Democracy may be our civil religion, but it’s one that has always traded heavily on myth. A government that began as a sinecure for wealthy white men required numerous constitutional amendments and acts of Congress, hard won through the centuries, to bring the country closer to Lincoln’s government by, for, and of the people. But, as the franchise has become more inclusive, many Republican strategists have become convinced that this process will be their party’s undoing. The 2020 election proved them right: voters turned out in great numbers and returned a Democratic President and Congress to Washington. No one—especially Biden and members of his Administration—should have been surprised when Republicans stepped up their efforts to redraw electoral maps and make it harder to vote for those they assume will choose Democrats.

There is something deeply wishful about hosting a summit to bolster democracy around the world when our own is, at best, floundering. One of the central premises of American exceptionalism is the belief that, against all odds, our democracy will endure, that it “shall not perish from the earth.” Yet the paradox at the core of all democracies is that they can be legislated out of existence. The anti-democratic movement that coalesced around Trump’s insistence that he was the rightful winner last November persists with the blessing of a number of Republican members of Congress, in order to sow doubt in the legitimacy of the electoral process. It is an accomplice to every legislative effort by Republican state legislatures to undermine future elections.