In recent years some analysts have anticipated a political apocalypse, a “tipping point” where the demographics of America had tilted so far in the direction of the core constituency of the Democratic Party that our political system had become obsolete.  The theory was, if a simple majority of our voting citizens were so dependent upon financial assistance from government that they might prefer such dependency over an opportunity to compete for a living in a free-market economy, the Republican Party – and our free-market, democratic republic – might be doomed.   People vote their pocketbooks, and if government-dependency is better for the have-nots’ pocketbooks than the best the free market can provide, they will swap the virtues of the historical American model for the bigger paycheck.  The election of Barack Obama did not signal that we had reached that tipping point, though it did signal that we were close enough that if you combined the have-not votes with the white-guilt votes, you had a winner.  But now we could be moving to the next stage.

Donald Trump has raised the prospect of a very different tipping-point.  His movement appeals to have-nots, though it is not defined by have-nottism.  It is a coalition of people who are so frustrated by the American political system that they will vote for the candidate most likely to blow it up.   This coalition includes not just people who are voting their pocketbook, but also people who see the American political system as so weighted-down by corruption, rent-seeking, and crony capitalism that it has failed.   One is tempted to say that the Trumpists are spoiled children, the products of a society grown so decadent, self-indulgent, and weak that it is easy prey for a theatrical con-man, and to some extent that is what they are.  But there is a bigger picture.

Some would argue that our affinity for off-the-wall candidates like Messrs. Obama and Trump should not be blamed upon the voters, that the fault lies with our government and our political system.  Call it a rescission of the “social contract” (if you are a progressive), with the voters taking the position that the state has invalidated that contract by making too many terrible decisions.  Or call it a breakdown in the “Rule of Law” (if you are a conservative), with our hodge-podge of laws and executive orders and regulations having become so voluminous, costly, burdensome, and corrupt as to constitute an abandonment of the Rule-of-law principle that the rules should be reasonable, consistent, non-discriminatory in application, and understandable to most adults.  Either way, the Trumpists are in a mood to tear it all down and re-start from scratch, regardless of where that might lead, and they could hardly care less about socialism, capitalism, the size of government, or political ideology in general.

That Trump has chosen the Republican Party over his natural home with the Democrats, is no surprise, as it is the Republicans who have done the best job of corrupting their own professed ideology, with people like Boehner and McConnell having abandoned conservative principles long ago.  Trump might be running as a Republican because he figured out that the Republicans might be even madder than the Democrats.

How did we get here?  A thought:  today, one can pop open the Wall Street Journal on a Friday or Saturday morning and see dozens of pages showcasing the lifestyles of the rich, where a mere $10 million home scarcely qualifies for display and one can find a $10,000 outfit of allegedly coordinated men’s clothing that will make you look like you just woke up with a hangover after an all-night fraternity-party.  They also have a weekly section devoted entirely to reviews of automobiles that cost $100,000 and up.  Are there really enough Wall Street Journal readers who even care about such stuff, much less have the means and the inclination to buy  it?  Do the WSJ and their target audience understand the impact of such behavior upon everyone else?

Wage-disparity is not an unprecedented phenomenon but it is nevertheless the stuff that turns “trickle-down economics” into a pejorative term and stirs resentment in a big chunk of the Donald Trump constituency.  The disparity motivates many, including some who make a very good living and some who could even afford to do their shopping via the WSJ weekend editions.  Many Trumpists must wonder, who lives like that, other than athletes, performing artists, Wall Streeters, and – the big one – politicians and lobbyists and crony capitalists and corporate CEOs, all the people who make the big money through involvement with our government?  It appears that many Trumpists are OK with rich actors and singers and athletes, but most are definitely not OK with people who appear to have gotten rich through their relationships with government – certainly they cannot stomach politicians whose net worth has increased dramatically during their term in office.

The 2016 election is not the French Revolution or the Bolshevik Uprising, but there are similarities.   Our elites are seen as being in breach of both the social contract and the rule of law.  The Trumpists might be here to stay.

