It’s 2026. 250 Years of Democracy. Time to Renew Our Vows. Or Not

In Saul Bellow’s novel Henderson, The Rain King, a fictional African tribe, the Wariri, is ruled by a king. According to the tribe’s system of governance, when the king dies, the new king must capture a specific lion to fully confirm his own role as tribal leader. The king would then reign as long as his “powers of procreation” and general health remained intact. When the tribe decides those are failing, they kill the king and elevate the Rain King as his successor.

Eugene Henderson, an American millionaire seeking adventure in Africa, comes to the Wariri camp, performs an act of great strength and becomes the Rain King. Soon thereafter, the king dies trying to capture the lion. Henderson sees what’s expected of him as Rain King, decides this is more adventure than he bargained for and he escapes from the tribe.

Power, Leadership, and The Origins of Governance

This is fiction, of course, and a very good yarn. But it imagines a very real problem humans have had since they first walked the earth: since surviving alone is not a viable option for most, how to manage group existence? Who gets to lead? And how?

For most of human history, the answer has been by vesting power in the best hunters, or the physically strongest, or the most successful warriors, or the most devious pretenders to the throne, and their heirs. The Greeks practiced a form of direct democracy, one that excluded women, slaves and many others. Romans gave limited authority to wealthy families. British nobles won shared power with the king through the Magna Carta.

America’s 250 Years of Democracy in Global Perspective

But only since the formation of the United States of America has power to govern been vested broadly at regular intervals to the collective decisions of the people being governed. As Americans we take that system of governance for granted, mostly unaware of how unique, and brief, our constitutional democracy is measured against the timeline of hundreds of thousands of years of human history that preceded us.

We have the right, and we exercise it regularly, to vote out existing leaders and replace them with others. That right is respected. Power transfers peacefully. At least it did until 2020.

This year, 2026, the 250th year since the signing of the Declaration of Independence, we will be celebrating that system of government. Not a king or queen’s reign. Not a religion. Not an ideology. But a bet our founders made that the collective wisdom of free people would lead to more successful and humane governance than those made by any one person or small elite group.

And by remarkable coincidence, it’s also a year when people with freedom to choose, all of us, will use that authority to reaffirm faith in that system. Or not.

The Immediate Test Facing Constitutional Democracy

While most of the themes of the celebration will be looking to the past—to 1776, the ratification of the Constitution in 1789, the Bill of Rights in 1791 and the tests since, we also need to keep a hard focus on the challenges ahead.

Our immediate test.

The “strict constitutional constructionists” who preach that the law must follow the literal words of the Constitution without regard to modern life, are using their political power now to convey king-like authority to an all powerful president. That’s a system our founders fought a revolution to reject. What irony. If they succeed, the Constitution and most rights that flow from it becomes a relic, not a working document.

And other tests are just ahead.

Machines are becoming smarter than people. Life is being created and human DNA is being manipulated in laboratories. Climate change is forcing hundreds of millions of people to leave ancestral lands. Fewer than 10 people, the leaders of nations possessing nuclear weapons, have the power to destroy life on earth. Inequality in wealth is matched by inequality of knowledge of the scientific and technical forces that are shaping our future.

Against this backdrop, questions such as who has the right to use which bathrooms and how high to raise tariffs on kitchen appliances hardly seem like issues that merit top billing on the national agenda.

The Constitution assumes that voters will make collective decisions that are in their best interests. But when scientific and technological advancements are moving ahead at warp speed propelled by complex knowledge understood by few, how do the many decide where their best interests lie?

These are inescapable issues that go to the heart of our democratic form of government. They need to be addressed right now.

Celebrating the past and redeeming the present are both essential. And so is action by contemporary Rain Kings clear-headed enough and brave enough to tame the lions threatening our future.

Comments? Criticism? Contact Joe Rothstein at jrothstein@rothstein.net

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