Richard Hasen, an election law expert at the University of California, Irvine, law school warns that the assault on the integrity of elections — specifically the belief they are “rigged” or unfair — “is the greatest political threat this country faces.”

Looking around the globe, Tony Blair says, “if several years ago someone raised the possibility of democracy declining, I would have replied, ‘For God’s sake, don’t worry, it’ll sort itself out.’” Now, he said on the Politics WarRoom podcast, “When people say to me ‘I think Western Democracy could be seriously disrupted and undermined,’ I’m no longer dismissive.”

In America, there is no more sober-minded historian than Beschloss. He told me, pointedly, “American democracy is facing the most dangerous threats from within since the time of the Civil War.”

Princeton University’s Sean Wilentz, in an essay in Liberties Journal, writes of the “unsettling similarities” between the Trump-inspired Jan. 6 mob assault on the Capitol to overturn the presidential election and the events leading to the Southern secession causing the Civil War. He writes, “The secessionists committed treason by repudiating the democratic Union; but the Trump Republicans committed something akin to treason by repudiating democracy itself.”