I am grateful for these provocative and engaging responses. Start with the elephant in the room: Is this the right moment to critique our system of checks and balances, after a near-majority of voters chose a man who stated he would only be a dictator “on day one”? Aziz Huq warns that too much criticism will likely play into Trump’s hands since checks and balances are the “only” option for restraining authoritarianism.

But the question is not whether courts or legislative action can help—as vital democratic institutions they most certainly could, though it remains an open question whether they will. Rather, the question is whether a system that routinely inhibits the public from checking the power of both public and private elites can steer us toward a more democratic future. I think that is exactly the question we should be asking at this dire moment, at least if we are serious about democracy.

The mythology that has grown up around our constitutional order—almost a kind of civic religion—offers few clear assessments of how well it actually lives up to its promise to represent the will of the people, protect vulnerable minorities, and avoid despotism. Huq is understandably focused on the last of these functions, but it is not as separable from the others as he appears to think. Powerful elite minorities helped propel Trump to power, and we can expect they will continue to elevate autocrats—and others who threaten vulnerable minorities—if we do not constrain their power and influence. Avoiding despotism, that is, must start well before we turn to courts or congressional investigations as a last line of defense. It requires expanding democracy, which in turn requires acknowledging how American-style checks and balances severely obstruct the will of the people.

Huq concedes that our presidential system makes it difficult to enact legislation, but the requirement that three separately elected branches of government must agree in order to pass policy reform is only the tip of the iceberg. Our unusually complex system also includes the deeply malapportioned Senate (plus a particularly undemocratic filibuster), a counter-majoritarian Electoral College, a strong tradition of judicial supremacy overriding national legislation, and fifty state governments that often implement national policy in uneven ways, if they do so at all. It’s not any one of these institutions but the sheer volume of veto opportunities that makes the United States unique in the democratic world, facilitating the extraordinary power of elites.

Yet it is precisely this plethora of checks that the prevailing narrative lauds for keeping concentrated power at bay. There is little place for mass publics in American-style checks and balances rhetoric, except as an object of derision. The same attitude is evident in Huq’s exaggerated pessimism about the American people. Trump has now run three successive presidential campaigns and lost the popular vote in two of them. He won in November with less than a majority and a margin of victory of only 1.5 percentage points. And his polling numbers are the worst of any president since polling began. More importantly, electoral outcomes are not set in stone. There is no good reason to think that better politics can’t mobilize a significant majority behind a very different vision for America, though Huq clarifies the profound skepticism of popular rule that leads so many to doubt that such a world is possible.

Samuel Moyn points out that elites are important to the mission of producing a more democratically responsive system. Indeed, elites in legislative and judicial bodies as well as social and economic institutions have always been a part of successful mass movements. We may indeed need “better elites” than, say, the professional class of technocrats that Lily Geismer sees at the head of the Democratic Party. But, as Gianpaolo Baiocchi notes, effective social movements are not just aimed at predetermined outcomes, which elites too often choose. Rather, as I argued, movements are themselves democratic institutions and thus a source of creativity and energy in their own right. Eric Blanc also makes this point in relation to the labor movement, where “the experience of the fight itself” is a mechanism to empower ordinary people. The same is true of civil rights movements, both past and present. It’s not clear how we get “better elites” without strong and sustained bottom-up mobilization and a direct challenge to the dominant checks and balances narrative, which contends that elites will check themselves.

Blanc also notes that movements are not built on abstract appeals to institutional change, but rather through substantive appeals: saving Social Security and Medicare, for example. I agree. Yet movements also need a constitutional vision, and reformers need to be prepared to confront the standard defenses of American-style checks and balances if they are to overcome them. This is part of my concern about appeals to federalism.

Marcus Gadson rightly calls attention to the vitality of state and local activism and reform in our extremely decentralized system—another way of seeing the significance of Geismer’s call for a fifty-state strategy. But appeals to federalism have too often invoked state constitutional authority to defend elite power rather than to promote the public interest. That was the case in the twentieth century with legal challenges to national legislation on minimum wage and maximum hours, and it has been the case this century with the rejection of Medicaid expansion, voting rights, and gun safety policies. It’s not enough to note that “states have played a critical role in constructing the best parts of America’s political order.” We must acknowledge that they have also played a critical role in constructing the worst. The unevenness of state policies is responsible for vast inequality of life expectancy, infant and maternal mortality, and premature death across the country. And some of the progress that states have made might have come from the national level in a less veto-prone national political system. Improving people’s lives and promoting democratic institutions through state politics is a worthy goal, but it should be an interim one—always with an eye to achieving national policy floors.

In fact, it has primarily been periods of strong national authority that have produced dramatic progress in democratic institutions and better health and economic well-being. Huq wonders how American-style checks and balances can figure so prominently in our current malaise, given that they also existed during the New Deal and Great Society eras. The answer is the very majoritarianism that Huq decries. Thanks to powerful majority backing, those periods of U.S. history enjoyed an extremely rare alignment: unified government across all branches, staggering margins of victory by the president, and near supermajorities in Congress. Franklin D. Roosevelt won his presidential elections by an average of 14.9 percentage points. Lyndon Johnson won in 1964 by a margin of 22.6. And under both presidents, Democrats had 57 percent or more of the seats in both chambers (sometimes much more). Our government thus functioned more like a parliamentary system that was both partisan and popular. Policy and institutional change in the public interest occurred not because American-style checks and balances became “safeguards against tyranny” but because the thicket of veto points accessible to elites were finally overcome by the sheer magnitude of the political demand.

It is perhaps these challenges to democratic accountability that lead Kelly Hayes and Maya Schenwar to reject any reforms that remain situated within the U.S. legal order. If it is so hard to get even basic, popular policy reforms, how can we hope to ever eliminate the abusive institutions of American politics that characterize the carceral state? I am deeply sympathetic to their critique, but mass democracy rarely delivers radical change. That does not mean giving up on revolutionary visions—including abolition—but it does mean understanding that mass democratic politics, with all its messy attention to the day-to-day concerns of large majorities, imposes constraints on the timing and substance of what we can achieve.

Some of the earliest advocates of popular government saw it as a way to constrain the ability of wealthy citizens to dominate politics. Even Machiavelli understood that patricians seek to preserve or increase their dominance far more than ordinary people do. And unlike the masses, elites have both much to protect and greater access to power. As the late political scientist V. O. Key opined, “politics generally comes down, over the long run, to a conflict between those who have and those who have less.” Democratic politics may be the only mechanism available to the have-nots for occasionally leveling the playing field. At a minimum, it should not further empower the haves—or legitimate their power with a misleading narrative.