When I asked a friend in the north of England what people there think of our recent election, he did not hold back. 

“The chief reaction here generally is one of utter incredulity,” he wrote. “There’s a sense of bewilderment at the number of people, apart from his most rabid supporters, who could actually vote for the creature, allied to a sense of wonder at a political and legal system which could allow it to happen.” 

Donald Trump is many things most people wouldn’t want in a neighbor, co-worker or son in-law. He’s uncouth, lecherous, manipulative, egotistical, arrogant, vindictive, paranoid, humorless, bigoted, willfully ignorant, lazy, dishonest — a grifter as well as a pathological liar — and cruel.  

The delegates had spent a sweltering Philadelphia summer behind sealed doors and windows debating and drafting a constitution for what would become the United States of America. Asked what they had to show for it, Benjamin Franklin famously replied, “A republic, madam, if you can keep it.”

Americans may wonder what it felt like to be living in Italy or Germany when they were submitting to tyrants. Now we know. 

Chuck Edwards defeated Rep. Madison Cawthorn in the District 11 Republican congressional primary because of the incumbent’s bizarre and immature personal behavior.

You don’t need an invading army to destroy a democracy, as Russia is attempting to do to Ukraine.

By Martin Dyckman • Guest Columnist | Some people may still wonder how the Germany of a century ago could have spawned Adolf Hitler, World War II and the Holocaust. It was, after all, one of the best-educated and highly cultured nations in Europe, if not the world.

By Martin Dyckman • Guest Columnist | Two heart-rending articles occupied the front page of the Florida newspaper that I was reading online two Sundays ago. 

One told the stories of people who had survived the 9/11 attacks 20 years ago. The other followed a nurse through a 12-hour shift in a hospital’s intensive care ward for COVID-19 patients. Three had died the day before. More will this day. Most of her patients, including a 36-year-old mother of two, are not expected to live. An older woman codes seven times before her suffering ends. The one patient who is recovering is the only one in the ward who was vaccinated.

By Martin Dyckman • Guest Columnist | A political party that stakes its future on allowing fewer people to vote does not deserve a future. A democracy that accommodates such a party will not have a future.

That is our nation’s present crisis, 234 years after the Constitutional Convention created a government with no prescribed role for political parties.

By Martin Dyckman • Guest Columnist | During the Spanish Civil War, which the Fascists won, one of their generals said there was a “fifth column” inside Madrid that would capture the capital before any of their four advancing formations could reach the city. Ever since, the phrase has stood for any group of disloyal people aiming to subvert their own country.