US axes website for reporting human rights abuses by US-armed foreign forces

It's not just a structural advantage, it's a de facto suspension of the Constitution.

Political parties are in theory subordinate to the Constitution, but when the executors and interpreters of the law are first and foremost agents of a political party, and they refuse to be constrained by the Constitution, that's the ballgame. You have a self-coup.

What we are witnessing is the aftermath of the self-coup, the Constitution is just a polite fiction that must be given lip service to prevent the already massive protests from turning into an outright color revolution.

This is often described in terms of adherence to democratic norms, but I like your framing better.

If we have to distill the problem down to its simplest essence, it's the political parties. In particular, it's the existence of the two political parties, whose priorities have transcended those of the Republic itself (mostly the members' self interest). It just so happens to be the Republicans in power when the consequences of this have spiraled out of control.

I think distilling in that far is missing the point that this is a republican and right wing issue. It doesn’t “just so happen” that republicans are in power while this is happening, they are the ones who are doing it.

The essence of the problem is not political parties, we've had them for hundreds of years and nothing this bad has happened. The actual simplest essence of this problem is malignant narcissism and cult-like behavior embedded in political parties.

Donald Trump is an actual cult leader (Jim Jones was also a malignant narcissist), MAGA is an actual cult (not just a cult of personality), and they are also ostensibly but not actually a political party. Insofar as a two party system isn't ideal, it at least provides a level of stability. But when one of the two parties is an actual cult, then the whole thing falls over. Parties must not be cults. That's the root of our current predicament.

> It just so happens

This didn't just "happen", it was predicted far in advance, and not on the basis of parties but on the basis of antisocial personality disorders. For instance:

https://medium.com/@Elamika/the-unbearable-lightness-of-bein... and https://medium.com/@Elamika/tyranny-as-a-triumph-of-narcissi...

  If we as a species are to flourish and prosper, we need to understand that our urgent and necessary task is transcending and dismantling of our narcissism, both individual and collective.

Note the date, May 13, 2016 to 2018. Her body of work from that time predicts with extreme prescience what has come to pass. Thinking back to when she made these predictions, people called her crazy, alarmist, unprofessional, all ignored her warnings. And yet, she turned out to be 100% right, even predicting the insurrection years before J6. Even as Trump was calling for a mob to descend on Congress days before J6, people refused to believe it would happen. Yet she got it right just by being lucid about who Trump is at his core.

How did she do it? She used her professional experience to recognize Trump as a malignant narcissist, and her lived experience as a Polish national who watched the rise of authoritarianism in her country to put 2 + 2 together.

So it wasn't something that "just happened" as if it was only a matter of time before Democrats act this way. There are precise reagents needed to make it happen. Political parties are necessary but not sufficient. The cult leader is the necessary ingredient that was missing. People who knew what to look for recognized it early, called it out, predicted this would happen, and they were ignored.

We can't rewrite that history now, we have to learn the lessons we missed. "It just so happens to be the Republicans in power when the consequences of this have spiraled out of control" is not the lesson. "A two party system where one of the parties turns into an actual cult destabilizes completely" is the lesson.

People still refuse to believe J6 happened. They instead Trump got 1 trillion dollars from Qatar. That fictional version of reality is much nicer, of course.