It's looking more and more like our opportunity to have an amicable separation between the two opposing viewpoints in the country has passed, and we're doomed for something like a bitter, lawyer-strewn court battle with the kids in the middle. How did we get here?
Well, for one thing, we've managed to mainstream hyperbole into political discourse; if your opponents are 'literally Hitler', there isn't much you can't justify doing about them, or to them. Constant screaming about an existential crisis to 'our democracy' (or, less commonly, the more accurate 'our Republic') creates the urgency, the sense of imminent doom, that focuses folks more on the end than the means; and focusing on the end, rather than the means, is almost the perfect OPPOSITE of what a Republic is supposed to be.
One of the means that's become more popular (although it's certainly not new) is using the apparatus of government against your political rivals; rivals who, conveniently, you consider a 'threat to democracy' and thus worthy of any efforts, legal or not, to bring them to a non-threat.
When you're living in the most prosperous, most free nation that's ever existed and yet loathe the very principles and philosophies that made that country possible, I'm not sure if there's any other rational outcome; you can't try to reach higher by cutting off your legs.
I suppose the most realistic hope now is that this messy, furious divorce happens in a courtroom, though finding a fair venue, jury and judge seems impossible; alternatives will be far, far worse.
So that's what we're reduced to; pining hopefully that this will 'only' be a devastating, extraordinarily expensive and overtly hostile divorce. Not optimal.
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