The Founding Fathers planted a bomb in the Constitution. Donald Trump lit the fuse.

This story is adapted from Ari Berman’s new book, Minority Rule: The Right-Wing Attack on the Will of the People—and the Fight to Resist It, which will be published April 23.

A day ahead of the third anniversary of January 6, President Joe Biden traveled to Valley Forge, Pennsylvania—where George Washington encamped during the Revolutionary War—before delivering what he described as a “deadly serious” speech framing the stakes of the 2024 election. Biden wanted to show how Donald Trump, by inciting the insurrection and trying to overturn the 2020 results, had violated the most basic principles in a democracy: free and fair elections and the peaceful transfer of power.

“Today, we’re here to answer the most important of questions,” Biden said. “Is democracy still America’s sacred cause? This is not rhetorical, academic, or hypothetical. Whether democracy is still America’s sacred cause is the most urgent question of our time, and it’s what the 2024 election is all about.” The alternative, Biden said, was “dictatorship—the rule of one, not the rule of ‘We the People.’” That fundamental tenet of American democracy was gravely imperiled, Biden warned: “We’re living in an era where a determined minority is doing everything in its power to try to destroy our democracy for their own agenda.”

That’s undoubtedly true. But the crisis Biden described—and the choice facing the nation this November—is much older and deeper than Trump. A determined minority has been trying to shape the foundations of American governance for their own benefit since the inception of the republic. For more than two centuries, a fierce struggle has played out between forces seeking to constrict democracy and those seeking to expand it. In 2024, the country is once again immersed in a pivotal battle over whom the political system should serve and represent.

From childhood, we are taught to venerate the Constitution as a civic religion, but the truth is that America’s democratic experiment has been defined since the nation’s founding by a central tension over whom the government should favor. The United States has historically been a laboratory for both oligarchy and genuine democracy. And to grasp the present-day fight, one must understand the long-standing clash between competing notions of majority rule and minority rights.

The founders, despite the lofty ideals in the Declaration of Independence, designed the Constitution in part to check popular majorities and protect the interests of a propertied white upper class. The Senate was created to represent the country’s elite and boost small states while restraining the more democratic House of Representatives. The Electoral College prevented the direct election of the president and enhanced the power of small states and slave states. The makeup of the Supreme Court was a product of these two undemocratic institutions. But as the United States has democratized in the centuries since, extending the vote and many other rights to formerly disenfranchised communities, the antidemocratic features built into the Constitution have become even more pronounced, to the point that they are threatening the survival of representative government in America.

The timing of our modern retreat from democracy is no coincidence. The nation is now roughly 20 years away from a future in which white people will no longer be the majority. New multiracial coalitions are gaining ground in formerly white strongholds like Georgia. To entrench and hold on to power, a shrinking conservative white minority is ­relentlessly exploiting the undemocratic elements of America’s political institutions while doubling down on tactics such as voter suppression, election subversion, and the censoring of history. This reactionary movement—which is significantly overrepresented because of the structure of the Electoral College, Congress, and gerrymandered legislative districts—has retreated behind a fortress to stop what it views as the coming siege.

To justify a deep hostility to broad-based political participation, conservatives have long pointed to the notion that the United States was never intended to be a true democracy. But those cries have gotten more pointed. “We’re not a democracy,” Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) tweeted on October 7, 2020. It was not “the prerogative of government to reflexively carry out the will of the majority of its citizens,” he maintained. Three months later, a mob that explicitly presented themselves as heirs to the American Revolution stormed the US Capitol to ­overthrow the will of a majority of voters.

And now they want to finish the job. “Welcome to the end of democracy,” far-right activist Jack Posobiec snarked at the Conservative Political Action Conference in February. “We are here to overthrow it completely. We didn’t get all the way there on January 6, but we will endeavor to get rid of it.”

