Post-election events in the US have been as depressing as expected. Two developments, in particular, suggest that American democracy is really and truly in its death throes.

On the one hand, you have the Republican party of North Carolina, which is holding an emergency lame-duck session of the state legislature to remove as much power as possible from the Governor -- because a Democract won the election.

North Carolina Republicans Try to Curtail the New Democratic Governor's Power

DURHAM, N.C.--With a Democratic governor scheduled to take the reins in Raleigh on January 1, Republicans in the North Carolina General Assembly are taking advantage of an emergency session for disaster relief to bring forward a raft of bills designed to sharply curtail the governor's power.

Among the bills introduced on Wednesday are measures that would make Cabinet appointees subject to state senate approval, remove the governor's power to appoint trustees of the University of North Carolina system and the state board of education, and eliminate other gubernatorial appointments.

So, one party has pretty clearly given up any pretense of democratic legitimacy, even in a year in which their party won pretty solidly at every level, and in which their loss of the governorship was entirely expected given the complete disaster that McCrory had been for the state.

What about the other side?

Spend a few moments over at Kos and you can see a full-throated call to overturn the election. The Hamilton Elector movement has not been fully embraced by the party establishment, but it's pretty clear that a good chunk of the base (intellectual and grassroots alike) is ready to stop a Trump presidency by any means necessary.

The Constitution lets the electoral college choose the winner. They should choose Clinton.

Conventional wisdom tells us that the electoral college requires that the person who lost the popular vote this year must nonetheless become our president. That view is an insult to our framers. It is compelled by nothing in our Constitution. It should be rejected by anyone with any understanding of our democratic traditions  -- most important, the electors themselves.

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Instead, if the electoral college is to control who becomes our president, we should take it seriously by understanding its purpose precisely. It is not meant to deny a reasonable judgment by the people. It is meant to be a circuit breaker -- just in case the people go crazy.

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But the question today is which precedent should govern today -- Tammany Hall and Bush v. Gore, or one person, one vote?

The framers left the electors free to choose. They should exercise that choice by leaving the election as the people decided it: in Clinton's favor.

Recent reports suggest that the movement have have already rounded up 20 of the 37 required faithless electors, though one can only imagine the response that would greet the first activist Electoral College in the history of the USA.

So, what do we have? One party has become nakedly authoritarian and has set out to rig the system to guarantee their own power at all costs. The other side is starting to respond in kind, rejecting the results of the election because the election happened to have been won by an offensive idiot who has nurtured a neo-fascist movement in the belief that it is really a personality cult.

Clearly, Trump should not be president, and it really does look like the only way to save this village is to destroy it. But the very fact that things have gotten here is a sign that the village had already been claimed by the Black Plague years ago.

Now, I know, a variety of voices have been claiming that Democracy in America is dead since the 60's. I have never really been a fan of those arguments, because in my opinion they all boiled down to, "powerful people have power in government, so Democracy is a lie." Well, duh.

The fact that Democracy is an arrangement between the powerful factions in society to compete in a regulated and controlled manner, as opposed to the free expression of the will of the people, is not exactly surprising. It is also a remarkable historical achievement, and one that we are now realizing is incredibly fragile. Apparently, lots of powerful people have decided that they have more to gain from abandoning democratic norms and values than they have to gain from respecting them.

That road leads to war, and that road is not very long.

We are fucked.