Americans do not need to be convinced that democracy is a good thing. There has been a national consensus about the virtues of self-government since 1620, when the Mayflower Compact became the Plymouth Colony’s founding social contract. The birth of American democracy goes even farther back, to the Iroquois, who established a sophisticated democratic confederacy a hundred years before the Europeans arrived.

If America’s long-standing attachment to democracy has a downside, it is that too many people take it for granted. Most Americans never give democracy a thought, beyond dragging themselves to the polls every few years and trying to get out of jury duty.

Over the last century, democracy has become a global phenomenon. It is now fashionable for politicians everywhere to promote democracy in glowing, even messianic terms. Almost every country in the world claims to be democratic, although most must be thankful that their claims are not subject to truth-in-advertising laws.

These are heady times for political leaders who claim to love democracy, but perilous for ordinary people who actually believe in it. In many countries, those who take democracy seriously run the risk of official harassment, persecution, prison, and worse.

Even in developed democracies, public officials routinely disregard basic democratic principles in the name of security, order, efficiency, and expediency. Politicians praise democracy to the skies in public while working quietly in private to subvert it. Like termites, the damage that they do is largely unseen, but if left unchecked, all that eventually remains is a hollow democracy, with a thin veneer of formal public accountability that barely conceals the rot underneath.