American politics is in a shambles, and it’s entirely due to the faction that gave us the former guy, 45, Donald J. Trump.

Long ago in a simpler time when small towns had parades with fire trucks, marching bands, and sidewalks lined with families and kids waving flags, this nation celebrated its simple two-party politics with neither side holding sway too potently, and the losing side of some electoral contest would cheerfully muse, “Well, the pendulum can always swing the other way next time!”.

Today we have a majority of a minority party still capable of commanding a majority of the electoral college (but not the last time, thank God!) who are under the spell of a candidate now facing 91 felony counts on four separate indictments. They are a passionate bunch of folks.

I’ve been talking with a number of former-guy supporters, and you just can’t get them to confront the reality of these pending court proceedings. They either change the subject to “the Biden crime family”, as if that was an actuality, or they discount the importance of the indictments entirely. They are a tribe united in their denial of events they’ve seen with their own eyes, and firmly believe they are entitled to believe lies while knowing them to be lies.

Which is precisely how the RICO statutes in Georgia were used to indict 18 co-conspirators alongside the former guy. Because you aren’t entitled to ACT on a lie you know to be a lie when your actions impact the outcome of a fair election to overturn it in favor of the loser.

These neighbors and acquaintances, as far as I know, aren’t engaged in conspiracies with a direct impact on events. But in so far as they deny reality, and willingly adhere to leadership they either know or suspect to be lying, they act in bad faith.

This time in our history has become the age of bad faith. Too many of our countrymen are willing to adhere to lies spoken to promote the privileges of their faction, to disfavor “the other”, and while eroding and degrading the institutions which made this nation what it once was, a reasonably fair and flexible democracy.

Gingrich and the Neo-cons, and every zero-sum gaming, winner take all pol, player, and office holder since them have brought us nearly to the end of the great experiment of American democracy. And they’ve done it by promoting fraudulent concerns while ignoring real issues and problems.

And, irony of ironies, they’re celebrating closed-mindedness; the adherence to “alternate” facts, and “us vs. them-ism”, against the great “evil” of WOKE-ISM, which I guess means people who are aware of what’s actually happening, is true, and worth attending to, and working towards.

I’m of the opinion that most of these former guy supporters wouldn’t recognize functional government if it reduced unemployment to under 4%, and showed them a faster economic recovery post -COVID than any other nation on earth, because, well, they don’t. Too busy mumbling about the Biden crime family, and ignoring 91 actual felony charges pending against their former guy…