As the Christmas holidays and the year end approach, I respectfully take it upon myself to recommend that thoughtful Americans reflect upon how close the United States came in recent years to roaring through and over the guardrails of its constitutional democracy like a derailed express train.

Call it the James Comey-Andrew Weissmann-Merrick Garland-Marc Elias school of fervent and illegal agitation for America as a one-party socialist state, inundated with the teeming masses of the world but governed always from the elitist left inflated with sanctimony while hyperactively dishonest and hypocritical.

The Clintons and Obamas and Bidens are severely implicated in the horrifying sequence of outrages to the Constitution that seem to have been terminated by last month’s presidential election. They knew and approved the assembly of the pastiche of anti-Trump defamations and fabrications and the representation of it as professional intelligence of Donald Trump’s contacts with the Russian government and collaboration with that government in the 2016 election, all of which was inserted into the press as the work of professional intelligence-gatherers not requiring corroboration.

The persons mentioned and their kindred spirits sanctioned the criminalization of policy and partisan differences, the launch of amphibious invasions of the homes of a former president and some of his supporters on grounds known to be spurious by those who commissioned and authorized them, and a series of rabidly partisan and unfounded impeachments and indictments.

They were parties to what appears from the decline by four million ballots cast in 2024 compared to 2020 despite the increase in the country’s population by seven million and an unprecedented effort to get out the vote last month, to have been a dubious 2020 election result. They assisted in maintaining the locked-arm solidarity of the entire national political press in treating any question of the legitimacy of the 2020 election result, which was marred by concerns about potentially harvested and unverifiable mail-in ballots, as an unpatriotic and deliberate lie.

These were the champions of oppressive wokeness, official and public lawlessness, discriminatory diversity and inclusion, the green terror, the persecution of religiously minded people and concerned parents, and the self-flagellatory nonsense about “systemic racism”  — this in the country that has made the greatest effort in history to raise up a formerly oppressed minority to complete equality. In the ineluctable genius of the American system, all of this was evoked to a practicing electorate of approximately 154 million Americans, a decisive plurality of whom have renounced all of it.

The more respectable political commentators who loaned some credibility to the unutterable nonsense that President Trump was a Russian intelligence asset or gangster who would abolish American elections, have retreated, some of them ingeniously and even stylishly, but almost none with the humility and self-rebuke that the danger and the dishonesty that their shameful partisanship, mendacity, and rank unprofessionalism, naïveté, and malice morally impel.

The country appreciates what it did in rejecting all of this and placing its trust in a man about whom it had some legitimate misgivings, and the forces of demented hostility to the returning president have effectively collapsed. Some of his enemies have shifted course with unknowable levels of sincerity, some have been struck dumb and have fallen into a merciful quietism.

The political and social atmosphere, though, is shifting every day towards moderation, increasing tolerance, and the resurrection of common sense. American public life was at a dangerous impasse only two months ago. Now optimism is in the air and there is evident relief in the world that America is emerging from a crisis of national self-consciousness.

Not all sensible individuals are suffused with confidence in the incoming regime, but all sensible people who wish America well are relieved that the crisis of a possible breakdown in constitutional government is swiftly passing. America would not have ceased to be a great power; but it could have lost any claim to being the moral leader and chief exemplar of democracy in the world.   

There was much fear of violence and skullduggery in the 2024 presidential election, but there was no violence and no serious allegations of vote-counting fraud, and the vintage Democratic effort to win a senatorial election (in Pennsylvania), by judge-shopping and seeking the acceptance of inadmissible ballots, was rejected by an appeal court and failed.

The American system, much more than any individual candidate, has triumphed again. The whole country, and the entire West, which has felt the instability created by the Biden vacuum, can celebrate that.