We have reached a milestone: we no longer have a supreme Court – that is, a functioning court that is supreme.  With the death of Justice Scalia, our Supreme Court is deadlocked and non-functional and will remain so for at least the next nine months.  Any doubts on that subject were dispelled by the 4/4 split in the recent teachers’-union case.  Today’s Court is so political that it is irrelevant.  The political split between Left and Right on the Court is so complete that the country’s appellate courts (the U.S. Circuit Courts of Appeal) are, by default, the final arbiters of all disputes involving the Constitution or federal law.  If you win in the Circuit Court, you have won your case; there is no point to appealing to the Supremes.  It gets worse:  in some circuits, there is no point in even going beyond the trial court – if you doubt that, you have probably never read any of the entertaining opinions rendered by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.

It is true that the biases of the Supremes are occasionally frustrated by an outbreak of judicial responsibility.  Unfortunately for the conservatives, the only Justices who can surprise are, alas, two who are generally thought to be conservative.  Justice Kennedy is capable of voting with the lefties at unpredictable times.  Chief Justice Roberts is the more complex case: appointed by a Republican President, thought to be politically conservative, he turns out to be that rara avis  who votes on principle rather than interest, even if favors the litigant whom he does not personally favor.  One of his principles, perhaps the most significant one, is that the constitutional arrangement for separation of powers among the three branches of the government must be honored; a related principle is that the Supremes must make every effort to uphold the constitutionality of acts of Congress.  Exhibit A:  the  treasonous Roberts-opinions on ObamaCare.

Once in a great while, a dispute comes before the Supremes in such a form that even the most political of the justices (e.g., Justice Ginsburg) find it hard to figure out which side comes closest to representing their political objectives, and then we get to see what the Justices can do and were hired to do, which is to use their brains rather than their emotions.  And it turns out that the Supremes are all pretty darn smart and talented, once they are forced to pick the winners and losers at the end of a case rather than at the beginning.

But most of the time, the gang simply decides the case and then makes up the arguments to support their decision.  Not that this is a novel practice; a noted scholar, judge, and New Deal politico, Jerome Frank, 86 years ago, commented at length upon the judicial tendency to act before you think. (He labeled his recognition of that tendency “legal realism.”) But Frank was living in a more innocent age, when most courts at least went through the motions of trying to be apolitical, of trying to present an appearance of respectable integrity.  Throughout, there have been some (including your humble correspondent) who have persisted in the belief that, while judges do have biases, that does not mean they are all children who can act only upon impulse.

Jerome Frank’s writings were initially considered radical, left-wing heresy – the antithesis of what Hayek later called the “Rule of Law.”  Today, legal realism is mainstream judicial thought, endorsed in nearly all of the elite law schools.  Legal realism is what begat the “Constitution-as-a-living-document” movement.  And that is how the third branch of our government, the judiciary, has become a charade and a John Roberts has become an anachronism.

The risks in this situation are palpable. At a time when our Supreme Court is no longer expected to  perform its constitutional responsibility (and the Right believes we have a rogue Chief Justice who tried to buck that trend), our Congress is no longer expected to perform its constitutional responsibility either (because we have indulged a rogue President who has eviscerated Congress with his pen and his I-phone whenever they failed to give him what he wanted).

That means 2/3^rd of our political system, our revered system of checks and balances, no longer exists at this time.  For at least the next nine months, we have no judiciary, no Congress, no “Rule of Law,” we have only rule by authoritarian dictat, government by executive order.  Can we stagger through another nine months of this?  Can we recover from this?

The decline and fall of the Roman Empire, which effectively began with the complete transformation of the Roman Senate by a rogue emperor, took about 500 years, but that was before the telegraph, the telephone, the steam engine, electricity, the automobile, television, the computer, and the Internet.  How long will it take this time?

It is not Donald Trump’s fault that his newly-adopted party seems on the verge of nominating the only candidate who cannot defeat an un-indicted Hillary Clinton.

The Barack Obama regime, 7+ years of training-wheels socialism and flaccid national security, has not just brought America to its knees but has provoked a temper tantrum on the part of 35% of Republican Party voters. All Republicans (with the possible exception of their newest party member, Mr. Trump) are infuriated by President Obama, but the majority of the Party did not blow a gasket in looking for a replacement. The majority would have preferred to bank their fires, cool their heels, and pick a decent candidate who could end the Obama Experiment responsibly.

