The President of the United States wields great power. He (nominally) controls the bureaucracy, absolutely controls the military, and has the ability to use the “bully pulpit” to persuade the American people–at least if he is even minimally persuasive. Joe Biden is not, but he retains his other powers.

If the president is a Democrat he also has almost every social institution backing him up: major corporations, the MSM, Hollywood, academia, big tech, the K-12 system, public employees’ unions, the federal bureaucracy, the intelligence community, the FBI…everything but Fox News and kinda sorta Twitter, which is now run by a mercurial if entertaining rocket man.

Yet if the Republicans win control of the House of Representatives, and God willing, the US Senate, democracy itself will Die in Darkness. Just as it did when Trump was president and had Republican majorities in Congress.

Dead. Kaput. The end of the Republic. The president will be powerless. No more elections ever. Orange Hitler will rule.

We are assured of this by…all the institutions I mentioned above. And, of course, almost every single supposedly nonpartisan “historian” and commentator known to mankind.

You would think that my description above is hyperbole, but it isn’t. They are really saying this nonsense.

The president has given two speeches saying as much. The second ranking Democrat in the House of Representatives came out and said that a Democrat loss today would usher in Hitler himself–or his modern day equivalent. Tom Nichols, a prominent writer at The Atlantic, the nation’s oldest and most respected magazine, has been on a tear practically spitting and screaming that America is at risk. MSNBC is having an existential crisis, presumably because tonight at midnight storm troopers will be entering the building to execute the staff.

It is, to put it very mildly, perplexing. Some would go farther and suggest it is a mental breakdown, reminiscent of the behavior that 2 year-olds exhibit, or perhaps people at the end of their unfortunate dementia journey. Such as the one their chosen Maximal Leader, Joe Biden is currently on.

I have just one question for these supposedly serious people: what happens tomorrow, when the Republic still stands and their literally demented president still holds office? If democracy is in the balance, do you expect a coup? From an election?

Voting is the prelude to a coup. Yeah, got it.

How? Why? WTF do you mean? Are Republicans going to launch their F-22s (which are under control of the president) to shoot down the F-15s the president keeps threatening the American people with?

How, exactly, is democracy at stake? How will the Republic fall? By what mechanism could this possibly be the case?

And if there is none–barring some hyper-complicated, impossible to grasp conspiracy theory–then STFU.

I mean it. STFU, you jerks. You lying dog-faced pony soldiers who send the FBI after pro-life activists and parents who oppose pornography in the schools, threaten us with F-15s, and smear every political opponent.

Hyperventilating rhetoric is hardly a Democrat innovation, and it’s hardly the case that Democrats are the only ones who engage in it. Donald Trump made hyperbole his signature–it was his superpower. A little bit goes a long way, and Trump used it more than a little bit.

But compared to Democrats? He was a piker. He used his hyperbole more to diminish and disarm his opponents, and rarely to whip up his followers. And when he did, he lost quite a few of them.

There are lots of people willing to vote for Trump because overall he was a good president, but a huge chunk of his supporters would gladly choose somebody less hyperbolic. The rhetoric makes for good comedy, but it also drives away a bunch of people who like the policies but dislike the man. It would be nice to win elections without having to justify the hyperbole to one’s family.

American democracy has been fraying, in the way that it frayed in the 60’s and early 70s. Division is everywhere, and trust is low. Low for a good reason: we keep getting lied to, censored, and forced to comply with ridiculous and even destructive policies.

But a change in political power inspired by dissatisfaction is not a threat to democracy–it is an expression of it. When LBJ managed to divide the country by screwing up Vietnam, even he didn’t take potshots at the electorate and call the Republicans Nazis. And he was a profoundly bad man.

But as a man of the Senate he had a sense of shame–even LBJ–and he decided to slink away and feel sorry for himself, not threaten to blow up the Republic.

Biden–less a bad man than a sad, small, mean man–is throwing a tantrum and bizarrely threatening to become James Buchanan, who ushered in the Civil War. A president whose defense of evil and immoral policies led to the deaths of half a million Americans.

We can hope that with the non-demise of the Republic the Elite™ fever will break, but don’t count on it. Losing their grip on power is more likely to drive them farther Left, convinced that they weren’t evil and coercive enough. I hope I am wrong, because the country benefits in the long term from having sane alternatives and political competition. Democrats are destroying themselves by trying to destroy the country.

We shall see. I am more optimistic than I have been in a long time, but I fear that the peaceful uprising of the people in the voting booth will only encourage the Biden Administration to become even worse.