When I lived in China, a decade ago, I often saw propaganda billboards covered in words that supposedly expressed the country’s values: Patriotism. Harmony. Equality. And … Democracy. Indeed, China claims to consider itself a democratic country. So do Russia, Cuba, Iran, and so on down the list of nations ranked by their level of commitment to rights and liberties. Even North Korea fancies itself part of the club. It’s right there in the official name: the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.

I thought of those Chinese billboards recently, when a postelection poll showed that many American voters touted the importance of democracy while supporting a candidate who had tried to overturn the results of the previous presidential election. According to a survey by the Associated Press, a full one-third of Trump voters said that democracy was their top issue. (Two-thirds of Harris voters said the same thing.) In a poll conducted before Joe Biden dropped out of the race, seven out of 10 uncommitted swing-state voters said they doubted that Donald Trump would accept the election results if he lost—but more people said they’d trust Trump to handle threats to democracy than said they’d trust Biden.

Almost all Americans say they support democracy. They even agree that it’s in trouble. But when researchers drill down, they find that different people have very different ideas about what democracy means and what threatens its survival, and that democracy is just one competing value among many. In the collective mind of U.S. voters, the concept of democracy appears to be so muddled, and their commitment to it so conditional, that it makes you wonder what, if anything, they’d do anything to stop its erosion—or whether they’d even notice that happening.

[Yoni Appelbaum: Americans aren’t practicing democracy anymore]

Americans perceive democracy through an almost completely partisan lens. In recent polls, Democrats tend to cite Trump—in particular, the likelihood of him seeking to subvert elections—as the biggest threat to democracy. They also point to gerrymandering, voter suppression, and Trump’s rhetoric about using the government to exact retribution as causes for concern. For Republicans, by contrast, threats to democracy take the form of mainstream media, voting by mail, immigration, and what they see as politically motivated prosecutions of Trump. Perhaps the best Rorschach test is voter-ID laws, which get characterized as “election integrity” or “voter suppression” depending on the perspective: Republicans see them as a commonsense way to make elections more accurate and accountable, while Democrats see them as a ploy to disenfranchise voters who don’t have state-issued identification. No surprise, then, that campaigning on a platform of preserving democracy didn’t work for Kamala Harris. Invoking the term to rally support assumes a shared understanding of what it means.

Even more troubling, American voters rarely prioritize democracy over other considerations. For the most part, we’re willing to overlook mischief that undermines democracy as long as our own team is the one doing it. A 2020 study in the American Political Science Review by Matthew H. Graham and Milan W. Svolik of Yale University found that only 3.5 percent of Americans would vote against a candidate whose policies they otherwise support if that candidate took antidemocratic actions, like gerrymandering or reducing the number of polling stations in an unfriendly district. Another survey found that when left-wing voters were presented with hypothetical undemocratic behavior by right-wing politicians—prohibiting protests, say, or giving private groups the ability to veto legislation—62 percent of them considered it undemocratic. But when the same behavior was attributed to left-wing politicians, only 36 percent saw it as undemocratic.

[Graeme Wood: Only about 3.5 percent of Americans care about democracy]

Some scholars have dubbed the phenomenon “democratic hypocrisy.” Others, however, argue that voters aren’t pretending that the antidemocratic behavior they’re supporting is democratic; they really feel that way. “People are pretty good at reasoning their way to believing that whatever they want to happen is the democratic outcome,” Brendan Nyhan, a political-science professor at Dartmouth, told me. That’s especially true if you can tell yourself that this could be your last chance before the other guy abolishes elections altogether. We just have to sacrifice a little democracy for the sake of democracy, the thinking goes. Graham, who is now an assistant professor of political science at Temple University, has studied the reaction to the 2020 presidential election and the “Stop the Steal” movement. “Our conclusion was that pretty much everyone who says in polls that the election was stolen actually believes it,” he told me.

The disturbing implication of the political-science research is that if the typical forms of incipient democratic backsliding did occur, at least half the country likely wouldn’t notice or care. Stacking the bureaucracy with loyalists, wielding law enforcement against political enemies, bullying critics into silence—these measures, all credibly threatened by President-Elect Trump, might not cut through the fog of partisan polarization. Short of tanks in the streets, most people might not perceive the destruction of democratic norms in their day-to-day life. And if Trump and his allies lose elections or fail to enact the most extreme pieces of their agenda, those data points will be held up as proof that anyone crying democratic erosion is a Chicken Little. “This is a debate that’s going to be very dumb,” Nyhan said.

You might think that, in a democracy, support for democracy itself would be nonnegotiable—that voters would reject any candidate or leader who didn’t clear that bar, because they would recognize that weakening democracy threatens their way of life. But that simple story isn’t always true. The job of genuinely pro-democracy politicians is to convince voters that democratic norms and institutions really are connected to more tangible issues that they care about—that an America with less democracy would most likely also be one with more economic inequality, for example, and fewer individual liberties.

