Ben Franklin’s response, on 17 September 1787, to Philadelphia socialite Elizabeth Powel’s question, What have we got, a republic or a monarchy? is now a classic, A republic, if you can keep it. Clearly, the great wordsmith meant that a republic, like the US, needed a significant effort to be maintained as a republic. Less obviously, it also suggests that the shrewd observer retained a certain skepticism that his countrymen had the full measure of insight and wisdom that such maintenance called for.

Don’t forget that the same man also said, in patent defiance of many Americans’ complacency that the American democracy is everlasting, that nothing is certain except death (and taxes). Polities die about as often as people. Some people live on like zombies though their ideals and values have long evaporated; we can’t recognize them though they still look about the same. Countries change and become shameful facsimiles of what they were. Sometimes they trample the ideals they once revered. Democracies collapse and become a horrendous repudiation of what they cherished earlier.

Politics may always be a rough-and-tumble business, but the US polity is now showing two fatal cracks. The first is the visible erosion of its political system. That system is predicated on parties that fight elections on the basis of platforms that outline their principles and policies. Unbelievably, of the two major parties, one has ceased to operate as a political party with clearly stated tenets.

The Republican party once stood for fiscal prudence, law and order, and strong defense. The last Republican administration merrily added $9 billion to the deficit; dubbed a violent attack on the Capitol and legislators as a legitimate political demonstration; and has now decided to withhold arms to Ukraine as a gift to an enduring enemy, Russia. It is even seeking to wreck its protective bulwark for decades, the NATO armor of common defense with Europe.

The other crack is that the two main sources of its social strength are drying up. Besides its structure, the polity draws strength from two other sources. The first is a government system which has demonstrated its strength for two troubled centuries. To talk of a ‘deep state’ as a malignant cancer to be battled is as foolhardy as the talk of defunding the police, whatever many wayward cops do. One needs a functioning state with a competent bureaucracy, whatever its occasional lapses. To question the FBI’s compet – ence and the in – tegrity of its savvy servicemen because of periodic misjudgments is also paranoid because the country badly needs its expertise.

The country’s prosperity and success depend not solely on self seeking businessmen, but also on the management capacity of a competent civil service that keeps the guardrails in place and the social services engine whirring. The other so ur ce that keeps the US going is a set of values and traditions that have served well but some seem eager to scuttle. Americans not only stopped a President from appointing a Supreme Court judge according to law and tradition, but keep appointing judges less than the best and let them act with seeming impropriety.

Many of the US legislators are decent and diligent, but we are increasingly seeing ones as mendacious as Ed Santos, as vapid as Marjorie Taylor Greene, as unscrupulous as Matt Gaetz, as dishonest as Bob Menendez or simply unhinged to any genuine political principles. If an unprincipled leader proposes a policy or an executive action that is contrary to law or the constitution, a vast section of the lawgivers is timorous to object and tilted to capitulate. The traditions that keep the US polity in line are at serious risk of being abandoned. But the biggest threat to the republic now comes, unbelievably, in the shape of an ex-President who is again a presidential candidate.

It is not his policies and programmes that are a problem; he has none spelled in detail. He bears the indelible hallmark of a demagogue: he superbly exploits known problems but offers no specific solutions. He wrecks a well-crafted nuclear pact with Iran, which US diplomats astutely persuaded even Russia and China to sign, promising to replace it with a better pact, but came up disastrously with nothing. He blessed forty initiatives to wreck Obamacare, the country’s belated response to a shameful absence of health cover for Americans (which fortunately failed), but never produced even the rudiments of an alternative plan.

The desperate people who come to the country’s borders for succor, he falsely calls rapists, murderers and drug dealers; but he neither amended the immigration-friendly laws or asylum-promoting procedures nor strengthened the border control, even when he controlled both houses of the Congress. It is easy to create a momentary spurt in the economy by cutting taxes, regardless of its disastrous impact on the deficit, or dramatically impose tariffs on Chinese products, but these have no salutary trade consequence and impose a burden on the ordinary consumer. But these are trivial missteps compared to the perverse ambitions the ex-President has set for his second term.

Trump has made no secret of his intention to make his new term an unabashed regime of hate and revenge, unhinged power and unqualified absolutism. His cabinet will be of yesmen, his advisors will be acolytes. He will again court despots like Kim Jong Un and, most dangerously, Vladimir Putin, who has openly declared his resolve to expand the Russian Federation to retrieve a facsimile of the USSR. The concept of qualified, independent civil service employees will be given the goodbye; the only test of acceptability in government employment will be ‘loyalty.’ That term would mean, in the classic words of Trump’s erstwhile VP Mike Pence, fealty to Trump rather than the constitution.

The Justice Department and the IRS, we have been told, would be used not to achieve fairness and equity but as weapons against political adversaries. Government documents, however sensitive or confidential, instead of being preserved as public property, could be tossed in the toilet or taken home at will by leaders. Alliances such as NATO, developed pains takingly over decades, can be simply compromised to meet Trump’s negotiating whim. There would be sweeping enlargement of executive power, at the cost of effective semi-independent agencies like the Federal Reserve System and the Federal Trade Commission. And Ukraine could be sacrificed for a Russian deal, proving US assurances worthless to the world.

In short, it would be a realization of the Nixonian concept that whatever the President does, because he is the President, becomes legal and legitimate. The republic that so concerned Ben Franklin, after two centuries of constitutional functioning, is gravely imperiled today. With implicit skepticism for the average American, Trump has declared that he would be gullibly followed no matter what he does, including shooting somebody on Seventh Avenue. A flamethrower in the hand of a charlatan is bad enough; it is worse when the charlatan enjoys playing with it.

(The writer is a US-based international development advisor and had worked with the World Bank. He can be reached at mnandy@gmail.com)