And this one ends with either democracy renewed — or democracy erased… We're now at the point where five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court have harmed us so severely that our nation is facing an oligarchic takeover, aka a constitutional crisis. Trump is ignoring the courts' orders and threatening the judges' lives so blatantly that even Chief Justice John Roberts has been moved to speak out. The history of America is the history of fits and starts of progress followed by oligarchic backlash leading to periods of pain and stagnation (except for the morbidly rich). Our first eighty years started with the American Revolution against an absolute monarch and the world's largest corporation. But the Founders' idealism was rejected by the Southern oligarchs, who saw the end of slavery as a threat to their wealth and power; they'd already turned the South into a neofascist hellscape and then launched the war against America that Abraham Lincoln won.