The Republican Party, one of those institutions, has already proved itself woefully insufficient. The party’s attempts to stop Trump in the campaign were hamstrung by its craven need for his voters. And after he grabbed the nomination, the erosion of its breast-beating opposition to him started melting away immediately, and by the election the climate change was complete. There was no opposition left.

And after he won in November, the party’s lukewarm acceptance turned into a tidal wave of outright support, as Republicans mobilized to seize their main chance to enact the broad mayhem of their unpopular agenda.

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And the other institutions? Well, which ones? The electoral apparatus failed to deliver the White House to the person who got the most votes. The House and Senate are similarly afflicted by institutional imbalance, and soon the Supreme Court will fall to these distortions, too.

When I was in downtown D.C. on Saturday, the massive and glorious architecture and monuments surrounded me with a very hollow reassurance about institutions. The idea of safeguarding the democratic idea with structures seems hollow, considering who is now in charge of all these fine edifices.

But then.

But then from outside the buildings they came. We the people. Women, men, gay, straight, black, white, young, old and everything in between. They came, and they never stopped coming. The public spaces filled, and then they overflowed. And still they came. The public spaces filled to capacity to such a degree that the original parade route became beside the point. The edges of the crowd were so far away that everywhere became the middle.

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And still they came. The parade existed everywhere, flooding out into the city streets, everywhere in every direction.

And everywhere the same message: peaceful but vehement insistence that rights and democracy cannot be captured and stolen by a demagogue without a mandate.