American Democracy isn’t dead yet but is under attack and on life support. Who believed that our guardrails and the spines of so many legislators and businessmen would crumble so fast? Many have pre-surrendered to the chaos, afraid of being audited, primaried, or doxed.

If Trump and Musk succeed in their efforts to disorient citizens and destroy institutions, there will someday be an autopsy conducted to establish how our once robust Democracy fell ill and died.

Democracy will not “have died;” it will have been murdered, not in its sleep but in ours. It will be easy and appropriate to conclude that the fatal shots were fired by Trump, but an autopsy must reveal more. It must show who ordered the gun, made the ammunition, and put the weapon into Trump’s hand. The shooter carries a lot of the responsibility but so too do the arms dealers.
How shall we trace the small missteps that will have added up to the destruction of our Democracy? We can see its origins in the Conservative pushback, really counter-revolution, to FDR’s New Deal. With Goldwater as the “bad cop” and Ronald Reagan as the “good cop,” political power began to shift. The Democratic segregationist South began its journey to the Republicans. This was the first defection of working people from the FDR coalition. It might have seemed a paper cut on the body politic, but it grew into a hemorrhage that left the Democratic Party anemic and enfeebled. Today the blue-collar workers are all but gone and so too are Black and Hispanic males.

Perhaps the first cause of death was the utter failure of Democrats to speak to the condition of their old constituents. I know they got more votes (until this cycle) but they lost their base.

This might have been reversible had it not been for three other major factors that didn’t seem epoch-defining at the time.

1. Citizens United in 2010, where the Supreme Court found that money was speech and efforts to limit spending were an abridgment of the rights of rich White people. Okay, those were not their exact words. Now poor and middle-class people also had the theoretical right to spend millions supporting (buying or renting) politicians. That didn’t work. The rich could buy newspapers, and radio stations and give money to politicians without any significant legal restraints. Between Rupert Murdock, an unapologetic partisan, and today’s versions of Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg we’re drifting from democracy to plutocratic oligarchy. Since it’s largely male, it’s really a Broligarchy.

Unlimited money undermined the system and enticed potentially honorable people to surrender to their funders.

2. Our downfall continued with the innocent appearance and innocent intended appointment of Merrick Garland as Atty General by President Biden. Whether out of caution or cowardice, misjudgment or sloth, he sat on Trump’s January 6 Insurrection. Making Prince Hamlet seem the very model of resolution, he stalled, dallied, cogitated, and let a year pass before beginning an investigation. Trump was able to run out the shortened clock. As Edmund Burke is quoted: “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” Garland didn’t do the necessary in a timely manner. Trump regained the presidency.

This brings us to this moment when our Democracy is bleeding out on the table, and there is nothing left in our medical bag to staunch the exsanguination.

3. Le Coup de Grâce was administered again by the Supreme Court with its legally inconceivable finding of Presidential Immunity. With the President having immunity from prosecution for presidential acts, we no longer have three branches of government, and the president can order his underlings to do anything and both promise and deliver them pardons. Only Trump could invert and pervert justice by pardoning convicted felons and then say that the felons, who assaulted the Capitol and the police, were the ones who “were actually assaulted by our government.” Shameless. Shameful.

Why is this a fatal Coup de Grâce? When the courts are ignored, Trump can’t be held responsible for his orders. His underlings who carry out his policies and orders can be tried, jailed, or fined. But that option is meaningless. If Trump pardons violent felons, then certainly he’ll pardon members of his team carrying out his crimes.

There are legal remedies. Impeachment. But that can’t happen. He could be impeached but with a Republican majority in the House, he won’t be. But were he to be, the Senate (again with a cowed and spineless Republican majority) would never be able to vote a conviction by a two-thirds majority. The last safety valve is the 25th Amendment which makes it possible to remove a President who is incapacitated by illness or madness. Neither the Senate nor the Cabinet will do this.

So, we’ll watch our Democracy, our traditions, and our precious legacy undergo an autopsy. We’ll come to understand, but we won’t be able to reanimate the corpse. Is it too late? No. Not yet. But soon. We must not be the “Good people who let evil triumph by our silence and inaction.”