Our government was built upon a series of compromises that were meant to hold the new nation together. These decisions, however, ultimately laid the groundwork for the divisions that are ripping the country apart today, when extreme forces are openly talking about destroying democracy. The founders, in ways they could not have anticipated, placed a ticking time bomb at the heart of American politics. The structural inequalities built into the system have exploded before, most notably leading to the Civil War. But like a law of physics, these problems are accelerating, with one inequity exacerbating another. The country is again at a major inflection point ­concerning race, political power, and representation. If the framers once feared what James Madison called “the superior force of an interested and overbearing majority,” the central threat now facing American democracy is minority rule.

In the late spring of 1787, 55 of the most illustrious men in America gathered in Philadelphia to draft a new constitution for the United States and, in Madison’s words, “decide forever the fate of Republican Govt.”

Standing at the back of the Pennsylvania legislature’s assembly room, Edmund Randolph, the tall and handsome 34-year-old governor of Virginia, took aim at the governments of the 13 states, which in the minds of nearly all of the delegates had led the country to the brink of collapse by being too solicitous of the common man. “Our chief danger arises from the democratic parts of our constitutions,” Randolph said. “It is a maxim which I hold incontrovertible, that the powers of government exercised by the people swallows up the other branches. None of the constitutions have provided sufficient checks against the democracy.”

The purpose of the convention was for the Articles of Confederation—the country’s original constitution ratified in 1781—to be “corrected and enlarged.” But in order “to restrain, if possible, the fury of democracy,” Randolph laid out a ­blueprint­, conceived by his fellow Virginia delegate Madison, for a new national government to replace the Continental Congress and counter the power of the states.

Under what was dubbed the Virginia Plan, the House of Representatives would be elected by the people, like the state legislatures, but would be accompanied by an upper chamber, the Senate, whose members would be nominated by the state legislatures and chosen by the House. (It wasn’t until 1913 that senators were elected by the voters.) The new national legislature would choose the country’s president and appoint its judiciary. That meant the public would directly elect only one house of one branch of the federal government.

This marked a radical turnaround from the Declaration of Independence that had been signed in that very room 11 years earlier. The declaration held that governments derived “their just powers from the consent of the governed.” It was “the mother principle” of the revolution, said Thomas Jefferson, that “governments are republican only in proportion as they embody the will of their people, and execute it.” The state constitutions subsequently drafted in 1776 placed the bulk of power in popularly elected legislatures that were expected to reflect and encourage democratic participation. Legislators were elected annually, with the slogan “where annual elections end, tyranny begins” so that they would be as accountable as possible to the public. Ordinary citizens clung fervently to the notion of “vox populi, vox dei”: “the voice of the people is the voice of God.”

Of course, many people were still excluded from the political process. Property requirements made more than a quarter of white men ineligible to vote, women could vote only briefly in New Jersey, and free Black men were allowed to cast ballots in just six states. The 700,000 enslaved people had no legal rights, and Native Americans were not even ­considered­ US citizens. Still, by the standards of the time, the postwar legislatures were far more reflective of everyday society than the colonial ones, which had been dominated by wealthy merchants and lawyers.

This new democratic egalitarianism might have defined America’s political system for decades if an economic crisis hadn’t hit in the 1780s. To pay off their staggering war debts—and a $3 million requisition in 1785 from the Continental ­Congress, which could not generate its own revenue—states enacted tax increases that fell most heavily on farmers, who made up 90 percent of the country’s population.

This devastated the economy, leading to a depression not surpassed until the 1930s. Tens of thousands of people had their farms repossessed. Jails filled with debtors. In eight states, impoverished citizens rioted. In Massachusetts, angry farmers tried to overthrow the state government. Citizens petitioned their legislatures for tax and debt relief, and politicians responded by forgoing tax collection and allowing debtors to repay their obligations with paper money instead of gold and silver coins, which were in short supply, causing massive inflation.

To the country’s economic and political elite, it appeared that the state governments were favoring the poor over the rich and debtors over creditors.

