While the prospect of American democracy’s possible decline and potential collapse have gained traction over the last decade, and even more so over the last year, the flaws that are currently metastasizing also reveal that American democracy was never a mythical ideal to begin with, and that its built-in contradictions have plagued it throughout its history. While the structure of the constitution has been vital in reproducing institutions and transferring power, the content of that constitution as originally conceived was fraught with the ramifications of building a liberal democracy while maintaining a violently illiberal slave economy. The original compromises of the constitutional convention, from the bicameral legislature to the three-fifths compromise to the Electoral College, all stem from the necessity to capitulate political power to an inherently undemocratic slaveholding south, and that geographic tension has long been the defining divide of partisan politics (political parties, incidentally, were a feature the founders failed to anticipate). The abolition of slavery was only possible with the total breakdown of democracy in a bloody civil war, the subsequent protection of black rights only possible while the South was militarily occupied and the Confederate elites disenfranchised. Periods of consensus and low polarization inevitably relied on compromises with illiberal policies; the Gilded Age allowed terror to sweep the South, the New Deal Coalition codified welfare for whites only. And our current hyper-polarization stems largely from the rise of the post-Reagan right, a backlash against the open embrace of Civil Rights that led to the first black president being succeeded by a man who equivocates on the evils of white supremacy. The question, then, is if American liberal democracy can ever survive without sacrificing a society that is liberal for all, or if those invested in white supremacy will see it fall before letting that happen.