I’ve been around here for years. The piece by Garrett Epps with the Atlantic you linked to may be the dumbest thing I’ve ever read. It lacked, well, anything that made any kind of intelligent point and of course lost me at using the word “democracy”. The fellow might have just type the alphabet and not wasted anyone’s time.
The US was set up as a Constitutional Republic. The Left does not like the limitations imposed on them by a constitution. They prefer Democracy, by which they mean “unlimited mob rule”, with the unstated assumption being that THEY will be the ones leading the mob.