In 1814, Napoleon escaped from the island of Alba where he had been exiled after the disastrous Russian campaign. The newspapers in Paris reported: “Devil escapes from Alba.” Upon the news of his escape, many former French soldiers joined him in his march on Paris. On the third day, he and his thousand comrades gathered near Paris, and newspapers proclaimed: “Viva Emperor!”

A similar story is told of our own Donald Trump, who has been called all sorts of names, most popularly “moron” and “idiot.” But he is risen now, like Napoleon, recapturing the nation, and political pilgrims on their bent knees flock to Mar-a-Lago for their homage to the conqueror.

It’s an irony of epic proportions that a politician who’d sworn to destroy America’s “liberal democracy”— our political system for over two centuries, first in frontier America and later in capitalism — is now setting out to destroy the very system that returned him to power. In spite of Trump’s open threats to destroy it, the system had fallen madly in love with its worst enemy: Its own liberal media could not have enough of him. For the last decade, Donald Trump was one news media darling all liberal Americans hated to love.

Historically, as demonstrated by our own 1776 generation, every successful revolution is recognized as legitimate and existing governments are fair game for destruction. In the American colonies, Haiti, France, Russia, China, Cuba, Korea and a few other places, the existing government was overthrown and the new revolutionary government welcomed by the world. In politics, as in capitalism, possession is the nine points of the law: You have it and they will come on bent knees to kiss your ring (or your rear end).

All governments, subject to citizen overthrow any time, exist only because they manage to exist at all — against the next revolution always around the corner (think Syria). By the same token, all existing governments are interested in self-protection, too, as every government exists only because it has not been overthrown yet. Although elections tend to prolong the calm, government is nothing but a temporary calm in the sea of constant political storm and stress between power-rich and power-hungry. That is the simplest definition of politics.

Naturally, in every society, stable or unstable, the contest between existing legitimacy and its potential destruction is fierce. As always, the law-and-order apparatus is used to keep the government in place: Law controls troublemakers and order helps the power-holder. Every institution in society is a weapon for the system: Its military, police, courts, schools and colleges, even religious rituals, exist to make sure the government’s legitimacy is upheld and potential troublemakers are rendered harmless.

For a decade, Trump was the most-openly-known troublemaker for America’s liberal democracy, who disdained the system as “deep state” and its “fake news” media as “the enemy of the people.” The ruling Democrats knew all about his desire to replace the ways of liberal democracy with something resembling the simpler, top-down imperial governing styles of the Roman, British and Nazi empires, with himself as the emperor.

In most other nations, democratic or not, such a publicly known revolutionary figure would not survive; he is too dangerous for his own good. But, America’s version of liberal democracy, especially in the Biden-Harris era, had to endure one fatal flaw: Its idealistic vision had become an addictive drug for Democrats who were too indecisive to save themselves from potential political threats like Trump. Even after the January 6 “insurrection,” Democrats did nothing to de-empower Trump. In fact, in all known modern history, aside from Trump, only Nelson Mandela threatened to destroy the ruling government and came back to win the presidential election fairly and squarely. In epic irony, Trump had openly promised to bite the hand that fed him — to death, and the master calmly proceeded to feed him with the most lavish democratic feast.

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In the game of politics, legitimacy justifies everything: The legitimate Democratic government could have effectively tamed Trump’s political ambition and prevented him from his potential destruction of liberal democracy. Democrats violated the first commandment of all ruling ideologies: First and last, thou shall survive.

How had Democrats become so stupid as to invite their own demise? Known to carry a knife to a gunfight, they had become too enamored with their own beliefs in idealized liberty and democracy to become a strong political party. They did nothing while Donald Trump openly declared his intentions to dismantle their liberal government brick by brick, department by department, and punish his political enemies piece by piece. Oblivious to such threats, ruling Democrats went their merry way to create the world’s finest democratic utopia possible (now derided as “woke culture”).

In the last half century or so, Democrats, and their neo-liberal free-marketers, also corrupted civic America by injecting poisons of Hollywood and Disney into its consumer veins, making Americans undisciplined and prone to fantasies. Blinded by their own overwrought idealism, Democrats buried their cherished liberal dreams of grand American brotherhood.

The dustbin of history is full of those who bit the dust by their own stupidity. After all, it was Democrats (in cahoots with consumer capitalism) who had spawned Trump’s bloodless revolution by their own infatuation with their archaic liberty, justice and brotherhood. They were pushed to the extreme by their own self-paralysis: Anxious to keep the DOJ politically neutral, ruling Democrats did nothing to protect their sitting president’s son charged with minor violations by the DOJ’s own Trump-favoring prosecutor. Embarrassingly, Democrats became history’s only ruling government who accused the political exiles of “persecuting” the president’s son.

This is how Democrats became history while Trump was making history.

Jon Huer, columnist for the Recorder and retired professor, lives in Greenfield and writes for posterity.