That is the question for American democracy, which dangerously fails to cope with existential threats to its viability due to a continuing refusal to effectively address a host of underlying questions. Just to name a few:
- How can our political system survive when it could not, and likely cannot, generate a single presidential candidate other than Joe Biden able to defeat a total scumbag like Donald Trump?
- How can our nation produce an electorate that includes more than 74 million voters who would have re-elected the most ignorant, immoral, feloniously corrupt, deranged, egomaniac to ever serve as president?
- How can our Supreme Court maintain the rule of law, upon which our democracy depends, when its “learned” members have clearly become nearly as partisan as our Congress of so many braying asses?
- How can our Constitution remain the governing foundation of our democracy when so many politicians swear an oath to “preserve, protect and defend” it but in fact brazenly attack it, while succeeding generations of judges and justices interpret I;ts precepts in diametrically opposed, if not often ludicrous, decisions?
- How can our Congress maintain the framework of democracy’s most fundamental promise – liberty and justice for all – when its Senate is led by an amoral, power-hungry cynic and its House of Representatives by a craven toady beholden to the most extreme ideologues of a political party lacking even a vestige of moral or ethical decency?
- How can we depend on our free press as a necessary bulwark of democracy when its freedom is corrupted by its ownership of mass media whose primary objectives are increasing viewership, advertising revenue and their resulting corporate profit?
- How, with all of these unanswered threats to our democracy, can we contemplate yet another presidential election whose declared candidates are largely a collection of ridiculously unqualified wannabes whose leading contenders are an aging, cognitively-questionable president with an unfortunately likely successor whose prior grossly inept presidential campaign imploded even before its first primary contest – two Democrats opposed by two GOP candidates, one of whom has arguably proven himself beyond a reasonable doubt as criminally unfit for any office, and the other a dedicated, and thus even more dangerous, demagogic throwback to tyranny reminiscent of Puritanical obsession?
How can we, indeed?