Is Democracy Really Under Siege, and If So, From Whom?
This one extends arguments I’ve made before: that the Supreme Court isn’t the partisan actor it’s accused of being, that one party can’t govern and one shouldn’t — a three-part series I made here and here — and that January 6 has a Democratic sequel nobody wants to name. There are other pieces in the archive that circle these same questions. Here’s where these threads meet.
The Sour Grapes Court
The Supreme Court is now routinely described as “conservative” or “progressive,” as though it were a legislature with a caucus.
For most of the last sixty years, on some of the most politically consequential questions, the Court moved beyond straightforward textual interpretation and constitutionalized policy choices that otherwise would have remained political questions. Roe v. Wade is the clean example, not because abortion is a clean topic but because the ruling itself gave the game away: a trimester framework, viability lines, a schedule for when state interests could and couldn’t override the individual’s — a complete regulatory code, invented by a seven-justice majority, that no legislature had passed and no electorate had voted on. Ruth Bader Ginsburg said as much in 1992, arguing Roe moved too far and too fast on the wrong doctrinal ground, short-circuiting a political process that was already liberalizing abortion law state by state. That’s not a conservative talking point. That’s the author of the Equal Protection Clause approach to abortion rights, on record, saying the Court overreached.
The problem with legislating from the bench isn’t the outcome. It’s that lifetime appointments make the mistake permanent on any timeline a voter can live through. Congress passes a bad law, you vote out the people who passed it. The Court “discovers” a right in the emanations of a penumbra, and undoing it requires waiting for justices to die or retire and hoping the President and Senate at that moment agree with you. Nixon ran on this problem in 1968. The Federalist Society was founded in 1982 to fix it methodically. It took until 2022 — fifty-four years from Nixon’s campaign promise — for that project to finally produce a majority willing to overturn Roe outright. If that’s a coup, it’s the slowest one in recorded history, conducted entirely through elections, confirmation hearings, and public argument.
Which is the part that gets dropped from the “democracy under siege” framing. Plenty of people objected to the mechanism when it produced Griswold, or Roe, or Obergefell — that objection is the entire conservative legal movement described above. What’s different is who’s objecting now, and on what grounds. Many of the same people who now describe an ideologically assertive Court as a threat to democracy showed far less concern about judicial supremacy when its rulings lined up with their politics. That’s not a defense of every decision this Court has made since. It’s sour grapes: the complaint was never really about the Court making law. It was about which laws.
Tried Three Times, Maybe Four
Meanwhile, Trump has faced three apparent or charged assassination attempts in barely two years — two of them while he was still a candidate, one after he’d returned to office. In July 2024, a shooter opened fire on Trump, then the Republican nominee, at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, killing a bystander and wounding two others before being killed himself. Two months later, a second gunman was found staked out along the perimeter of Trump’s golf course in West Palm Beach with a rifle, waiting for a clean shot; he was later convicted of attempted assassination of a presidential candidate. That shooter, Ryan Routh, had a documented history of left-leaning politics and had turned publicly on Trump after once supporting him.
The third attempt came after Trump was back in office. In April 2026, a man ran an armed security checkpoint at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner and fired a shotgun, striking a Secret Service officer in the chest before being fired on and subdued. He was charged with attempting to assassinate the president and, once a grand jury indicted him, with assaulting the officer he’d shot. His own writings, by every account of reporters who reviewed them, sit squarely on the political left, and the Justice Department is investigating his reported ties to a group described by multiple outlets as a left-wing network.
A fourth case is sitting in a California courtroom as I write this. On August 2, federal agents spotted a man photographing security preparations at Trump’s golf club in Rancho Palos Verdes, two days ahead of a scheduled presidential visit. He was carrying a loaded pistol and a spare high-capacity magazine. A search of his home turned up an illegally modified rifle, body armor, and notebooks investigators called “concerning.” He’s currently charged with weapons offenses, not attempted assassination — the authorities are being careful with the word, the way authorities generally are until a case is airtight. Readers can decide for themselves what a man does with a rifle, body armor, and a notebook of concerning statements outside a president’s golf course two days before that president arrives.
Go back and find the last time this happened at this frequency, and you won’t find it. Every other shooting or attempted shooting of a modern president traces back to a single, isolated mind, not a movement. John Hinckley Jr. shot Reagan over an obsession with an actress; there was no politics in it at all. Oscar Ortega-Hernandez opened fire on the White House in 2011 believing Obama was inside, driven by a personal fixation on Obama and a numerology obsession with the date 11/11/11 — a deranged individual, not a foot soldier. Even Lee Harvey Oswald, a genuine ideologue who tried to defect to the Soviet Union, wasn’t embedded in any domestic movement organized against the Kennedy administration; his politics pointed outward, at Cuba and Moscow, not at a sustained campaign to remove Kennedy himself.
