Eugene Volokh, patriarch of The Volokh Conspiracy, repeats a pointless exercise that he imposes on his readers from time to time. It’s a lecture about whether the United States is a democracy or a republic. His pedantry is misdirected because he is writing about the superficial form of governance under which Americans suffer or delight, depending on their political preferences.
The United States is in fact a bureaucratic a-theocracy that operates under the aegis of an anti-democratic oligarchy to advance the harmful credo of that oligarchy and the purported interests of the constituencies that it must placate in order to retain power.
Further, this arrangement, being so far from the democratic republic envisioned by the Framers, is always on the cusp of collapse as long as it depends on actual democracy. The oligarchy therefore actively seeks ways in which to maintain the semblance of democracy while subverting so as to obtain power in perpetuity.
There is a train of evidence for the latter proposition in the events of the past several years — the attempt to rig the election of 2016 by the creation of a hoax that was supposed to cripple Trump’s candidacy; the attempt to reverse (“deny”) the outcome of that election by a sham investigation; the use of that investigation and other sham evidence to impeach the Trump; the rigging of the election of 2020 through a conspiracy to suppress information, the privatization of election processes, the virtual stuffing of ballot boxes, and other forms of chicanery; the continuing effort to discredit the Trump so that he can’t return to power; and the overarching effort to shame, shun, and suppress anyone who expresses support for Trump or opposition to the oligarchy’s credo.