Following Donald Trump’s return to the White House, American political life has adopted a predictable weekly pattern: a court ruling acts as a breaking point, a fundraising appeal asserts that the republic remains salvageable, and another executive order is framed as the decisive tipping moment. The rhetoric is consistently urgent, the disaster perpetually imminent, and the republic portrayed as narrowly, yet persistently, within reach of salvation.
This account does not constitute genuine analysis. Rather, it functions as a soothing story that many influential individuals feel compelled to perpetuate.
A more difficult reality is that the decline of American democracy did not commence with Trump’s return to the White House in January 2025. This deterioration had been ongoing for decades, advancing steadily and often with bipartisan endorsement. Many of the individuals now positioning themselves as democracy’s final defenders were, in fact, instrumental in its administration during this period of decline.
For tens of millions of Americans, the democratic promise was never realized. Many experienced unstable housing, limited access to medical care, unaccountable law enforcement, and persistent indebtedness. Systematic defunding of public goods and the absence of genuine political influence characterized their reality. These circumstances did not simply signal a threat to democracy; they served as evidence of its prior failure.
Psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott described patients who were preoccupied with the fear of an impending catastrophe, only to discover through analysis that the catastrophe had already transpired—early, overwhelming, and repressed rather than addressed. What resurfaced later was merely its echo, misidentified as a future threat. The fear was genuine, but its focus was misplaced.
American liberal political culture has performed a version of this displacement. By treating Trump as a sudden rupture with no institutional roots, it avoids a more uncomfortable accounting. The conditions enabling his rise were built across thirty years of bipartisan policy. The political class now marshaling to defend democracy was, for most of that period, one of its principal architects of decline.
In 2014, Princeton political scientists Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page published a landmark study concluding that the United States functioned, in practice, as an oligarchy. Their research demonstrated that policy outcomes correlated strongly with the preferences of economic elites and only weakly, almost negligibly, with those of ordinary citizens. This finding did not indicate a democracy merely under threat; it described one that had already been supplanted.
The mechanisms were not mysterious. Decades of deregulation transferred financial power from public oversight to private accumulation. Successive rounds of union-busting reduced the organized political weight of working people. The Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United ruling removed the last formal constraints on corporate capture of elections. Welfare retrenchment dismantled the public infrastructures through which people experienced themselves as members of a shared civic life. These were not the acts of a single administration or party. They were a sustained, generational project.
Questioning which version of democracy is being defended requires an honest assessment of its historical and contemporary outcomes. The United States was established through the dispossession of Indigenous peoples and the enslavement of Black Americans. Women were denied suffrage until 1920, and Black citizens were excluded from full civic participation until the mid-1960s. Legislative acts continue to undermine the basic rights of transgender people. Following the 2008 financial crisis, the political order prioritized bailouts for banking and automotive executives, while working families suffered losses of homes, savings, and, in many cases, lives due to addiction and despair—a phenomenon documented as a measurable increase in deaths related to despair. Under the administrations of Obama, Biden, and Trump, the nation witnessed the most rapid concentration of wealth in its history.
If democratic collapse is regarded solely as a future threat to be averted, political responses will remain defensive and insufficient. Efforts will focus on safeguarding institutions whose legitimacy has diminished and on restoring a norm-based order that, for most Americans, was never equitable. The objective thus shifts to keeping a past that is irretrievable and, for the majority, never truly existed.
Progress in democratic politics does not require preservation, but active construction.
Authentic democratic life is not sustained by mere procedural observance. It is established through public institutions that foster material interdependence, such as effective public housing, universal healthcare, adequately funded schools and libraries, robust unions, community infrastructure, and genuine accountability in law enforcement. Where these institutions are present and supported, democracy is experienced as a reality. In their absence, individuals become isolated and vulnerable, susceptible to political groups that offer simplistic explanations for complex forms of suffering.
Universal childcare, Medicare for All, guaranteed housing, debt relief, and substantial public investment in community care are not simply campaign platforms. They constitute the basic conditions that enable individuals to see themselves as participants in a collective civic life. In their absence, individuals become competitors within a privatized existence. The removal of these supports does not yield a worried yet resilient democracy; it results in the current state of affairs.
In neighborhoods across the country, many Americans have already stopped waiting for institutional permission. Rapid-response networks organized to protect immigrant neighbors from ICE. Mutual aid funds for detainee community members. Shared legal resources. Volunteers monitoring vulnerable areas. Neighbors choosing one another over their party affiliations.
These developments did not result from a reinvigorated determination among the Democratic Party leadership. Rather, they appeared precisely because such leadership failed to act. Individuals assumed responsibility in the absence of effective representation.
These projects are local in scope and largely unrecognized beyond their immediate communities. They are improvised, underfunded, and lack long-term security. Nevertheless, they point to a reality that mainstream political discourse often neglects: democratic power is not imposed from above or merely threatened by exceptional leaders. Instead, it is constructed from the ground up through concrete acts of solidarity and mutual responsibility, and is either maintained through public investment or permitted to deteriorate.
Ultimately, the central question is not whether American democracy can be preserved, but whether Americans are prepared to construct a system that most have never truly experienced. The task is not restoration, but creation—undertaken for the first time, with a clear grasp of historical realities.
A.D. Bevan
