Children look at the Star Spangled Banner, the flag that inspired the lyrics of the American national anthem, at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History on June 10 in Washington, D.C. (Mark Schiefelbein/The Associated Press)

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One year ago, an editorial in this space chided the major candidates for president — at that time, Joe Biden and Donald Trump — for each man’s prediction that American democracy was doomed unless he won the coming election. Today there’s widespread agreement that one of them had a point.

Democracy might not have been doomed, but it was indeed under threat, and there are indications that people have come to believe it. An NPR/PBS News/Marist poll released this week finds that nearly 3 in 4 American adults see politically motivated violence as a major problem — but Minnesotans hardly need a poll to tell us that, in the weeks following the killing of Melissa and Mark Hortman and the wounding of John and Yvette Hoffman.

A greater share of respondents, 76%, said they believe democracy is under serious threat.

Women were more likely than men to believe it; Democrats were more likely than Republicans; those with college degrees were more likely than those without.

It’s worth asking whether those disparate groups of people had a common frame of reference. On this 249th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, what does it mean to live in a democracy? What are the democratic values we supposedly live by?

Asked in 1943 to explain the meaning of democracy, the author and essayist E.B. White wrote that one element of it was the suspicion that more than half the people are right more than half the time. That glass-half-full construction invites a complementary suspicion that more than half the people are wrong at least some of the time. And we who claim to believe in democracy are obliged to be OK with that. As American citizens, we are bound to accept the results of electoral decisions — even those we believe are grievous mistakes.

That we might someday have a president who refused to abide by that tradition used to be unthinkable; now it is not only thinkable but indisputable. That fact, maybe more than any other, has given birth to a protest movement that marches under the banner of “no kings.” The slogan fits because President Donald Trump speaks and acts as though patriotic loyalty means nothing more or less than personal loyalty to himself. In his glee describing his new “Alligator Alcatraz,” a migrant detention facility, he resembles nothing so much as a king with dungeons and a moat. When an election or a court decision does not go his way, he denounces it as illegitimate. His stance recalls the kings of old who asserted that they ruled by divine right. In fact, Trump goes further, asserting after an assassination attempt that he was "saved by God to make America great again."

It’s a dubious argument for an American president to make, considering the country’s founding tradition of keeping church and state separate. That tradition is rooted in the Constitution the president and other public servants are sworn to protect. Trump, though, seems intent on undermining some of its provisions, such as the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of citizenship to anyone born in the United States. He’s also put himself on record as favoring the “termination” of “rules, regulations and articles, even those found in the Constitution,” in response to the “massive fraud” that he alleges robbed him of the 2020 election. Though he put them in writing, he later claimed his words had been twisted.

White’s essay, written in response to a request from the Writers’ War Board, finds meaning in the orderly institutions and practices of American life: Democracy is “the line that forms on the right. It is the don’t in don’t shove. … Democracy is a letter to the editor. Democracy is the score at the beginning of the ninth.” If he were writing his essay today, perhaps White would add that democracy is the refugee who finds a home, the child who gets a vaccination, the immigrant worker who helps roof a house.

Democracy is also voters who, when their democracy is in trouble, act to protect it.