1. American democracy is in serious danger, because it's under sustained assault from Republicans who wield real power across the country. But to understand what's going on and why it's so dangerous, here are some things I've learned from studying democratic breakdown elsewhere:
2. Democracy - bear with me - is a bit like a sandcastle. By just holding an election, you can make something super basic that looks like a democracy. But without lots more effort, you're stuck with something weak that can easily be wiped away. Many countries never get past that. 
3. Over hundreds of years, the US built a sophisticated, robust democratic sandcastle - what political scientists call a "consolidated democracy." It's so sophisticated that individual institutions can falter, but the whole thing still stays standing. It's become pretty resilient
4. Like sandcastles, even strong democracies can be wiped out in one big wave (coup, civil war, or revolution), but these days, they're often destroyed by smaller waves -- the slower erosion of authoritarian populism, attacks on voting rights, politicization of rule of law, etc.
5. In a way, that's more insidious, because apolitical people rarely notice it's happening. When you lose a few grains of sand per day, year after year, the damage is severe, but there's no coup, no revolution, no abrupt shift. It's lots of small waves that each wash sand away.
6. That's happening in the US currently. The MAGA wave did a lot of damage under Trump. But now, the waves are continuing to erode democracy at the state level, at the local level, in addition to national level politics that are defined by increasingly authoritarian Republicans.
7. The challenge for us now is that diverting the waves or repairing a damaged democratic sand castle is a lot easier than building one from scratch, or trying to rebuild one that's underwater. When democracies collapse into an authoritarian mess, they're rarely rebuilt.
8. Republican political dynamics now actually reward GOP politicians who embrace authoritarianism and punish those who aim to protect democratic institutions. The extremism is getting worse in the party. And the waves, so to speak, are getting more frequent.
9. The point, then, is that we're in a period of severe danger for our democracy, and if we don't protect it now, it'll be way harder to repair or rebuild. I've studied many democracies that were washed away by authoritarian waves. Pretty much none have been successfully rebuilt.
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