When he arrived in Philadelphia in May 1787, Madison said the “evils” of popular democracy in the states “had more perhaps than any thing else, produced this convention.” The erudite Virginian believed that majority rule was inevitable and, indeed, preferable in a democratic society. But he also worried that rash and impulsive majorities could trample minority rights and threaten the viability of self-government.

While most American citizens came from modest means, virtually all of the delegates to the Constitutional Convention owned large amounts of land, many were extremely wealthy, and nearly half were enslavers. Their views unapologetically reflected this class bias. The framers of the Constitution had no conception that white people would one day become the minority, but they were keenly aware that they themselves were a distinct minority who needed to be shielded from the masses. If a majority were to control all branches of the government, John Adams wrote, “debts would be abolished first; taxes laid heavy on the rich, and not at all on the others; and at last a ­downright­ equal division of everything be demanded, and voted.”

In 1776, the prevailing view of the founders had been that people were meant to be as close to the government as possible. Now, in order to rescue the new American experiment, Madison strove to create a system that he hoped would result in “the total exclusion of the people in their collective capacity, from any share” in governing the country.

A day after Madison spoke against the excesses of majority rule, the convention considered the Virginia Plan for a new upper house. In every state except Maryland, the upper house was elected by the people, but Randolph and Madison proposed that members of the US Senate be nominated by state legislatures and selected by the House, with no involvement from the public. They suggested that both houses of the legislature be apportioned according to the population of each state, which would insulate the new Congress from popular majorities while striving to maintain the government’s legitimacy by ensuring that it represented the greatest number of people.

But the country was narrowly split between large states and small ones. To protect their power, representatives of the smallest states argued that each state should have an equal number of senators. On June 30, Gunning Bedford Jr., the attorney general of Delaware, confronted the delegates from Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and Virginia, the three largest states in the union. “I do not, gentlemen, trust you,” he said. “If you possess the power, the abuse of it could not be checked; and what then would prevent you from exercising it to our destruction?” He issued a startling ultimatum: “The large states dare not dissolve the Confederation. If they do, the small ones will find some foreign ally of more honor and good faith, who will take them by the hand and do them justice.”

To prevent a rebellion among the small states, the delegates narrowly agreed to their demand while maintaining proportional representation in the House of Representatives. Equal representation became known as the Great Compromise, but as Daniel and Stephen Wirls write in The Invention of the United States Senate, “The Great Concession is perhaps a more apt moniker.”

The new Senate made minority rule not just likely, but inevitable. It was another stick of dynamite strapped to the foundation of American democracy. Even those who wanted to curb the power of the masses expressed trepidation. Madison presciently warned that equal representation in the Senate would only worsen inequities over time as sparsely populated Western states joined the union, allowing “a more objectionable minority than ever” to control the federal government. But the level of inequality in the Senate today—by far the worst of any upper chamber in an advanced democracy—would have shocked even him. In 1790, the country’s most populous state, Virginia, had 12 times as many people as its least populous, Delaware. Today, California has 67 times the population of Wyoming. Fifteen small states with 41 million people combined now routinely elect 30 GOP senators; California, with 39 million residents, is represented by only two Democrats.

This imbalance is growing more lopsided: By 2040, roughly 70 percent of Americans will live in 15 states with 30 senators, while the other 30 percent—who are whiter, older, and more rural than the country as a whole—will elect 70 senators.

Adding diverse areas like the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico as new states would make the Senate more representative of the country overall, but congressional Republicans have flatly rejected this. And the underlying structure of the chamber is practically impossible to fix, because doing so would require the assent of those who benefit from its inequity. As one of the last acts of the Constitutional Convention, the framers specified that no amendment could deny a state equal representation in the Senate without that state’s consent. It’s unimaginable that any sparsely populated state would voluntarily give up this massive overrepresentation.

The composition of the Senate also significantly underrepresents voters of color. White people make up 46 percent of the population of the five most populous states but 78 percent of the five least populous states. Overall, white voters are overrepresented in the Senate by 14 percent compared with people of color.

