Clearly it's not happening tomorrow, but eventually Democrats (and maybe even Republicans who want to uphold the constitution!) will be in the majority.

That makes the big assumption that we’ll ever have free and fair elections here again.

Demographic changes also make it much harder for the Democrats to win in the future (https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/democrats-future-crisi...).

We need to shut down immigration so we don't create an emerging Republican majority, or something. Didn't someone write a book about this

The Culture Transplant by Garett Jones

Yep. For all of these sensational headlines we're seeing recently, we need to keep in mind that we are only seeing the tip of the iceberg of what's happening, and that we are seeing exactly nothing of what's happening behind closed doors. In fact, the fiascoes may be specifically intended to keep the public's eye off the ball.

I would be very surprised to learn that there are not teams working in every state to weaken the integrity of the electoral process.

If that were the case then no dictatorship anywhere would ever get embedded. Contrary to the widespread cultural belief in the US, people everywhere like freedom and integrity in public life; they're just not as individualistic about it, because most countries were settled many centuries earlier, and there is not an ethos of pioneering based on the idea of infinite free land and resources.

The problem with dictatorship is that of first-mover advantage; once a dictatorship becomes embedded it's hard to dislodge. There's de facto control of the legal, electoral, and cultural infrastructure which the regime can use to (ostensibly) re-legitimize itself every few years, while in the meantime suppressing dissent through violence and fear. That would be very much in line with the stated goals and actions of the administration so far. And I don't mean this hyperbolically; Trump stated that he would be a dictator on day one, and while his supporters brushed this off as a joke his autocratic behavior since entering office is wholly consistent with that.

Barring abrupt reversals in the next month or two, I think this is going to become a long-term situation, and there is simply no way the US can go back to two party pendulum politics after this. It would be like getting out of hospital after a stroke or a heart attack and heading straight back to an all-you-can-eat steakhouse.

The main problem is the Democratic Party has proven itself to be absolutely useless at preventing this sort of perversion of our systems. They are too happy to rely on process, decorum and the status quo to build defenses into our systems. Democrats still pretend like it’s the late 90’s / early 00’s political climate where boring neoliberals can beat boring conservatives reliably and that’s the only defense our nation needs. During my lifetime the only persistent democratic plan is to just not lose elections ever and things will be fine. It’s frankly amazing how much awful shit conservatives are able to inflict on the country while being in the minority and how little liberals are willing do with a majority. It all feels very performative from democrats which I guess makes sense since they have mostly the same donors to appease as the conservatives do.