words are “surprisingly harsh and unsparing for someone who is still an active participant in American political life”.

Yet they’re totally deserved. Bouie had more to say in his Times column:

“A very large portion of my party,” Senator Mitt Romney of Utah tells McKay Coppins, “really doesn’t believe in the Constitution”….

If Romney was using “the Constitution” as a rhetorical stand-in for “American democracy,” then he’s obviously right. Faced with a conflict between partisan loyalty and ideological ambition on one hand and basic principles of self-government and political equality on the other, much of the Republican Party has jettisoned any commitment to America’s democratic values in favor of narrow self-interest.

The most glaring instance of this, of course, is [the] attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, which was backed by prominent figures in the Republican Party, humored by much of the Republican establishment and affirmed, in the wake of an insurrectionary attack on the Capitol by supporters of the former president, by a large number of House and Senate Republican lawmakers who voted to question the results.

Other examples of the Republican Party’s contempt for democratic principles include the efforts of Republican-led state legislatures to write political majorities out of legislative representation with extreme partisan gerrymanders; the efforts of those same legislatures to raise new barriers to voting in order to disadvantage their political opponents; and the embrace of exotic legal claims, like the “independent state legislature theory,” meant to justify outright power grabs.

In just the past few months, we’ve seen Tennessee Republicans expel rival lawmakers from the State Legislature for violating decorum by showing their support for an anti-gun protest on the chamber floor, Florida Republicans suspend a duly elected official from office because of a policy disagreement, Ohio Republicans try to limit the ability of Ohio voters to amend the State Constitution by majority vote, Wisconsin Republicans float the possibility that they might try to nullify the election of a State Supreme Court justice who disagrees with their agenda and Alabama Republicans fight for their wholly imaginary right to discriminate against Black voters in the state by denying them the opportunity to elect another representative to Congress.

It is very clear that given the power and the opportunity, a large portion of Republican lawmakers would turn the state against their political opponents: to disenfranchise them, to diminish their electoral influence, to limit or even neuter the ability of their representatives to exercise their political authority.

So again, to the extent that “the Constitution” stands in for “American democracy,” Romney is right to say that much of his party just doesn’t believe in it. But if Romney means the literal Constitution itself — the actual words on the page — then his assessment of his fellow Republicans isn’t as straightforward as it seems.

At times, Republicans seem fixated on the Constitution. When pushed to defend America’s democratic institutions, they respond that the Constitution established “a republic, not a democracy” [although, according to the English language, a republic is a kind of democracy]. When pushed to defend the claim that state legislatures have plenary authority over the structure of federal congressional elections and the selection of presidential electors, Republicans jump to a literal reading of the relevant parts of Article I and Article II to try to disarm critics. When asked to consider gun regulation, Republicans home in on specific words in the Second Amendment — “the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed” — to dismiss calls for reform.

[The leader of the Republican Party] tried to subvert American democracy, yes, but his attempt rested on the mechanisms of the Electoral College, which is to say, relied on a fairly literal reading of the Constitution. Both he and his allies took seriously the fact that our Constitution doesn’t require anything like a majority of the people to choose a president. Attacks on representation and personal freedom — the hyper-gerrymandering of legislatures to preserve and perpetuate minority rule and the attempts to limit or restrict the bodily autonomy of women and other Americans — have operated within the lines drawn by the Constitution, unimpeded or even facilitated by its rules for structuring our political system.

Republicans, in other words, do seem to believe in the Constitution, but only insofar as it can be wielded as a weapon against American democracy — that is, the larger set of ideas, intuitions, expectations and values that shape and define political life in the United States as much as particular rules and institutions.

Because it splits sovereignty between national and subnational units, because it guarantees some political rights and not others, because it was designed in a moment of some reaction against burgeoning democratic forces, the Constitution is a surprisingly malleable document, when it comes to the shaping of American political life. At different points in time, political systems of various levels of participation and popular legitimacy (or lack thereof) have existed, comfortably, under its roof.

Part of the long fight to expand the scope of American democracy has been an ideological struggle to align the Constitution with values that the constitutional system doesn’t necessarily need to function. To give one example among many, when a Black American like George T. Downing insisted to President Andrew Johnson that “the fathers of the Revolution intended freedom for every American, that they should be protected in their rights as citizens, and be equal before the law,” he was engaged in this struggle.

Americans like to imagine that the story of the United States is the story of ever greater alignment between our Constitution and our democratic values — the “more perfect union” of the Constitution’s preamble. But the unfortunate truth, as we’re beginning to see with the authoritarian turn in the Republican Party, is that our constitutional system doesn’t necessarily need democracy, as we understand it, to actually work.