Over about a decade of teaching a course on “U.S. Politics and Foreign Policy” at the University of Sydney I posed a question each year to my 200+ undergraduate students: What is the ultimate guarantor of U.S. democracy? In other words, what is the single factor that safeguards US democracy from collapsing into authoritarianism? The answer I was fishing for from them was not “the Constitution” or “the Supreme Court” or even “free and fair elections,” it was “political culture” – a political science term for shared political norms, values, and practices that, while they might not be written down as formal rules, potentially play a fundamental role in explaining behavior. In particular, I asked them to consider what might happen if the (power-seeking, fiercely competing) US political elite no longer considered the liberal-democratic system to be normatively important or no longer held basic democratic values themselves. Without a “culture” that values democracy, the system’s essential laws, rules, norms and processes could be corrupted or ignored, as has happened in many other instances of democratic reversal or backsliding. Elites in pursuit of power in the short-term may undermine democratic institutions for the long-term, in the absence of some fundamental beliefs that make this unthinkable, or at least unacceptable.