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Anyone who was at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland saw this coming. Heidi Cruz was reportedly physically threatened inside the convention hall. The frisson of danger that ran through Quicken Loans Arena was palpable and very, very real. Anyone who was at the Inauguration saw this coming. The address summoned up the desolate, witch-thickened wasteland he'd been handed. He had a memorable phrase for it.

American Carnage.

It came, finallyAmerican Carnage, that ison the streets and sidewalks of Thomas Jefferson's college town. He couldn't call it by its name. He couldn't heal the country because he'd hidden himself in its wounds.

As horrifying as the video of the murderous automobile was, there was another image from Charlottesville that shook me even more deeply. At some point in the long and bloody afternoon, a phalanx of local militia wannabes took up posts around Emancipation Park. They were dressed like Croatian guerrillas and they carried formidable firearms. As far as I know, they didn't do anything worth noting, but they were standing there as heralds to a very bleak future.

We now know what the reaction will be if the institutions of government, and the people in them, get so sickened by this administration that they act to rid the country of it. Is there any doubt that a president* who, after the events of this weekend, can't even see fit to rid himself of the fascists around him, including the ludicrous Dr. Sebastian Gorka, Ph.D., wouldn't balk at encouraging paranoid violence as a means of self-preservation? Is there any doubt that a president* who could not even muster the gumption or the outrage to criticize Nazis for what they are wouldn't blink at bringing the temple down on his own head either out of pure childish pique, or because he doesn't know any other way?

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Except for himself and (possibly) his family, there is nothing this president* cares enough about to keep from destroying it if he thinks he has to do so. And, if he thinks he has to do it, he will use whatever tools are at hand, because why wouldn't he? Nobody in the party he purportedly leads has shown any willingness to do anything more than moan about how Troubled they are at what he's doing. And a lot of what his administration is doing comes from the same place in our history out of which James Fields, Jr. and his automobile came barreling in the summer sunshine of a Saturday afternoon. The administration still employs Kris Kobach for the purpose of suppressing minority voters. The administration is still in court defending the rights of oppressed white college applicants. Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III is still the attorney general, and a lot of people are trying to get the inside voice to speak again. Somebody never stopped whistling Dixie.

I can't remember a bleaker time in this country's history. The most perilous moments of the Cold War were frightening but, by and large, we were all in it together. The Vietnam period was angry and divisive but there was a central focus to all the rage, an ill-conceived and immoral foreign adventure that even its most wrathful opponents knew had to end sometime. But the centrifugal forces seem stronger and more mysterious this time. They seem to be coming from too many different directions and they seem to have a number of obscure and distant sources. Our sense of being a self-governing nation is being pulled apart. Our concept of a political commonwealth is unmoored and floating. Nothing is solid. Everything is fluid, and everything ought not to be. Not like this. Not in the 21st century. We settled some things in the last century that should have been settled for good.

I can't remember a bleaker time in this country's history.

Back in 1789, Thomas Jefferson, who founded a university in Charlottesville, engaged with James Madison on the subject of the popular basis of political authority. Famously, Jefferson wrote that:

"As the earth belongs to the living, not to the dead, a living generation can bind itself only: In every society the will of the majority binds the whole: According to the laws of mortality, a majority of those ripe at any moment for the exercise of their will do not live beyond nineteen years: To that term then is limited the validity of every act of the Society: Nor within that limitation, can any declaration of the public will be valid which is not express."

Madison, in reply, tried in his usual way to talk Jefferson gently down from his high horse and back to the business of governing here on planet Earth.

However applicable in Theory the doctrine may be to a Constitution, in [sic] seems liable in practice to some very powerful objections. Would not a Government so often revised become too mutable to retain those prejudices in its favor which antiquity inspires, and which are perhaps a salutary aid to the most rational Government in the most enlightened age? Would not such a periodical revision engender pernicious factions that might not otherwise come into existence? Would not, in fine, a Government depending for its existence beyond a fixed date, on some positive and authentic intervention of the Society itself, be too subject to the casualty and consequences of an actual interregnum? If the earth be the gift of nature to the living their title can extend to the earth in its natural State only. The improvements made by the dead form a charge against the living who take the benefit of them. This charge can no otherwise be satisfyed than by executing the will of the dead accompanying the improvements.

Yeah, I know, just a couple of slaveowners talking there. But the point remains important. Like the law, democracy must be stable, but must not stand still. Some things must abide, beyond the power of equivocators, thugs, and misbegotten presidents, beyond the influence of inconstant political drama. Some changes must change and, once change occurs, it, too, must abide. It must become permanent, and not subject to periodic revisions engendered by pernicious factions. Like Nazis, I guess.

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This Is the Bleakest Moment for America in My Lifetime - Esquire.com