This Fourth of July, we’re conducting a health check on America’s democracy, nearly six months into Donald Trump’s second term. But, first, we’re revisiting Jill Lepore’s 2005 essay on how, in some ways, it’s baffling that democracy took off at all. Plus:

• Susan B. Glasser on the Big, Beautiful Bill
• America’s most political food
• Our writers’ favorite spots in Paris, Los Angeles, and beyond

In 1938, if you had a dollar and seventy-two cents, you could buy a copy of “The Rise of American Democracy,” a seven-hundred-page hardcover about the size of a biggish Bible or a Boy Scout handbook. While a Bible’s worth is hard to measure, the Scout guide, at fifty cents, was an awfully good bargain, and was, in any case, the book you’d most like to have if you were shipwrecked somewhere, not least because it included the chapter “How to Make Fire Without Matches.” But “The Rise of American Democracy” promised, invaluably, “to make clear how Americans have come to live and to believe as they do.” It was also a quick read. “A Simple Book,” its ad copy boasted. “Paragraphs average three to a page. Sentences are short.” Better yet: “A Democracy Theme runs through the whole text.”

The book’s authors, Mabel B. Casner, a Connecticut schoolteacher, and Ralph Henry Gabriel, a Yale professor, set out to make history matter. In a foreword written in the dark days of 1937, when Fascism, not democracy, was on the rise, they offered a sober historian’s creed: “We live today in perilous times; so did many of our forefathers. They sometimes made mistakes; let us strive to learn not to repeat these errors. The generations which lived before us left us a heritage of noble ideals; let us hold fast to these.” Above all, they wanted American schoolchildren to understand the idea of democracy.

Rarely have so many members of Congress voted for a measure they so actively disliked, Susan B. Glasser writes. Read the story »

This Fourth of July comes just shy of the six-month mark in Donald Trump’s second term. We asked Andrew Marantz, who, on The Political Scene podcast, has been doing regular check-ins on the health of the country’s democracy, to help us understand just how worrisome this first chapter has been.

Q: How bad have these first few months been for American democracy?

Marantz: I would say that, as of this July 4th, America has not yet been made great again. Of all the realistic scenarios of how badly Trump could degrade American democracy within his first few months, we’re not in the worst-case scenario—but we are in one of the bad scenarios.

As I’ve written, the idea of Trump riding in on a tank or on a horse and ripping up the Constitution and declaring martial law was never a realistic possibility. But, within the frame of what scholars call competitive authoritarianism or illiberal democracy, this is one of the more aggressive attempts we’ve seen. A lot of the Trump administration’s efforts so far have been either unsuccessful or a mixed success. They are trying a lot of things, and in some cases they’re being pushed back; in other cases, they’re not. Even if Trump and his allies only get a small percentage of what they want, that represents a bigger and quicker assault on the institutions of liberal democracy than we’ve seen in probably a century.

Read: Heading to the Hamptons? Don’t forget your copy of Colson Whitehead’s novel “Sag Harbor,” which, as he told our fiction editor, is “all true except for the parts that are made up.”Watch: If anyone can make America feel utopian, it’s David Byrne.Listen: Tonight is Oasis’s big reunion concert. “We weren’t the best musicians,” Liam once said. “But we had spirit, man.”

P.S. When America’s Founding Fathers signed the Declaration of Independence, the document did not “create a nation,” Louis Menand writes. “It created only the idea of a nation, and that idea, as its scope and meaning have evolved over time, is what we annually pay our respects to.” 🎆

Hannah Jocelyn and Erin Neil contributed to today’s edition.