vvjl Donald Trump Is Done With Checks and Balances

What does it mean to say that “democracy is on the ballot” on Election Day?

In her speech on Tuesday in Washington, D.C., delivered from the same place near the White House where Donald Trump incited a crowd to attack the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, Vice President Kamala Harris said it was a question of whether Americans “have a country rooted in freedom for every American” or whether they have one “ruled by chaos and division.”

It was a question, she said later in her remarks, of whether the United States would “submit to the will of another petty tyrant” and become a “vessel for the schemes of wannabe dictators.”

The vice president was not wrong. Election Day will be a referendum on whether we want an autocrat in office — a plebiscite, of sorts, on the very idea of government of the people, by the people and for the people. But Harris’s answer is incomplete. Also at stake on Tuesday, when it comes to the question of American democracy, is the future of the Constitution.

Will it continue into the 21st century as Frederick Douglass’s “glorious liberty document,” or will it legitimize an American-style authoritarianism as a new “covenant with death,” to use the words of Douglass’s erstwhile abolitionist ally, William Lloyd Garrison.

It is important to remember that the Constitution was neither written nor ratified with democracy in mind. Just the opposite: It was written to restrain — and contain — the democratic impulses of Americans shaped in the hothouse of revolutionary fervor.

“Most of the men who assembled at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787 were also convinced that the national government under the Articles of Confederation was too weak to counter the rising tide of democracy in the states,” the historian Terry Bouton writes in “Taming Democracy: ‘The People,’ the Founders, and the Troubled Ending of the American Revolution.”

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