If a normal national election features a contest between parties and candidates that treat one another as respectful rivals with competing conceptions of the common good and a shared sense that free, fair, and regular elections are the most reasonable way to settle such contests, then we have not held a normal election for at least a dozen years. Instead, every couple of years we face existential battles between competing accounts of the very nature of our country. Do we continue a centuries-old experiment in aspiring to realize a democratic ideal in which equal liberty is extended to all and used to build together a mutual and humane society? Or instead chart a different, more populous, and less democratic path, based on the conclusion that democratic principles and liberal Constitutional niceties have outworn their utility in light of their failure to arrest spiraling economic inequality, disorienting social, cultural, and technological change, and other widespread sources of discontent and vulnerability? These fractious politics reveal an emerging pattern in which the electorate oscillates: trying the party that aims to redeem the democratic experiment by passing and implementing policies aimed to address the sources of discontent and vulnerability, but, as these policies inevitably fall short of their target, and as the Democratic Party appears to reflect the priorities of the relatively privileged over the more precarious, the pendulum swings back in the direction of the Republicans, the party of more radical discontent, populist fervor, and authoritarian leadership.