You do have a way with words my friend. This is key:

"If America is going to exist in thirty years, not as the global leader, those days are over and they are never coming back, but exist at all as a recognizable constitutional democracy, every single person who participated in the destruction of its institutional architecture is going to need to reckon with what they did."

I see so many people (particularly Bulwark writers) arguing that this is a chance to "build back better, with moar norms, hardened guardrails, and explicit legislation to prevent another Trump/MAGA ever arising into power.

But that strikes me as fancy and ignores the reality that what we had is not ever going to be again. There is no return, as long as there is a strain of this taint in the polity. And that ain't going to be easy to remove.

As you rightly noted, to even begin to regain any resemblance of a truly functional democracy will require a wide swath of retribution against - well to be honest - all elected Republicans (and Fetterman). They have all proven that they are cravenly following Trump, and while I hear all sorts of whispers that a mot of house and senate republicans will say they aren't on board, I just don't buy it, their fear of publicly calling out Trump and the MAGA insanity makes them fully vested in the movement.

And, since I doubt that the Democrats have the stomach for the root-and-branch cleansing and public accounting, the strain of MAGA will continue to thrive, and recur like a bad case of shingles later in life.

The lesson I hear people calling for is to have Nuremberg trials, to air it in public. But most of the people who say that are ignorant of the history. Sure, they were showy, and some of the worst of the worst Nazi's were sent to the gallows, but the reality is that far too few Nazi functionaries were tried and convicted. Throughout the 50's and 60's, Germany's government was lousy with ex-Nazis who kept their heads down, doing functional work, but never were forced to repent.

I do not see an appetite for that level of cleansing, because look how many Confederate flags still fly in the south (and elsewhere). We did a half-assed job in the aftermath of the Civil War, taking a full 100 years to pass the Civil Rights Act, and what is that I see? Oh yeah, the Roberts court is about to remove the final bricks in the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Fucking brilliant. We are fucked, and I am too old to emigrate.