Not surprisingly, the Senate significantly overrepresents Republicans, especially as the GOP’s advantage in smaller, whiter, rural states has become more pronounced. Senate Republicans haven’t won more votes or represented more Americans than Democrats since the 1998 election, but they’ve controlled the Senate for half the time since then.

The math is especially daunting for Democrats in 2024. Republicans can flip control of the Senate by winning Democrat-held seats in two of the nation’s least populous and whitest states—West Virginia and Montana. That would give Republicans a majority despite representing just 42 percent of the country’s population.

Even when Democrats manage to overcome the Senate’s structural bias and win a majority, the rules of the chamber make it difficult for them to govern effectively. During the Biden administration, as few as 41 Republican senators representing just 21 percent of the population have used the filibuster, which is not in the Constitution, to block legislation supported by large majorities of Americans on issues like gun control, abortion, and voting rights.

Trump’s impeachment trials vividly illustrated the skewed nature of the Senate and its implications. In 2020, the 48 senators who voted to convict him on the first article of impeachment represented 18 million more Americans than the 52 senators who voted to acquit him. When Trump was impeached again for inciting the insurrection, the 57 senators who voted to convict him represented 76.7 million more Americans than their colleagues.

But if the Senate has evolved to be an institution that protects conservative white power, the House was designed to be one. After the small states threatened to oppose the Constitution if they were not given excess power in the Senate, the slave states did the same with the House. The minority’s extortionist tactics worked a second time. To broker a deal, Scottish-born lawyer James Wilson proposed that an enslaved person be counted as three-fifths of a person, a figure that derived from how the Southern states were taxed in 1783. The near-complete acquiescence of the Northern majority was again called a compromise.

The three-fifths clause increased the Southern states’ representation in the House by one-third, greatly strengthening their power. Equal representation in the Senate and the three-fifths clause in the House warped the country’s most powerful new institution: the presidency.

When Wilson proposed that the president be directly elected by the people, the small states and the slave states contended that a popularly elected president would threaten their influence. So he floated a complicated alternative where “electors” selected by the states would choose the president.

The number of electors a state received would be equal to their total representation in both houses of Congress. This meant small states received a disproportionate number of electoral votes compared with large ones, and slave states triumphed over free ones. Virginia and Pennsylvania had roughly equal free populations at the time, Jesse Wegman writes in Let the People Pick the President, but Virginia’s 300,000 enslaved people gave the state six more House seats and presidential electors.

The North had double the free population of the South, but due to the combined weight of equal representation in the Senate, the three-fifths clause, and the Electoral College, 10 of the first 12 US presidents were enslavers, as were the speakers of the House for most of the country’s first four decades and 18 of the first 31 Supreme Court justices.

Trump never could have attempted to overturn the results if the United States had a system in which every vote mattered equally in presidential elections.

Even though electors now generally follow the will of their state’s voters, the Electoral College remains biased toward the same groups it favored at its inception, much like the US Senate. And it continues to depress voter turnout by depriving millions of citizens of a meaningful vote in presidential elections.

The structural inequities built into the Electoral College have other ripple effects. The tiny handful of battleground states are whiter and more Republican than the rest of the country. Eighty-three percent of voters in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania in the 2020 election were white, according to the New York Times, compared with 69 percent of voters elsewhere. Wisconsin, the tipping-point state in 2020, is also 3.5 points redder than the country as a whole. University of Texas political scientists estimated in 2019 that in a 50–50 popular vote election, the Republican candidate had a 65 percent chance of winning the Electoral College.

And the number of competitive swing states in 2024 is projected to be smaller than ever, comprising just six major battlegrounds (Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin) with 15 percent of the country’s population. That leaves 85 percent of Americans with little incentive to vote for the nation’s highest office, which affects down-ballot races as well.

Because representation in the Senate helps determine the number of electoral votes, smaller states also have more power than large ones to determine the president. The vote of a Wyoming resident, for instance, counts 3.7 times more than that of a Californian in a presidential election.