“Welcome to the American oligarchy,” Roger Kimball writes at American Greatness.

Preparation for the new type of regime, he observes, is being done by the military:

Why are there some 21,000 troops and oodles of razor wire in Washington D.C.?

Really, it is an amazing, not to say an ominous, spectacle.

What excuse for it does this type of ruler give the nation?

The ostensible reason for turning the capital of the United States into an armed camp is to protect the mostly virtual inauguration of China’s Big Guy, Joe Biden, against the onslaught of all those “right-wing extremists,” “white supremacists,” etc. that the magical magus Donald Trump is mobilizing through secret “dog whistles” and other shamanistic practices.

As always when a tyranny puts on a show of its might, it claims that it is acting only out of necessity. As always, the necessity is a fiction.

The trouble is, all those “right-wing extremists,” like President Trump’s supposed “incitement” of the crowd at his “Save America” rally on January 6, are a figment of Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer’s addled imaginations. Yes, that meme is assiduously, not to say preposterously, circulated and amplified by the media, social and anti-social alike. But those threatening hordes do not exist.

Just so, the violent mob scene at the Capitol on January 6 was not an “insurrection” or an act of “domestic terrorism” but rather … a political protest that “got out of hand.”

Here’s something else that has got out of hand: the American political order.

Many people, myself included, have been quoting Benjamin Franklin’s response to an inquisitive citizen upon the conclusion of the proceedings of the Constitutional Convention in 1787.

“What sort of government have you given us, Dr. Franklin?”

“A republic, madam, if you can keep it,” was Franklin’s reply.

Well, that’s all over now. Welcome to the American oligarchy.

THE FREE REPUBLIC OF AMERICA IS OVER AND GONE.

The Left has been promising for years to “fundamentally transform,” this country, and now it has done so.

The transformation was accomplished with the election of 2020.

As the years go by, historians, if the censors allow them access to the documents and give them leave to publish their findings, will count the 2016 presidential election as the last fair and open democratic election.

Beginning with the election of 2020, the game was rigged.

I know, I know, we are not supposed to say that, and Twitter, Forbes, Facebook, and other woke guardians of the status quo will frown upon the suggestion.

But every honest person knows that the 2020 election was rigged.

The statistician William M. Briggs has a handy round-up of the evidence. He also makes the commonsense observation, “If a party cheats, and is in charge of investigating accusations of cheating, and if the media calls the cheating a conspiracy theory, and if the rulers move to expel those who question the cheating, as has already happened, then that party will win by virtue of its power.”

That, as he goes on to observe, “is the way power works.”

An evil chance helped the long-striving would-be transformers to succeed:

The forces that rigged the 2020 election had tried before. Hitherto, their efforts had met with only limited success. But a perfect storm of forces conspired to make 2020 the first oligarchic installation of a president.

The evil chance came in the form of a contagious sickness, the Covid-19 virus. Government everywhere, in universal accord, turned an epidemic into a panic, and the panic into an urgency so pressing that it required an abrogation of law.

It would not have happened, I think, absent the panic over the Chinese virus. But that panic, folded in a lover’s embrace by the democratic establishment, was not only a splendid pretext to clamp down on civil liberties, it also provided an inarguable excuse to alter the rules for elections in several key states.

Well, “inarguable” is not quite the right word. There could have been plenty of arguments, and many lawsuits, against the way the executive branch in many states usurped the constitutionally guaranteed prerogative of state legislatures to set the election rules when they intervened to allow massive mail-in voting. But the Trump Administration, though foreseeing and complaining about the interventions, did too little too late to make a difference.

There has been “an unaccountable administrative state for many years” directing and implementing policy, regardless of which party is in power. Through all that time, the continuing existence of the free republic of America has been to a large extent illusory.

The illusion has been possible because …

 … the people do have a voice, but it is a voice that is everywhere pressured, cajoled, shaped, and bullied. They have a choice, but only among a roster of approved candidates.

The central fact to appreciate about Donald Trump is that he was elected without the permission, and over the incredulous objections, of the woke oligarchy that [now openly] governs us.

Representatives of that power tried for four years to destroy Donald Trump. The first mention of impeachment came mere minutes after his inauguration, an event that was met not only by a widespread Democratic boycott and hysterical claims by Nancy Pelosi and others that the election had been hijacked, but also by riots in Washington, D.C. that saw at least six policemen injured, numerous cars torched, and other property destroyed.

Kimball fully appreciates the good that President Trump has done for America:

Donald Trump’s accomplishments as president have been nothing less than stunning. (Here’s a nice summary by a spokesman for the administration.) Trump was, and is, a rude force of nature. He accomplished an immense amount. He lacked one thing. Some say it is self-discipline or patience. I agree with my friend who suggested that Trump’s critical flaw was a deficit in guile.

Yes. President Trump trusted too easily and was betrayed over and over again.

Trump seems never to have discerned what a viper’s nest our politics has become for anyone who is not a paid-up member of The Club [of oligarchs in both political parties].

But Kimball, despite his finding that “the transformation of the United States of America from a republic into an oligarchy” was long in the making and decisive in its recent consummation, seems to think it is temporary. He does not say that the oligarchy will go and the free republic return, but implies it with a prediction that remorse will set in among the oligarchs:

Someday—maybe someday soon—this witches’ sabbath, this festival of scapegoating, and what George Orwell called the “hideous ecstasy” of hate will be at an end. The orgy will end one day and people will be aghast, some will be ashamed, of what they did to the president of the United States and people who supported him …

We think it highly unlikely that the oligarchs will regret anything they are doing to gain power, exact vengeance, and vent their resentment, spite, malice, contempt and fury on Donald Trump.

And on his tens of millions of devoted followers.

They are taking power as the choice of a minority of voters and plainly do not care to win the majority over. It is the tyrants’ pleasure to force those who hate them to obey them.