When asked what form of government we had ended up with Benjamin Franklin is famously quoted as responding
"A Republic, if you can keep it."
As far back as Plato there has been a fear that Democracies or Republics will naturally devolve toward demagogues and tyrants.
A representative republic on the scale proposed for the new United States of America was a radical notion even without the expansion that would follow.
Now, as we stand with an unstable narcissist in the White House elected on a platform of racism, hatred and outright lies, it seems like the worst fears of the framers have come to pass. Every new piece of information that surfaces about this presidency highlights Trump's unfitness for the office he holds.
See the WaPo excerpt from “A Very Stable Genius: Donald J. Trump’s Testing of America"
The framers of the constitution were well aware of the historical tendencies of republics and tried to build in safeguards to protect the country they envisioned.
Those safeguards have steadily eroded and are in jeopardy of collapsing entirely.
It has been over 230 years since the Constitution of the United States was ratified, and with the possible exception of the American Civil war in the 1860s I don't think we have ever been closer to seeing the Great Experiment Fail.
I don't know what it will take for the Great Experiment to survive this chapter. The mechanisms exist in the constitution to reclaim the government from the Oligarchs, but that requires winning elections. Democracy has always been predicated on the notion of an informed, engaged voting population.
Currently it appears that the elections in the Unites States are being won through manipulation of a highly malleable voter base. Professor Jonathan Metzl recently examined aspects of this in interviews with Boston University Today "Are White Americans Harming Themselves by Backing GOP Policies?" and the Tennessee Star "Vanderbilt Professor Says Racial Prejudice Keeps Rural Tennesseans From Embracing Obamacare".
In terms of the legitimacy of elections themselves it is hard to tell whether things are getting better or worse. With recent court decisions overturning heavily gerrymandered districting in Michigan and North Carolina it seems like there is progress on that front, but at the same time direct hacking of voting systems is on the rise. See Page 7 of the Worldwide Threat Assessment
The bottom line is that if we want to keep our Republic we will have to singularly and collectively commit to building voting coalitions that can defeat the bought and paid for servants of the oligarchs by large enough margins to make it impossible to steal the elections.
