The conservative critique of government is rooted in a Feudalistic notion of property. The point of self-governance is to wrestle property rights away from the encroachment of the king. The king has been dethroned, of course, but the tools of royal coercion still exist in a nefarious and nebulous concept of “the government” which stands over and above the actual forms in which self-government takes place. It’s not a well-thought out idea, more of a visceral reaction. “The government” in this sense is viewed as a distant, foreign, and at times, occupying force. Peculiar, since the anti-government symbolism coexists rather easily with a strong sense of nationalist pride.

The problem is this leads to the destructive habit of cherry-picking. When the government does something I agree with, this is good and right. In what sense? In the confused sense that the people will’s was truly expressed through the principle of self-governance. Similarly, when “the government” does something I disagree with, this is not only bad and wrong, but an attack on the very principle of self-government. Worse, it was undertaken without my consent. Therefore, by definition, it is a violation of the principle of self-government. Other minds will go further, uncovering secret plots and conspiracies rather than the more obvious reason of majority rule.

The schizophrenic view of government is often expressed as a difference between a democracy and a republic. Whether such a distinction ever made sense at any point in history, today it is certainly a meaningless distinction. Modern governments are inherently complex systems requiring a level of organizational and administrative operation that is largely immune from direct democratic rule. As populations grow, as economic activity expands, as social interactions evolve in increasingly sophisticated ways, governments will naturally grow. Those who dream of shrinking government by starving it of revenue seem oblivious to this fact. A government can be both complex and efficient. It can also be small and invasive. Levels are never a good way to measure any system.

This was the inevitable conclusion to this tragic farce. The man with the sad clown face (let us no longer speak his name anywhere but in a courtroom or a jail). He was always a cancer. Everything he touches, he destroys. Family, business, faith, hope, love, laughter, all consumed by his cancerous soul. The second negative partisanship coupled with an over-reliance on geographical boundaries brought him into power and ushered in a four-year struggle, the choice was simple. Either the Republican Party would be destroyed or America. I take no pleasure in warning of this danger, of being “right”. The time for reasoning with the other side has long since past. Everything has been directed at one result. America would survive. That was my choice and the choice of 81 million strong. Everything was designed to contain this cancer from consuming our country.

The cancer is now destroying the Republican Party. To my conservative friends who truly don’t dream of civil war, who do not truly view me or other progressives as our own form of cancer, I offer this advice: let them go. Let Trump and the dark forces that prop him up go and start their own third party. No union is worth sacrificing your conscience.

It’s a truism in political arguments that equating something to fascism puts you on a slippery slope. Let me go skating on ice, lest we think that fascism can never come to America.

Trump is a menace and a threat to democracy. The idea that he can be contained has eerie echoes of Germany on the eve of electing the greatest madman in the world. Hitler was elected in a coalition govt. and Von Papen too was somehow supposed to hold Hitler in check. So what happened?

Germany was not a proto-fascist state before Hitler rose to power. The Weimar was a Presidential Republic. It gave us art, expressionism, nudism, vegetarianism, socialism very liberal stuff. The problem is it had very little support. And this is where history becomes instructive to me. Our respect for the government, civil institutions and political processes are at the lowest they have ever been, and keep heading lower. There is so little respect because we have ratcheted party politics and fratricide to an unprecedented level. The system is under attack from all direction. Revolution is in the air, on both sides. Isn’t this good? Shouldn’t the system fall?

Call me a pessimist (I prefer realist) but I do not share this faith in the separation of powers to constrain our madman Donald Trump. And the reason I don’t have faith is because every day these wise constraints are coming undone. Political discourse has descended into bar fights. Congress members can’t even stand to be in the same room together. People are shut off to other points of view. We have built up a permanent echo chamber, reified, unthinking, founded on blind rage rather than principle. The courts are blatant and naked in their ideology. Tell me there are 2 democrats and 1 republican judge and I lay good money the decision is going to be 2-1. This cynicism is so ingrained so normal that exceptions like the Roberts decision on Obamacare are truly shocking. Presidents no longer feel constrained to bother with Congress when it comes to the conduct of War, and Congress green lights anything anyway, too weak to stand up and reassert their constitutional authority. Our nation, in short has lost respect for American Democracy.

So Trump will be held in check. And I ask, when is our Reichstag fire coming?