Impeachment, Brexit, and the battle to define democracy

In two leading democracies, citizens’ visions of core principles of government have diverged sharply. That’s undermining confidence, and helping to feed nationalism and populism.

“This is what democracy looks like!” Those six simple words have emerged as the rallying call for countless political protests worldwide in the past few years.

But if you put a question mark at the end, they go to the heart of a crisis facing two of the world’s leading democratic countries: the United States and Britain. In the U.S., at immediate issue is the possible...