In the west, to call a public official a tyrant is to make the case for violent overthrow, either by coup or assassination.

If you make the case that so-and-so is a tyrant, but cannot specify unique acts that would constitute tyrannical action, then you are engaging in revolutionary rhetoric that most people, a generation ago, would have considered criminal and wantonly insurrectionist. Vague accusations of tyranny, or accusations of tyranny that could just as easily be made against your favored politician, are inherently anti-democratic.

This is where current ideological debate now is. The two partisan sides consider the other to be tyrannical and fascist or dictatorial.

As usual, both sides make a plausible case. But each side, in recognizing only the case against the other, while not recognizing the plausibility against its own side, dooms the civil order to chaos.

I am old now, and it might be exciting to die witnessing the end of our civilization. But why younger folks — or folks with children and grandchildren — would go along with this nonsense is a bit harder to understand. I take it they have been bamboozled by a psy-op, a Big Lie that would make Goebbels proud.

Perhaps, even, their bamboozlement is the result of the infamous Operation Paperclip in which the masters of the Big Lie were allowed access to and power within the deepest burrows of the American Deep State, in effect taking over American “intelligence”!

That would be droll. One of the few verities of our age is that all sides see the Third Reich as the greatest of all political evils. But wouldn’t it be a sort of ghastly irony were the current rise of anti-democratic tribalism to have been orchestrated by the very thing that all say they despise?