The alternative to making and remaking the case for democracy is a descent into apathetic nihilism. Just look at the Chinese media’s coverage of the U.S. election. A video shared by China News Service said that whoever won would merely be “the face of the ruling elite, leaving ordinary people as mere spectators.” The state broadcaster China Central Television claimed that the election was plagued by “unprecedented chaos.” That kind of talk makes sense coming from democracy’s enemies. The danger is when democracies themselves start to believe it.

Officials say efforts to assess damage are under way after 6.8-magnitude earthquake hits eastern Cuba.

Waking up to the election results on Wednesday, many Americans who opposed Donald Trump may have felt inclined to resent their neighbors. How could more than 70 million of them vote for a convicted felon who had hobnobbed with a fascist, showed little respect for the country’s institutions or alliances, and couldn’t even promise not to rule as a dictator? Some foreign observers on social media seemed to react similarly, seeing in Trump the worst traits of American caricatures: egomania, narcissism, chauvinism, carelessness.

But these prejudices were unfair on November 4, and they are still unfair on November 8. Yes, Trump is a true native son of this country, and some of its worst tendencies have allowed him to flourish. And yes, those who care about the future of the United States have every right to be worried about the trends he has unleashed or exploited—authoritarianism, misogyny, conspiracism.

And yet: This country has always been a big, beautiful land of contradictions. As an Iranian Canadian socialist who moved here from Europe in 2017, I hear my share of anti-American chatter from left-leaning Middle Easterners, Canadians, and Europeans. Many seize on simple stories about America as a land of hyper-capitalism, violence, racism, and imperialism—and such stories are not in short supply. The United States remains the world’s only developed country not to have public health care. It is by far the world’s biggest military power. And expressions of racial animus can be loud, deadly, and persistent.

[Jennifer Senior: Focus on the things that matter]

But to reduce America to these clichés is to miss much that is extraordinary. This same country of megalomaniac capitalism is home to public libraries and research universities that are the envy of many European social democracies—institutions tended by millions of Americans deeply committed to their survival. Those who imagine America as a country of racists perhaps haven’t actually visited its small towns, where mosques, Hindu temples, and gurdwaras prosper next to churches and synagogues. In this supposedly immigrant-hating country, Trump banned entry to the residents of seven Muslim countries in 2017—only for thousands of Americans to show up at airports in protest. Thousands more Americans staff immigrant-rights groups. For a narcissistic country, the United States has a lot of excellent public museums that acknowledge historical injustice and encourage self-reflection.

This country got its start as a naively daring social experiment already riven with contradictions. A group of European slave owners on ethnically cleansed land pledged to establish a nation whose self-evident truth was the equality of all. And yet, what they founded was a breathtakingly dynamic republic whose tree of creativity has never ceased leafing. The hopes vested in the United States have been sometimes vindicated, sometimes dashed. Chattel slavery endured here long after it was eradicated in Britain. But in 1860, Americans did elect a president who brought about its abolition at the end of a bloody civil war. The postwar promise of Reconstruction gave way to Dixiecrat rule and Jim Crow, but the American civil-rights movement of the 1960s was to become the most inspiring example of civil disobedience of its era, encapsulated in the call of Martin Luther King Jr. for the United States to “live up to the true meaning of its creed: We hold these truth to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.”

American actions abroad have also been contested and contradictory. In the Philippines, Cuba, and Puerto Rico, Washington played the role of imperial power. The same Washington helped establish the League of Nations in an effort to end all war—before the U.S. Senate refused to join it, undermining its efficacy. The United States first vowed to stay out of World War II, then joined the Allies to help defeat fascism on the beaches of Normandy and the plains of Manchuria. After the war, the United States helped establish democracies in Japan and West Germany—during the same era in which it took part in organizing an antidemocratic coup in Iran.

[Listen: Are we living in a different America?]

The essence of America has always been the battle over its essence. No one election has ever determined its complete or permanent nature, and that is as true now as it was in 1860 and 1876. If today’s America is the America of Donald Trump, it is also the America of those who would stand up to him.

Don’t give up on this beautiful country. Its best traditions are now in danger, and no special genius of constitutional design will automatically keep them intact. In the hands of a president who may wish to model himself on Vladimir Putin, democratic institutions will be tested like never before. Americans will have to fight to safeguard them at every level of government. Daunting as this task may be, I have faith that Americans will rise to it. Trump may be the Founders’ nightmare, but their dreams can still outlive him.

Cuba is facing widespread power outages and damage after Hurricane Rafael ripped through the island.

Hurricane Rafael brought strong winds, causing a shutdown of the country's electricity system for the second time in just weeks.

Cubans are having a bad sense of deja vu after the second major hurricane and islandwide power outage in two weeks.

Rafael is the fifth major hurricane of the 2024 Atlantic hurricane season, which ends at the end of November.

Hurricane Rafael slams into southwest Cuba as a Category 3 storm, with 115 mph winds knocking out electricity.

The category three storm made landfall on Wednesday and is expected to bring storm surges and floods.

Rafael continues to strengthen and forecast to be near major Category 3 hurricane status at landfall in western Cuba.