Democratic backsliding is not just the erosion of existing democratic institutions, but also the resurgence of old forms of racial, colonial, and patriarchal authoritarianism and the rollback of hard-won rights against these forms of domination. This lecture turns to W.E.B. Du Bois’s concept of “abolition-democracy,” coined to capture the brief moment of multiracial democracy in the United States after the abolition of slavery and the end of the Civil War, as an essential resource for meeting the challenges of our own times: how to hold onto our ideals of democracy while also combating the most anti-democratic tendencies in contemporary politics.