The United States was designed from the ground up to prevent itself from becoming a dictatorship.  Checks and balances and a Bill of Rights were among the measures the Founders took great care to install in our Constitution.  For two centuries, those measures worked well.  America survived every nefarious attempt from within and without to centralize all power in or around one man. Under such a system, we avoided the fate of many nations that awoke one morning to find that a strong man had seized total power overnight.  In those countries, resistance proved futile, because there was no infrastructure to provide any solid basis for insuring, or restoring, democratic rule. We have such an infrastructure, but during the past few years we find that it has been severely weakened.  Much damage has been done, first by relentless attacks from the political left, but also by neglect of the average American. The weakness of our system was made glaringly obvious...(Read Full Post)