Lest anyone see this as just more sour Democratic grapes, it should be remembered, as the Chicago Tribune reported from a small regiment of sources in December, that when Neil Gorsuch dared to say, in March 2017, that he found the president’s scathing attacks on the federal judiciary “disheartening” and “demoralizing,” Donald Trump reacted with an “explosion” of temper and fears that Gorsuch would not prove “loyal.”

“He’s probably going to end up being a liberal,” the great White House lummox groused in a meeting with McConnell and Speaker of the House Paul Ryan. “You never know with these guys.” Word quickly made it back to Gorsuch that Trump was incensed and threatening to withdraw his nomination and saying, according to the Tribune, “that he knew plenty of other judges who would want the job.” Our new guardian of the Constitution knew his cue and went into full grovel.

“Your address to Congress was magnificent,” Gorsuch informed the president in a handwritten letter. “And you were so kind to recognize Mrs. Scalia, remember the justice [Scalia], and mention me. My teenage daughters were cheering the TV!” He added, “The team you have assembled to assist me in the Senate is remarkable and inspiring. I see daily their love of country and our Constitution, and know it is a tribute to you and your leadership for policy is always about personnel.” Unwilling to end his effusions on even that felicitous note, Gorsuch concluded by offering, “Congratulations again on such a great start.”

Lawlessness, long tolerated, has a way of coming back on one’s own party. Democrats, ruminating upon what meat doth our Caesar feed, may be dumb, but they’re not stupid. They understand that the Gorsuch coup was another escalation, another coarsening of democracy. They get that McConnell’s silence and McCain’s pledge about not approving a Hillary nominee, period, was a clear suggestion that any Democratic president would be considered illegitimate—and that should one be elected, we can expect a four-to-eight-year Republican blockade of any Supreme Court nominees, and nominees to other vital government posts as well. Partisanship is now such that no Republican dared breathe a word of objection as Gorsuch was made to bend the knee, perhaps out of pure pique—or as a Trumpian loyalty test for any upcoming constitutional crisis.

Judging by the events of the last year—and the last 30—that crisis may soon be in the offing. The tactics formulated by the right, and eagerly adopted by Trump, have proved so successful that their opponents would be foolish to forswear them. And if Democrats still don’t happen to possess more than a knife to bring to this gunfight, they seem at least to recognize that it is a gunfight. Votes on the most important issues, such as the new tax bill, hew to strict party lines, with Democrats appearing to realize that any ranks-breaking will get them their own primary opponents and leave the party base just as infuriated as the Republican base always is with its defectors.

After all, what did Barack Obama and his advisers get from their attempts to “moderate” their stimulus package, at the nadir of the Great Recession, by carefully keeping it below $1 trillion and putting so much of it into tax cuts? Only an infamous inaugural-night supper by Republican Party leaders in the Caucus Room Brasserie, in which they pledged not so much as to entertain any and all presidential initiatives, in order to make him a failed, one-term president. Obama’s health care plan, with ideas drawn largely from the right-wing Heritage Foundation, and implemented earlier by Mitt Romney in Massachusetts, which was passed on a federal level only after the president met with Republican members of the Congress, and Democrats held 25 days of hearings on the bill, was vehemently opposed to the very end. Its passage was then followed by a form of weaponized amnesia, through which the right maintains to this day that Obamacare was a radical, left-wing idea, imposed on them without a word of debate.

To believe that any of today’s generation of politicians is likely to uphold any impartial standards is naïve to the point of absurdity.

Passage of the Affordable Care Act had already been held up, along with everything else they could filibuster, by Republican efforts to keep contesting the election of Al Franken to the Senate in 2008, thereby denying Democrats the “supermajority” they needed to push legislation through a Republican minority that was, true to its pledge, doing everything it could to deny the president a “win.” After that ended, Democrats chivalrously—or perhaps idiotically—waited for Scott Brown, a Republican elected in a 2010 special election to replace the late Ted Kennedy, to take his seat before holding the decisive Senate vote on the ACA. They were repaid by Republicans this year, who rushed their enormous tax bill through before Doug Jones, the Democrat elected in a special Alabama election over Roy Moore, could take his seat in the Senate and vote on it—a tactic used both to give a win to President Trump and to start the systematic dismantling of the American welfare state that the Republicans’ most fanatical backers have long demanded, right down to Medicare and Social Security.

All of these maneuvers and many more will likely be justified by various Republican apparatchiks, pointing to some Democratic perfidy from the time of Jim Wright, or Dan Rostenkowski, or possibly Bobby Baker. They would be better off looking to the future, when Democrats will no doubt come to ape their tactics and their excuses. Here in Trumpland, these exchanges will come to build their own momentum, diverting democracy to their own course, just as they did in the past.

There remain many professed “anti-Trumpers,” usually for purposes of brand and positioning, who are most interested in nitpicking the tactics of their fellow travelers. Prominent among these handwringers are such centrist-to-conservative New York Times columnists as David Brooks, who tells us that any and every piece of resistance to Trump and his party is off-key, unnuanced, and put forward by insular, lefty elites living in their own bubbles.

In his January 8 column, “The Decline of Anti-Trumpism,” Brooks tsked sadly that “the anti-Trump movement, of which I’m a proud member, seems to be getting dumber” and that it, too, now suffers from Trumpian “low-browism.” The proof offered for this lamentation was Michael Wolff’s salacious tale, as if that book had somehow been ordered up by the DNC or Indivisible. Brooks was right to point out, as he did, that “This isn’t just a struggle over a president. It’s a struggle over what rules we’re going to play by after Trump. Are we all going to descend permanently into the Trump standard of acceptable behavior?”

Just three days after this column appeared, Trump sandbagged a meeting with Republican and Democratic senators to devise a bipartisan immigration bill, by bringing in some of the worst anti-immigration bigots in the Congress and announcing before them all that he was for more immigrants from nice countries like Norway, and not from some “shithole countries.” In short order, all the president’s men were insisting that they had heard nothing, nothing at all; other Republicans were denying he had said anything bad or claiming that he had actually said “shithouse countries” (a befuddling distinction); and Trump himself was insisting, once again, that Democrats wanted to let murderers and drug dealers into the country to kill us all in our beds.

In one fell swoop, the president had inflicted on Americans a vulgarity that we had never before seen in our daily newspapers or heard on our newscasts and followed it up with his usual tsunami of lies, coerced perjury, and lethal smears. The sad truth of the matter is that it was years ago that one political movement in this country obliterated the “rules” Brooks is talking about, and its adherents enable Donald Trump to pull the country down daily to any level of unacceptable behavior that he—and they—desire. What the United States is immersed in now is not politics as usual but something much worse, with as venal, as vicious, and as openly racist a group of individuals as have ever controlled its government.