Are These The Last Days Of The Republic?

Succession to the throne in empires is messy. When Turkish sultans died, their sons often fought civil wars to determine who would wear the crown. The loser was strangled with a silken cord. The Romans were no less brutal. There was no such thing as the peaceful transfer of power.

We’re beginning to see the outlines of a similar system here in what used to be the United States of America. The press keeps talking about polling numbers and political strategies as if this were all about who could win an election in a constitutional republic. That’s not really what’s going on at all. That was the old system the one based on the idea that power derived from the people.

How quaint.

Some time ago, powerful interests in this country decided that while they would maintain the outward appearance of a Republic, they were no longer going to allow the people to actually choose the President. There was too much chance for a messy result. Instead, these “oligarchs” decided to implement a completely different system.  We would now be an empire and powerful men, corporations, and non-governmental entities would decide who would sit on the throne.

We saw this system deployed in full measure in 2020. Money and technology were married to good effect. Entire stories of great import like Hunter Biden‘s laptop were simply winked out of existence. Completely false narratives were manufactured.

Donald Trump was a minion of Putin. Donald Trump was a rapist.  The greatest threat to America was an army of Christian nationalists armed with Bibles and AR-15’s. Allegations that Joe Biden had taken tens of millions of dollars from the Chinese Communist Party were baseless.

America was fed fiction, not in the piecemeal fashion of years past, but in a truly Orwellian manner. Lies became truth. Truth was banished to the far fringes of the Internet.

Then these powerful men and interests moved into directly manipulating the voting process. Under the pretext of the “existential” threat of COVID-19, every conceivable safeguard developed to ensure the integrity of the electoral process was discarded.  Mail-in voting became the norm. No matter that in large measure no one could confirm when the ballot had been filled out, who had filled out the ballot, or even if the person casting the people actually still lived in the district in which they voted.

Hard-copy ballots and hand counts were eliminated. Americans voted on voting machines programmed by unknown actors and subject to no meaningful inspection. Had they been hacked? Were they working properly? No one could say.

It did not matter. Americans of all political persuasions stopped believing in the validity of electoral results. The men and women driving the train did not care. It was all for show and the more easily it could be controlled and manipulated the better.

The dogs were called in. People asking reasonable questions about how voting machines worked became conspiracy theorists and Nazis. Individuals suggesting we return to a simple system based on voting in person on election day became racists.

Trump was shoved aside. A man who was the laughing stock of the Senate was installed.

Now the unforeseen has occurred. The lapdog placed on the throne by the “oligarchs” has begun to come apart. He was never asked to do much more than read a teleprompter, but even that is now increasingly beyond him. 

A new President must be found.

Contrary to what many believe, though, that process will not be simple or bloodless. When a Sultan fell, factions coalesced around all the various contenders. The struggle that ensued was bloody and cruel. In its own way this process will be just as ugly.

Biden will not willingly step down. Those around him who rule now in his name will fight tooth and nail to hold their positions in the palace. All around the country, would-be claimants to the crown will calculate and conspire. Alliances will be made. Promises will be given and then broken.  

Totally absent from this process, however, will be any real discussion of the needs of the country or the wants of the American people. Kamala Harris will not choose her course based on an idea of how to improve the lives of the American people or how to secure their support. Neither will any of the other major players in this drama.

The American people have become almost irrelevant to these people. They are props nothing more.

None of this, of course, bears the slightest resemblance to the electrical process delineated in the Constitution. It is nonetheless increasingly the reality we live in. Joe Biden may well be forced to step down. Who replaces him and how that occurs, however, is far from certain.

Supporters of Donald Trump may think that Biden’s political demise means certain victory in November. I hope that is true. We must acknowledge, however, that the problem we face is much larger than one man and his agenda. Powerful forces in this country have conspired to seize political power from the American people, and we are fast running out of time to reverse course.

We may not have seen the end of the Republic, but if we’re not careful, we may be living its last days.