You hear it everywhere: the 2024 election is a battle for our democracy. With Donald Trump the presumptive Republican nominee in all but name, these warnings have grown ever louder. Democracy is under threat.

For our February print issue, we wanted to examine what has everyone so worried, and what exactly threatens our democracy. As you’ll see in the coming days, we found our problems are not limited to Trump. In the kickoff to our series, I wrote about how the threat to democracy is coming from inside the house. I’m talking about the Constitution itself.

The Founding Fathers, with limited belief in true democracy, created a fragmented government where the majority does not necessarily rule and addressing social challenges is made deliberately difficult. A presidential election system that effectively disenfranchises 99.8 percent of the population, combined with a separately elected, malapportioned legislature, is a recipe for dissatisfying stasis at best and perpetual crisis at worst.

We have failed to fix many of these initial deficiencies, and then added on more like the unjustifiable Senate filibuster rule, surgical gerrymandering enabling politicians to choose voters, and a political system that values the preferences of organized money over an organized public.

In the piece, I argue that a movement intended to save democracy should be honest about its flaws, and work to actually fix them. The same high veto points that alienate Americans from their democracy provide tremendous obstacles to overhauling it. But being honest about the actual democracy we want, rather than focusing on abstract ideas that don’t match our reality, is more likely to inspire support. The way to save democracy is to promise to give people one in the future. You can read the piece in full here >>

All week, we’re going to be diving deeper into what really threatens democracy—in the states, in the courtrooms, and in the workplace. We hope to broaden the frame to better understand where democracy actually needs shoring up.

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