We keep talking about what kills or destroys or burns down democracies as if this is well understood and based on a massive body of previous cases. 1/

In fact, I think there are many aspects of our current situation that are sui generis. (Though we may also have more in common than we think with many other contemporary nation-states.) 2/

The United States has only been fully democratic racially in a meaningful sense since the passage of the Voting Rights Act, and even that is kind of arguable, with the complicated semi-exception of Reconstruction. Women have only been voting in the US for a century. 3/

What we refer to as the democracy we are defending (those of us who defend it) is young, fragile and has been fiercely contested ever since it came hesitantly into being, surrounded by resentment. 4/

Perhaps if we start thinking more this way, we will realize that we do not stand on stately, firmly established traditions and legal norms that are being suddenly transgressed but instead on a battlefield where some of us have been trying to pretend the war was long since won.