When the Bulwarks Fail

To the nation's founders, today was unthinkable

Things have been happening so fast, and yet the sensation of a slow-motion train wreck combined with a sinking ocean liner adds up to a nightmare dream state. As a result, I’ve written numerous columns in my head over the past weeks, without being able to summon the energy to go all-out on any one of them. They feel outdated even before publication, because the Distraction Machine runs non-stop nowadays.

What continually pesters me is that the intellectuals who wrote our nation’s founding documents would be dumbfounded by the speed and totality of the MAGA movement’s victory over their attempts to ensure balance and restraint in the exercise of the awesome powers of the federal government.

Yes, they tried to restrict the full exercise of civil rights to white male property owners, and they did their best to try to keep masses of deluded voters from installing the worst people in office. But by using profoundly anti-democratic mechanisms like the Electoral College and the Senate’s veto power over the People’s representatives in the House, they sowed the seeds now bearing such mutant fruit.

They could not have imagined that the patrician Senate would roll over for a cheap charlatan showman at every turn, including allowing him to install unqualified ideologues throughout the federal judiciary. They certainly couldn’t have guessed that a third of the population would long for a return to being governed by a king, with absolute powers, when that was explicitly why they were rebelling in the first place.

Handwritten draft of the Declaration of Independence by Thomas Jefferson

They also had to have assumed that the Supreme Court would not transfer such power to a President, and that the Court itself would not become powerful in its own right. The current ascendancy of well-financed lawyers and corrupt or prejudiced judges over the will of the people was not something they anticipated.

And, since there was no two-party system at the time, they didn’t even think to write a prohibition into the Constitution against stacking the electoral deck in the various States. The kind of partisan shenanigans that the Roberts Court has blessed would have driven them up one of the Constitutional Convention’s ornate walls.

Now, the last remaining rampart against complete authoritarian conquest of our nation is We, the People. If we follow the example of previous democracies that have chosen the illusion of security and prosperity over the hard work of self-rule, we will have only ourselves and our selfishness to blame.

Labor Day 2025 Protest in Santa Fe, New Mexico

Now that I’ve gotten that out of my system, maybe I can write one of the columns on nature, the arts, or education that are all looking for a clear path through the fog. Meanwhile, I think the administration should keep in mind this quote from V for Vendetta, a movie way ahead of its time in 2005:

People should not be afraid of the government.

Government should be afraid of the people.

— V

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