The election saved the Republic, not democracy. We don’t have that.

It is a good thing that the election is finally over and the candidate that won, by far, the most votes was officially declared the winner. President Trump and his Maga-maniacs were not able to steal the election, and not for lack trying. The implications of what happened in 2020 will be felt and analyzed for a long time. There is a consensus that democracy won, and that is true in a sense. In this election, Trump and the Republican Party gave the latest and the greatest of master classes they have been carrying out for years on the meaning of antidemocratic. Their candidate for president lost, and that is a win for democracy.

Yet to conclude that therefore our democracy is strong is a fallacy. We are not a democracy. Key institutions, mainly the Electoral College and the Senate, fall far short from democracy’s majority rule ideal. By constitutional design, we are not and have never been a full-fledged democracy. The Founders, propertied men who worried that a combination of the have-nots could emerge to challenge the prerogatives of property through the ballot, deliberately designed a constitution that made that virtually impossible. That comes across loud and clear in the Federalist Papers, written by a Who’s Who of the political elite that emerged from the American Revolution.

The democratic aspects that our system of government does possess expanded for decades with the direct election of senators and the extension of suffrage to women and African Americans. But since Republicans have assumed the leading role in politics, democracy has contracted. The gutting of the Voting Rights Act through a ruling by a right-leaning Supreme Court appointed by Republicans is symbolic of this anti-democratic trend.

Money has always played a big and anti-democratic role in American politics, but today it plays a bigger role than ever, mainly for two reasons. First, the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision opened the door wider than ever for money in vast quantities to pour into the political system. How that money is used to influence the fate of candidates, parties, and policies in favor of the interests of the moneyed minority is detailed in Jane Mayer’s excellent book, Dark Money. The title reflects just one of the ways in which the existence of this vast fund of political money works for a plutocratic rather than a democratic society: the lack of transparency about where it comes from, who gives it, and what it is used for.

Second, there is more economic inequality in the United States than at arguably any time in our history, significantly greater inequality than in the parliamentary democracies of Western Europe and Canada. Thus, not only does money play an unprecedentedly outsized role in politics, as inequality rises the interests of the moneyed (individual or corporate) diverge ever farther from those of the average family or individual. The level of economic inequality in the United States today is simply incompatible with democracy. (The best sources on this topic are Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty and Capital and Ideology by the same author).

The Republican Party is the main force driving the anti-democratic trend. The reason for this is clear. Republican policies, especially its tax policies from Reagan to Trump, have hugely favored the richest Americans. They have been great for the top one percent, better for the top one tenth of one percent, and fabulous for the wealthiest one hundredth of one percent. These policies are the major reason for the stratospheric level of inequality today.

It is a feat to win an election with such policies. One way the Republicans have managed is by focusing Americans’ attention away from the giveaways to the rich and toward a variety of scapegoats, including immigrants, Muslims, and predominantly Black protesters against police brutality portrayed as thugs. The specter of socialism and the issue of abortion have also been useful in deflecting attention away from the GOP class war on behalf of the rich and the corporations. More directly, Republicans have become experts at suppressing the minority vote through a variety of schemes, including purging voter rolls, reducing the number of polling places, especially in heavily minority communities, and making it as difficult as possible for students at historically black colleges and universities to cast a ballot.

With all that, only one Republican has won the popular vote since George H.W. Bush in 1989. That was George W. Bush who won the popular vote in 2004 after losing it in 2000. Al Gore won the popular vote in 2000, but George W. Bush won the presidency via the Electoral College with an assist from a conservative Supreme Court. That victory gave him the advantage of incumbency in 2004, when he won both the popular and the Electoral College ballot. But would there have been a Bush presidency at all if the popular vote determined U.S. elections and Gore would have become president in 2000?

Comparing the fate of recent presidential candidates, the weakness of the Republicans’ popularity as a national party is evident. Three of the last four Republican presidencies went to the loser of the popular vote. In the last 30 years there have been two Democratic eight-year presidencies, Clinton and Obama, both of whom won the popular and Electoral College vote. There has been only one two-term Republican president in this century. The last Republican president, Donald Trump, lost the popular vote—twice. Going back to the twentieth century Nixon won two terms but never served out the second because he had to resign to avoid impeachment and was pardoned by his successor, Gerald Ford, who became a one-term, never elected president when he lost to Jimmy Carter, who has been the sole one-term Democratic president in recent years.

The more popular party nationally, the Democrats, won and the anti-democratic and less popular party lost the presidency in 2020. The fact that the Democratic Party is the more popular party is confirmed by the fact that in both Senate and House elections this year, Democrats won significantly more votes than the Republicans. The fact that the make-up of Congress does not reflect this is another measure of the democratic deficit built into the system and expanded upon by the Republicans, who are its chief beneficiaries.

The Biden-Harris victory means that we managed to keep the Republic and preserved the hope for a more democratic country. But let’s not kid ourselves: we did not preserve democracy because we don’t have one, never have and probably never will thanks to checks against democracy built into the Constitution by the Founders themselves. Conceiving what would make for a more democratic nation is easy. Abolish the Electoral College. Apportion the Senate proportionately by population so that the people of California and New York have more representation in that body than the cows of Montana and Wyoming. Reestablish steep income taxes, establish a property tax, restore inheritance taxes. Provide universal health care and education. Call it socialism if you want. I call it real democracy.

This political program is not as inherently hard as inventing anti-viral vaccines or finding cures for the toughest cancers. It depends on the right balance of political forces. But we are far from the one we need. On January 20, we need to start pushing hard, not for full democracy, which we will not achieve in one term if ever, but for more and more democracy.