We've been standing up for Democracy for years. Let's do it again right now.

Here's what I wrote in 2021 about the fight to save democracy. It's all still true today.

I wrote this piece back in 2021. At the time Republican State legislatures were undermining voting rights in new ways and the US Supreme Court was letting them do it. If GOP legislatures were the anti-democratic sword, the Supreme Court would be its shield. But it was also a time of small d democratic awakening. People in every state were learning about the threats to democracy and beginning to stand up to them. Since then, we’ve seen more and larger efforts to erode the democracy and more and larger efforts to save it. As we come to the end of this most consequential election, the piece is more relevant today than when it first appeared, so I’m reposting it.

Since July, I have been hosting a Saturday radio show largely focused on politics in America. Each week, I prepare for interviews with journalists, historians, artists and other interesting guests. What they say about our democracy worries me, but what I hear makes me grateful. Like the 1770s and the 1860s, ours is a dangerous time, but one that can change the world for the better. As Lin-Manuel Miranda wrote in “Hamilton,” “Look around at how lucky we are to be alive right now.”

There can no longer be any question that democracy is in danger. But the very reason Republicans are attempting to overturn elections and undermine democracy gives me a reason to hope. For what the Republican base has been taught to fear is coming to be: America is becoming the world’s first and only multiracial democracy.

The backlash is not surprising. We have, since our founding, been a multiracial culture, but our governing power wasn’t shared. Now we are even more diverse, with many races and religions and gender identities.

According to a historian I interviewed, Georgetown University’s Thomas Zimmer, America should not be described as polarized. Rather, the data shows that the Republicans have been radicalized. Much of the country values democracy, respects science, works hard and plays by the rules. Today’s GOP undermines democracy, politicizes science and makes up its own rules.

Many of us have wondered at our fellow Americans’ capacity to swallow the lies they hear daily on TV and online. The only way to understand it is to see it as a terrified rejection of the reality unfolding before them. Republican operatives have been stoking that terror since the 1970s when Kevin Phillips taught them to build majorities based on ethnic rivalries and fears. Commenting on the tendency of the South Boston Irish to vote for Democrats in the late 1960s, Phillips said, “It’s because there aren’t enough Negroes and Jews in Boston to take over the local Democratic organizations and send the other ethnics whooping into the Republican Party. But it will come.”

After a half-century of campaigns based on stoking fear of other Americans, it is hardly surprising that what is left of the GOP is animated by racial fears and the sense that the “real” America is disappearing. In their rage, members of the Republican Party would destroy the nation to save it. Which is what radicals always say before the blood starts to run.

State after state with Republican-controlled legislatures have passed measures limiting voting rights. Some have gone further and enacted measures to allow the nullification of results. Radical gerrymandering in those states means that even where Democrats win a sizable majority of the votes, Republicans maintain large majorities in the legislature.

According to the Brennan Center for Justice, a nonpartisan organization focused on American democracy, “In 2012, (Republicans) won 60 of the 99 seats in the Wisconsin Assembly despite winning only 48.6% of the two-party statewide vote; in 2014, they won 63 seats with only 52% of the statewide vote.” They can do this because the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act and legalized partisan gerrymandering. Nearly every expert warns that this GOP-led crusade against voting rights in the states raises the very real possibility that political power in America may soon no longer be determined by voters.

The dangers are real. The effort to undermine our democracy has been far more successful than most Americans realize. But there are reasons to expect the anti- democratic effort will fail. Americans don’t really believe all the lies. We are, after all, getting vaccinated. And the lies are motivating every American who lives in the real world: We are getting organized. We are litigating. We are going to vote, and we expect those votes to count.

As the attempts by the GOP to undermine democracy are becoming better understood across the country, outrage is growing. So is a new patriotism, rooted in the idea of fairness. You can hear it in the voices of the people I interview. Sure, they are telling me worrying things, but increasingly, I hear a kind of love for the democracy so many have sacrificed so much to build. You can hear it in the exasperation of school board members and parents when people carrying firearms try to disrupt their meetings. You can even hear it in the United States Senate, which may soon find a way to pass voting rights legislation.

There is something else, too. America, despite its racist history, was founded as a spark of egalitarian hope. The idea that all are created equal remains more powerful than armies and interests arrayed against it. Thomas Jefferson’s declaration shook the world in the 1770s. Abraham Lincoln’s courage in the 1860s preserved the last best hope of people everywhere. If we hold our democracy against the current attack by the radical right, then it will be ordinary Americans who inspire the world by securing for posterity the world’s first stable, diverse and inclusive democracy.