Democracy is messy, complicated, divisive, compromised, emotional, and prone to disappointment. Most democracies suffer periods of overbearing executive domination alternating with periods of diffuse oligarchy. This does not make an authoritarian regime, unless one is convinced that democracy actually means that one’s partisan side (who are naturally smart, well bred, and morally just elites) can or should never lose. In at least two periods in U.S. history, for example, we have seen major episodes of fraught regime politics: that of Abraham Lincoln’s wartime government during the American Civil War and Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s executive-dominant New Deal administration in the 1930s and 1940s. While these eras are rightly remembered and celebrated as high points in the life and evolution of American democracy, the fact is that persistent rights violations, court-packing schemes, executive aggrandizement, bureaucratic manipulation, one-party hegemony, and per­sonalist politics were all prominent. Someone looking for “democratic backsliding” or burgeoning autocratization could certainly find piece­meal evidence in these periods. And yet American democracy survived…