Why isn't everybody upset about this?

Four years ago, when I warned those who had managed not to pay attention to Donald Trump's longstanding pattern of erratic behavior, crazy conspiracy theories, and overt authoritarianism that he just wasn't a price worth paying to keep Hillary Clinton out of the White House, most of them scoffed. Even now- incredibly- the phrase "Trump Derangement Syndrome" flows from the mouths and keyboards of intelligent people. The human capacity for ignoring the inconvenient but incredibly obvious is astounding.

Now, even after all the threats against the press, tweeted libels against those who disagree with him, solicited physical abuse of demonstrators, gross abuses of power, corruption, discriminatory policies toward races and religions, manifest ignorance of and disregard for the Constitution, and a comic-opera attempt to overturn the result of a fair and honest election later, it's amazing the number of folks who are neither stupid nor crazy who still don't understand the threat Donald Trump poses to our system and to our very freedoms. That our institutions seem to have survived his time in office intact is a testimony to their sturdiness, even if the moderate size of the margin by which we voted him out of the White House last month bears witness to the cluelessness of so many of us. 

But now, we have the spectacle of a growing number of his crazier supporters treading gingerly on the ledge of treason by urging the President to invoke the Insurrection Act, suspend the Constitution, and order the military to conduct a new election.

This includes a retired Army general and former National Security Advisor.

That a loony-tunes publication like the Epoch Times, a far-right rag run by the racist Falun-Gong cult whose followers mostly live in China, whose self-proclaimed god lives in New York State on a plus estate, and that is outraged at the Marxism of the Chinese government because Karl Marx wasn't Chinese, should fail to honor the niceties of American political customs is one thing. That somebody like Sidney Powell, who can dream up the bat-guano crazy (and obviously imaginary) Dominion-Systematic techno-plot to flip a Trump landslide nationally into a rather decisive victory for Joe Biden, can foam at the mouth is not a shock. But it's not just the number of practicing Second Amendment enthusiasts who confuse themselves with embattled farmers of Lexington and Concord and Donald Trump with George Washington who worry me.

It's the number of everyday Americans who don't understand that the ideology of Donald Trump is the polar opposite of the ideology of the American Revolution and the American Constitution, even though the man refuses to acknowledge the American people's right to fire him.

The openly authoritarian rhetoric, the clownishness, and the incompetence aside, you would think that would get people's attention. But even in defeat, it seems unable to sufficiently discredit the man to prevent him from going into political exile as the leader of the strongest anti-democratic movement in the history of the Republic- and the only one to actually hold power for four years. 

Today Charlie Sykes wrote, "The entire Trump presidency has been a superspreader event for crackpots." That's all too true. At least a third of the nation falls into that category now. But beyond that, it's been Novacaine- no, leprosy- that has deadened the nerve endings of our democratic sensibilities and left most of us unaware of just how dangerous a man Donald Trump is, and how incompatible his movement is with our freedom.

We've dodged a bullet, people. And Trumpism remains very much with us. We are nowhere near out of the woods, even as Joe Biden prepares to take the oath.