The significance of those events which transpire in 2022 cannot be overstated. Whatever facet of the public realm in which they occur nothing less than the survival of what currently remains of our functioning democracy (however autocratic and anemic its status) is at grievous risk of its total dissolution.

In every sector of our society the forces of retrenchment, reaction, and the repeal of all that is progressive and an enlightened and liberatory agenda, is under unremitting and relentless bombardment.

Whether the particular objective is to suppress the electoral volition of minorities, delete elements of a public school curriculum that contains the horrific truths of our republic’s racist legacy, or the decimation of the indigenous populations who were residents of this continent long before our arrival, or the tragic history of our efforts as a nation to reject and exclude immigrants due to considerations of ethnicity or religious affiliations to be permitted to establish residency on our shores, the cumulative impact of these activities is accelerating the decomposition of our social cohesion and the acceleration of the strife and polarization by which we are afflicted.

In related areas of enormous concern, we are witnessing the importation into our cultural mainstream of racist tropes and virulent expressions of both anti-Semitism and anti-Islamic condemnation. So too are major segments of our fellow citizens engaged in the nihilistic behavior that rejects effective medical antidotes to the pathogen of Covid-19 in its various iterations, that due to their intransigence and deluded embrace in the name of persona liberty has caused the deaths of more than 800,000 americans since its inception in 2020.

These manifestations of self-destructiveness and their societal ramifications retard our national recovery to a salutary state of public health, and simultaneously obstruct the speed and extent to which our economy may recoup the losses it has sustained since the advent of this plague’s arrival among our populace.

However, beyond all those previously cited calamities and pathologies by which we are presently accosted none poses the mortal threat to our maintenance as a democratic polity which the malignant and pervasive hoax that our previous president has ceaselessly reiterated since his campaign to secure a second term as our commander-in-chieff was rebuffed, is the fraudulent and wholly discredited assertion that his defeat was attributable to the nefarious and illegal machinations of various elements of those officials who had supervised the 2020 electoral contest.

This delusionary claim has enthralled and mesmerized tens of millions of our citizens who as a result aver that the current occupant of the White House has been illegitimately installed, and among this coterie of our fellow Americans there are many who advocate as an antidote to “restore” the nation’s true purpose and adherence to its founding principles, a resort to violence if that is what is required to rectify this contemporary anomaly .

Thus, do they vigorously support the efforts of state legislatures to engage in the further gerrymandering of congressional districts and state and local precincts to ensure that those officials who represent them will retain their positions ad infinitum, and reject the initiatives of those in our nation who have been denied the promises which our founding fathers enunciated, and wish to redress those grievances by ensuring that those policies and programs which are adopted within the political realm are sufficiently efficacious to ameliorate those enduring injustices.

The dangers which these perspectives pose could not be more perilous to the maintenance of our democracy, for at the very epicenter of those beliefs about our republic is the sacrosanct notion that our citizenry via the ballot box shall determine our fate as a nation, and that each of us shall be afforded this constitutional prerogative, and that every such vote cast shall be duly recorded and tabulated and in concert with the votes of all others who have expressed their electoral preferences shall determine the composition of those individuals we have entrusted the crucial task of managing our public affairs.

Should that fundamental embrace of the validity of this process be compromised and as a result a significant portion of our populace becomes committed to the notion that the remedy for our current woes lies in the “therapeutic” dynamic of violence, our experiment in representative democracy which has endured for almost two and a half centuries shall be abrogated, and we shall be engulfed in a second civil war that in its form and content will bear little resemblance to the previous national conflagration, but will nonetheless irrevocably terminate our standing among those who remain functioning democratic states and plunge us into an interminable nightmare of authoritarian rule, or even more forbidding an era in which we suffer under the yoke of a governmental structure and dynamic that is a fully rendered exercise in fascism.

The response which this draconian possibility that is looming every more proximate and probable demands is the mobilization of a comprehensive campaign that enlists and involves every single element of those organizations and entities which are currently engaged in any facet of the struggle to create a nation that is transformational in its character and reflects and embodies in the vision of the strategic paradigm it advocates those realities that comprise a progressive, equitable, and liberating narrative and conceptual typology.

It is via this instrumentality and its implementation and ascendancy in this nation that we will finally become the empirical realization of the values and broader normative ethical underpinnings which those who formulated the precepts of the enlightenment so many centuries ago can acknowledge that their prescriptions for a society in which social justice is operative has at long last been called into being.