THE DEMOCRACY BOMB

A day ahead of the third anniversary of January 6, President Joe Biden traveled to Valley Forge, Pennsylvania-where George Washington encamped during the Revolutionary War-before delivering what he described as a "deadly serious" speech framing the stakes of the 2024 election.

- ARI BERMAN 

Biden wanted to show how Donald Trump, by inciting the insurrection and trying to overturn the 2020 results, had violated the most basic principles in a democracy: free and fair elections and the peaceful transfer of power.

"Today, we're here to answer the most important of questions," Biden said. "Is democracy still America's sacred cause? This is not rhetorical, academic, or hypothetical. Whether democracy is still America's sacred cause is the most urgent question of our time, and it's what the 2024 election is all about." The alternative, Biden said, was "dictatorship-the rule of one, not the rule of 'We the People." That fundamental tenet of American democracy was gravely imperiled, Biden warned: "We're living in an era where a determined minority is doing everything in its power to try to destroy our democracy for their own agenda."

That's undoubtedly true. But the crisis Biden described-and the choice facing the nation this November-is much older and deeper than Trump. A determined minority has been trying to shape the foundations of American governance for their own benefit since the inception of the republic. For more than two centuries, a fierce struggle has played out between forces seeking to constrict democracy and those seeking to expand it. In 2024, the country is once again immersed in a pivotal battle over whom the political system should serve and represent.

From childhood, we are taught to venerate the Constitution as a civic religion, but the truth is that America's democratic experiment has been defined since the nation's founding by a central tension over whom the government should favor. The United States has historically been a laboratory for both oligarchy and genuine democracy. And to grasp the present-day fight, one must understand the long-standing clash between competing notions of majority rule and minority rights.