For more than a decade, our political debate has been driven by genuine panic. Depending on who is speaking, every election cycle brings warnings of an imminent slide into fascism or communism. These fears are not baseless. When partisans manipulate congressional rules, pack courts, gerrymander districts, and weaponize state agencies, democracy genuinely suffers.
These abuses matter. They act like a chronic illness, slowly draining public trust and trapping politicians in an escalating cycle of rule-bending. We should hold leaders accountable for these illiberal power plays. At the same time, history shows that constitutional republics are remarkably tough. They have absorbed corrupt machines, factional scheming, and dirty legal tricks for centuries without collapsing overnight.
What no society can survive for long, however, is the loss of basic morality.
A system of laws does not produce human decency on its own; laws only work when they sit on an uncompromising moral floor. When that floor rots out, the best-written constitution cannot prevent a rapid descent into violence.
A Slow Grind vs. Acute Poison
Political rule-bending and moral collapse are intimately connected, but their timelines and stakes are entirely asymmetric.
Decades of procedural hardball function like a thousand shallow cuts. Every broken norm feeds partisan paranoia, convincing both sides that the other cannot be trusted to play fair. This slow decay is painful, but it remains a battle over the machinery of state power. Even in fierce partisan combat, opponents still fundamentally recognize each other as citizens.
The acute danger is that this chronic exhaustion leaves the civic body defenseless against a far deadlier pathogen: tribalism that has crossed into eliminationism.
That poison takes hold the moment a culture abandons its taboos against dehumanizing rivals and excusing political violence. When that happens, the debate ceases to be about policy or governance; it becomes an existential threat to human life.
This moral baseline is not arbitrary, nor does it require consensus on religion or personal lifestyle. It is the bedrock and original sequence of liberal democracy itself. The moral claim of the Declaration of Independence—that all individuals possess equal human worth and an unalienable right to life and liberty—preceded the Constitution by more than a decade. The mechanics of government were engineered to protect that truth, not invent it. Applauding the physical destruction of an opponent destroys the very premise that makes self-government possible.
A system of laws does not produce human decency on its own; laws only work when they sit on an uncompromising moral floor.
Policing Our Own
This asymmetry between illiberal tactics and moral decay dictates where our civic energy must be spent.
Because safe districts and hyper-partisanship heavily insulate politicians from consequences, demanding unilateral procedural restraint is largely shouting into the wind. In the arena of power politics, it is rarely obvious where self-defense ends and escalation begins.
Yet there is zero ambiguity around the boundary separating political combat from moral depravity.
While dirty political tricks inevitably provoke retaliation, immorality cannot be answered with equal immorality. The moment a culture says, “We can celebrate the murder of our enemies because they celebrated the death of ours,” it has committed moral suicide.
Fortunately, holding that moral line offers a far clearer path to political success than practicing procedural restraint. An official who unilaterally refuses to gerrymander or wield legislative hardball will likely be punished at the ballot box by their own base. But a leader who refuses to compromise basic human decency—who draws an unyielding boundary against eliminationist hate—may trigger anger from a loud fringe, while creating an opportunity to win over a far larger, exhausted majority. That majority, however, will only matter if we actually show up to back them.
Courts can police legal abuses, but basic moral taboos can only be enforced by civil society—by everyday citizens deciding which individuals and organizations they are willing to legitimize. The real crisis today is not simply that cynical politicians peddle eliminationist hatred; it is that their own supporters make excuses for them.
Too many citizens look away when their leaders dehumanize opponents, excusing the rhetoric because they like the candidate’s judges, taxes, or cultural agenda, or simply because they have been trained to vote for one party no matter what. We cannot continue this way. The line has to be drawn at the fundamental moral guardrails of liberal democracy. We must make it unmistakable to any leader: the moment you engage in or sanitize eliminationist hate, you forfeit our vote—no matter what illiberalism you are fighting against.
