Political rhetoric necessarily boils history down to the basics. President Biden, not usually a brilliant orator, captured the truth when he stated in his inaugural that American history is characterized, in part, by a push and pull between the forces of democratic aspiration and opposing forces of democratic limitation. We’re seeing that battle continued today as Republican officials across red and purple America attempt to beat back the gains Barack Obama represented in our long fight to become a liberal state. This is not a drill.

America was not founded as a democracy in the sense in which we understand the word today. The framers of our constitution placed multiple layers of limitation on who got to participate in self-governance, ranging from the ratification of chattel slavery through the Three-Fifths clause to strict property requirements. Admittedly, most white males owned property in early America, so the property qualification was less restrictive than modern impressions. But still, women and the poor could not vote, and the vast majority of African Americans male and female would be confined to slavery under the structures built by our earliest leaders.

The first wave of democratization arguably took place during the Jacksonian era. This is disputed by some historians who rightly hold Old Hickory in low regard, and they have a point: voter turnout did not rise in the elections that put Jackson in the White House. Still, most states enacted universal white manhood suffrage for the first time during this populist’s administration, and government was made closer to the people. That said, white manhood suffrage increasingly meant a White Man’s Republic, and as white men’s suffrage expanded, Black male suffrage was steadily restricted during the era of what was once called Jacksonian democracy. Interestingly, slave-state North Carolina allowed free Black men to vote until 1836, the final year of Andrew Jackson’s presidency.

The next wave of democratic progress came in the Reconstruction era, when in the wake of emancipation thousands of African American men gained access to the polls after 250 years of enslavement. The white South was furious and acted quickly to get their revenge. Founded by war criminal Nathan Bedford Forrest, the Ku Klux Klan terrorized Blacks and white Republicans with a campaign of lynching and political intimidation. White Leagues and, later Red Shirts, contributed to the first campaign of American domestic terrorism and had largely succeeded by the time the white North, no angels themselves, made a bargain with Southerners to abandon the Black South to its former and current tormentors. Democracy was largely dead in the Old Confederacy for the next century.

It took 100 years for democracy to rear its head again in Dixie. Leading up to the Voting Rights Revolution, Black men and, now, women slowly registered to vote in parts of the South–particularly North Carolina and other Upper South and segregated border states. The African American Civil Rights movement blossomed in the 1950’s with the 1955 Montgomery Bus Boycott and quickly expanded its reach to the core freedom of American life, voting. Not long after the seminal 1965 Voting Rights Act, a white backlash would emerge, powering racially conservative white politicians into power across the country and especially in Dixie. In the next 50 years, voting rights would gradually erode under pressure from Backlash Republicans the Supreme Court justices their presidents appointed.

Which brings us to today. Seldom in American history has there been a more vivid demonstration of the power of voting than Barack Obama’s election as president. An African American with the middle name Hussein, Obama was elected in large part because of the strongest Black voting turnout in modern history. As observers noted, nothing had electrified the Black South like Obama’s victory in the Iowa Caucuses since Joe Louis defeated the Nazi Max Schmelling for the world heavyweight boxing title. Racism, even some pessimists believed, had lost this round.

That was hardly the case. Almost immediately after Obama took office, Tea Party Republican legislatures started passing strict voter ID laws obviously aimed at suppressing Black and youth turnout. “Project Red Map,” a high-tech gerrymandering effort directed by the Koch brothers and brought to its apex in Art Pope’s North Carolina, effected legislative maps so rigged that democracy was effectively neutralized in red and purple states. In Wisconsin, Democrats won 54% of the vote for state legislature yet are outnumbered by the Republican majority two to one. The fourth wave of American democratization has been met by the fourth counter-wave of American white autocracy.

The policy implications of this history should be clear to anyone not blinded by the naivety of long-dead bipartisan traditions. Democrats, the party of democracy, must pass S.1. and clip the wings of the political Republican birds of prey preparing to swoop down on our young and fragile democracy. To cling to hopes that any significant number of Republicans will side against their party’s crusade to reinstate a White Man’s Republic on this continent is to delude oneself with pleasant dreams. Democracy in America has always been met with resistance by a faction of Americans wedded to a very different creed. Those who believe America should eventually fulfill its Founding ideals, rather than return once again to its founding structures, should be clear-eyed about what they face.