Instead, Mr. Trump stepped into the breach, seemingly as a stunt rather than a serious venture, and became the willing beneficiary of the inability of the 35% to ignore the urgings of a corps of supposedly conservative commentators who thrive on conflict and adored the prospect of garnering massive attention through the windfall of a human headline-machine. If people such as Limbaugh, Levin, Coulter, and Ingraham had disdained the Trump candidacy because most of Mr. Trump’s policy preferences run contrary to the conservative principles the commentators had spent their careers claiming to embrace, if they had resisted the urge to treat immigration policy as though it were the only important issue, Mr. Trump’s campaign might never have gained traction. Had the radio folks addressed immigration reform more thoughtfully, had they laughed at the outrageous behavior of Trump rather than exalting it as an appropriate expression of public frustration, the primary race would have produced a more-instructive debate over various alternative platforms for immigration reform.

But the commentators did not do any of those things. Instead, they pandered to the 35%: they obsessed over immigration and over the inability of the Republicans in Congress to overcome the insuperable legal obstacles presented by presidential vetoes and executive orders, and they scape-goated the “establishment” for that inability. They provoked a civil war within the Republican Party. They fomented rebellion and encouraged the 35% to indulge themselves, and now we face the prospect of a socialist or closet-socialist president and a permanent end to the great American experiment with a liberal democratic republic committed to free people and free markets.

Among the dangerous problems that the country will face if Mr. Trump takes down the Republican Party and we elect the Democrats’ nominee, is that America has almost never reversed a governmental entitlement-program or other handout-program.  If you doubt the likelihood of a huge uptick in new expenditures beyond even the elevated levels to which Mr. Obama has driven us, think about the spectre of Ms. Clinton and Mr. Sanders competing to see which of them can come up with the more expensive set of increases in our already-unpayable entitlements and other schemes for the redistribution of incomes and wealth. Bear in mind that actual condition of our Social Security and Medicare programs is hidden from the public by a massive accounting scam that fails to disclose the many, many trillions of dollars of additional liabilities that would have been accrued – and added to the published figure for our national debt – had the feds held themselves to the same accounting standards as they impose upon Wall Street.

But the most important issue involving the future of our country, the one that dwarfs everything else, is the issue of the composition of the Supreme Court. It is of paramount importance because of the power of the Court to resolve so many important disputes, including the most fundamental constitutional issue of our time: separation of powers. In comparison, that issue far outweighs the significance of what a left-leaning Court might do with regard to abortion, gay marriage, LGBT matters, racial quotas, and other so-called social issues.

When non-lawyers complain about President Obama’s Executive Orders and federal regulations and other such devices for governing as a monarch or dictator would, what they are reacting to is the undermining of the constitutional authority of Congress, its mandated role as the only branch of government with the power to legislate. As utilized by this President, E.O.s and regulations, unless and until overruled by the Supremes on the ground that they exceed the authority of the executive branch, represent government-by-fiat, which is the signature of authoritarian governments. Once the abuse of our constitutional structure by a rogue President has been approved by the Supremes, the game is over; we are no longer a democratic republic, we are Rome under an authoritarian emperor, with a neutered, impotent Senate. If we elect a President Clinton and she gets to replace not just Justice Scalia but, say, Justice Ginsburg and even one of the conservative justices, we will have an imbalance on the Supreme Court that the country might never be able to correct, one that might deliver the coup de grace to our beleaguered nation.

So, why is this not Mr. Trump’s fault? It is because he is not evil, he is just a weak and flawed and un-conservative and decidedly un-virtuous man, willing to take the whole country down because he is having so much fun. Hard to blame him for yielding to the temptation. Similarly, it is hard to blame the 35% of the Republican electorate for acting out, as they are behaving just as we have raised them, as we have encouraged them to behave: as selfish, self-centered people who are quite willing to indulge their personal frustrations by misbehaving. And because we have allowed them to become totally ignorant of the history and purposes of this nation, of the ways in which we really are exceptional.