Today's Squirrel-Hair-is-a-catastrophe-in-the-making must-read

Angelo Codevilla's piece at The Federalist. I'd been catching excerpts from it elsewhere all day, and just read it in its entirety.

It's so true. The plain fact of the matter is that real rule of law and fealty to the Constitution has been in the process of erosion for decades. It has resulted in the kind of rule by fiat that the Most Equal Comrade has been imposing since 2009. It happened because

[d]uring the twentieth century’s second half, both parties and all branches of government made a mockery of the Constitution of 1789. Today’s effective constitution is: “The president can do whatever he wants so long as one-third of the Senate will sustain his vetoes and prevent his conviction upon impeachment.”

And there's much truth to the notion that a very wide swath of post-America has had it with the snobbery involved in the mentality that says that only those of a certain pedigree are fit to draw conclusions about what post-America is about and where it goes from the present moment.

As I have shown at length elsewhere, America is now ruled by a uniformly educated class of persons that occupies the commanding heights of bureaucracy, of the judiciary, education, the media, and of large corporations, and that wields political power through the Democratic Party. Its control of access to prestige, power, privilege, and wealth exerts a gravitational pull that has made the Republican Party’s elites into its satellites.
This class’s fatal feature is its belief that ordinary Americans are a lesser intellectual and social breed. Its increasing self-absorption, its growing contempt for whoever won’t bow to it, its dependence for votes on sectors of society whose grievances it stokes, have led it to break the most basic rule of republican life: deeming its opposition illegitimate. The ruling class insists on driving down the throats of its opponents the agendas of each its constituencies and on injuring persons who stand in the way. This has spawned a Newtonian reaction, a hunger, among what may be called the “country class” for returning the favor with interest.

Okay, I'm nearly done excerpting from this please-read-it-all essay. I'll just leave you with the concluding paragraph. It's not too much of a spoiler, I don't think, because you can probably see where he was going.

Neither Obama nor Trump seem to know or care that cycles of reciprocal resentment, of insults and injuries paid back with ever more interest and ever less concern for consequences, are the natural fuel of revolutions—easy to start and soon impossible to stop. America’s founders, steeped in history as few of our contemporaries are, were acutely aware of how easily factional enmities deliver free peoples into the hands of emperors. America is already advanced in this vicious cycle. The only possible chance of returning it to republicanism lies in not taking the next turn, and in not following one imperial ruler with another.

What do you think? Shall we try to save post-America from this?