The colonial-era US printer Benjamin Franklin is credited with responding to a question about what the Constitutional Convention of 1787 had produced by saying, “A republic – if you can keep it.”¹ The convention was the United States’ second attempt to form a national government after its revolutionary break from Britain – a break that was codified by the signatures of Franklin and fifty-five fellow delegates on July 4, 1776.

Of course, Franklin and his contemporaries’ vision of a democratic republic for propertied white men was significantly narrower than what most people in the US conceive today. That original vision of representative democracy was transformed by President Abraham Lincoln’s rhetorical reframing during the Civil War and subsequent constitutional amendments granting citizenship and basic rights to formerly enslaved people.² The vision was further expanded by the nineteenth amendment granting women the vote in the early twentieth century and by the civil rights laws of the 1960s that added enforcement mechanisms to the amendments passed a hundred years earlier. By the turn of this century, many US institutions had, at least rhetorically, embraced the notion of working toward a truly pluralistic multiracial democracy.