As America’s second decade of the 21^st century staggers and stumbles to a close there are a few things that can be considered accepted knowledge….a few things that we all know. The Congress of the United States is hopeless divided along partisan lines with allegiance to a narcissistic megalomaniac being the key partisan issue. We also know that the President of the United States will be impeached but will not be removed from office in the first month of the third decade. And finally, we know that the Democratic Party is seemingly implacably dedicated to finding a way to re-elect Donald Trump even as that disaster threatens to morph into reality every day.

As far as Congress is concerned, ever since the first Black president was inaugurated and the Tea Party emerged as the voice of endangered conservatism and white supremacy, it has become a forum for vitriol, opposition, interposition and nullification. Democrats keep searching for a coherent articulation of their motivating philosophy.

Meanwhile the Republicans are comfortably settled into the realm of the reimagining the Constitution so that it suits the needs of the wealthy, the zealots, the xenophobes, the destroyers of the planet and the needs of those who are in need of the affirmation of their privilege as whites, as males and as the dominant voice of America.

And Donald Trump has become their avatar, their savior, their Chosen One to whom they have sworn allegiance and fealty No Matter What. And even as this country careens towards a dystopian future, the Republicans feign blindness even though they can see what we all see – there is a bleak future for this country if five more years of Trump ensue.

And while there has never been a President more deserving of impeachment – with the possible exception of Andrew Jackson – Trump has created this victimhood/martyrdom scenario that satisfies his base and confounds his enemies. Even those determined to be ignorant of history must admit that the Constitution was written in the aftermath of a revolution against a supreme monarch. And as flawed and more than occasionally awful as many of the so-called Founding Fathers were, they were in agreement that that a return to monarchical reign was to be avoided at all costs.

And yet, some 230 years later, the Republicans are arguing that Trump can attire himself with all of the operational garments of monarchy without consequence. They somehow approve of him using the office of the presidency in an attempt to conspire with a foreign government to subvert the 2020 presidential election. And the Democrats seem to be baffled at what to do when Trump simply refuses to observe the basic principles of the Constitution and ignore any summons from Congress.

So we know that Trump will be impeached shortly. And we know that the Republican Senate will be united in their defense of the indefensible. And yet, national polls tell us that at least 50% of all Americans are okay with this outcome. And indeed, this may be how democracies die.

And finally, in the midst of this historic institutional dumpster fire, the Democratic Party is going about the selection of a candidate to oppose Trump as if this were a normal election year. There are still over fifteen men and women running for the Democratic nomination even though most of them would stand less than a snowball’s chance of defeating Trump.

Yet we are supposed to believe that a Sanders or Buttigieg or Klobuchar or Booker or Steyer candidacy is a real thing. Perhaps in a “normal” political environment that might be true. But there is nothing normal about the times in which we live and the Democrats are truly fiddling while the American Rome burns and all of us will suffer for a very long time if this pitiful process results in the re-election of Donald Trump.

And so, the question becomes, is America at the crossroads or is it at a dead end? And we can only hope that we won’t have to wait until November 3, 2020 to find out.