What’s different now isn’t that politics is involved — politics was involved in Oswald’s act too. What’s different is what the politics is about. Oswald’s ideology pointed outward, at Cuba and the Cold War; it had nothing to do with rejecting the outcome of the 1960 election. Hinckley and Ortega had no ideology at all. Trump’s attackers are the opposite case: multiple, unconnected people, radicalized by a shared premise that has nothing to do with any single policy and everything to do with the election itself — that his presidency is illegitimate, that the outcome doesn’t have to be accepted, that “resistance” is the correct response to a man Americans voted for. Routh, an activist against Trump specifically. The WHCD shooter, reportedly tied to a left-wing network, writing a manifesto that reads like a movement pamphlet. Different people, no coordination between them, the same conclusion: the election doesn’t count, so force is on the table.
That’s the actual answer to whether democracy is under siege, and from whom. Not from a Supreme Court that gave abortion policy back to elected lawmakers. From a movement that has decided an election it lost doesn’t have to be honored.
One Afternoon Versus One Year
Compare the two events people keep reaching for. January 6 lasted one afternoon. Five people died — one rioter shot by police, three from medical emergencies in the crush of the crowd, a Capitol officer who suffered a stroke the next day. It was over by nightfall, Congress finished certifying the election a few hours later, and the country spent the next four years being told, correctly, that it was a singular assault on the constitutional transfer of power.
The resistance to ICE enforcement has now run over a year. It didn’t happen in an afternoon and it hasn’t stopped.
Immigration enforcement was not a surprise policy sprung on the country. The economy topped the list of voter concerns in 2024, but the border wasn’t far behind — it was central to the coalition that elected Trump, the second-ranked issue overall and the one his own voters cited most after the economy itself. Large parts of the Democratic Party have responded to that mandate not by contesting it in Congress, where they still hold seats, but by treating enforcement itself as illegitimate: encouraging civilians to physically insert themselves into federal operations, portraying agents as an occupying force, giving cover to escalation and then expressing shock at what escalation produces. A one-afternoon riot got four years of unbroken condemnation. A yearlong, ongoing campaign against the lawful execution of an elected mandate gets treated as the moral high road.
That’s the same refusal running through every section of this piece. Not “we lost, so we’ll organize to win next time.” We lost, so the result doesn’t count.
Unaccustomed to Losing
There’s a reason this particular party reaches for “fascism” and “democracy under siege” faster than the other one does, and it isn’t about Trump. It’s about arithmetic. Between 1933 and 1995, the Democratic Party controlled the House of Representatives for all but four years. Add the presidency under Roosevelt, Truman, Kennedy, Johnson, Carter, Clinton, Obama, and Biden, and you get a party that has spent most of the last ninety years as the default assumption of American governance rather than one competitor among several.
A party that has been the water everyone swims in for that long doesn’t experience a loss the way a party built on a fifty-fifty coin flip does. It experiences a loss as an anomaly requiring explanation — and the explanation on offer is never “the country’s priorities changed,” it’s “something illegitimate happened.” The House flipped away from them in 1994, and the presidency has changed hands more freely since, but the institutional self-image that formed over sixty-two years of near-total control didn’t get revised down the moment the numbers did. It slipped for three decades. What’s happening now is worse than slipping: the Court that shaped constitutional law for fifty years has flipped, the House they built has flipped, and a president they consider illegitimate won the White House twice. A party can absorb a single bad cycle without questioning its premises. It’s harder to absorb losing the branch that used to make its law, the chamber that used to be its birthright, and the presidency itself, all inside a single decade. A conservative Supreme Court majority isn’t the product of fifty years of patient, public, constitutional-amendment-level effort; it’s a coup. An electorate that ranked the border as its second-highest concern isn’t expressing a preference; it’s being manipulated into fascism. A president who won two constitutionally valid elections isn’t the choice of the country; he’s an aberration to be corrected by whatever means necessary, including, apparently, a rifle.
None of this requires anyone to like Trump, or the Court’s current majority, or ICE’s tactics. It requires only noticing that “democracy under siege” has become the reflexive language of a party discovering, after nine decades of assuming the country was fundamentally on its side, that it might not be. That same party runs cities in states where it faces no opposition at all, and the record there isn’t much of an advertisement. Warning about fascism is easier than explaining the tent cities. The public mood shifted. It would serve everyone better — including the party that lost it — to ask why, instead of asking who to blame for the country no longer agreeing with them.