How old were you when the United States became a democracy? The big story of the United States is that it’s always been a democracy — that democracy was the whole point of overthrowing British rule. I’m guessing most other people who grew up in the United States probably learned it too. But these days, if you speak to many experts on American history or political science, you’ll often hear something very different. “As a person who studies autocracy, there’s no way I would code the U.S. as a democracy prior to 1965, before the passing of the Voting Rights Act,” Anne Meng, a University of Virginia political scientist, told me in January.

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Persons: it’s, you’ll, ” Anne Meng Organizations: University of Virginia Locations: United States