I was brought up to believe in “the American Way.”

My father was a political science professor and a onetime Republican candidate for state office, who was very proud of the way our system worked. As a young man, I learned about such merits of compromise with the “loyal opposition,” and how our “separation of powers” protected us from abuse of power.

I wonder what he would think of a world in which “compromise” has become a dirty word and the separation of powers is on the verge of total collapse.

Is “the American Way” a sham? The system seemed to be working, but now it isn’t. An authoritarian president is imposing his will on the country and the other two branches of government. He defies Congress and the Congress. He exploits the court system’s loopholes and deliberate pace to render it all but impotent.

He’s turned the Fourth Estate, the media, into his own personal lapdog — dependent upon him for ratings and programming content. They may criticize him, but any publicity is good publicity.

We’ve put so much trust in the system, we’ve forgotten one thing: No human system works if humans stop supporting it.  

One by one, speakers at the Democratic National Convention referred to America’s failures: racism, slavery, sweatshop labor, the scorn and abandonment of those who can’t make ends meet, the theft of land from sovereign tribes and nations.

When the U.S. violated the treaties it signed with these nations, it illustrated just how dependent human systems are upon human beings. A contract means nothing if no one enforces it.

Checks and balances mean nothing if they’re not respected.

Bye bye, boundaries

The word first word in the phrase “separation of powers” implies boundaries. Increasingly, the Republican Party has shown itself unwilling to respect boundaries between:

• Conservatism and white supremacy

• Citizens’ rights and law enforcement

• Science and quackery

• Policy positions and conspiracy theories

• Public service and personal gain.

Politics has always attracted unscrupulous types who would use it to abuse power. To empower and enrich themselves at the expense of those they’re suppose do be serving. We relied on “the system” and “the Constitution” to keep them in check.

But we were fooling ourselves. What kept them in check was an agreement among the majority of those within the system to support it.

A car is a fine machine, but without a driver to steer it or a mechanic to maintain it, it won’t get you anywhere. The same is true for a system of government: If those who participate in it aren’t willing to guide and preserve it, it’s bound to break down — no matter how good it is.

Donald Trump set the stage for this breakdown. A real estate developer who cast himself as a “builder,” he was, in fact, the exact opposite. He was a destroyer.

Politicians have channeled public frustration with gridlock and inefficiency into election victories. They’ve vowed to “shake up the system,” but they’ve never suggested dismantling it. Until Trump came along.

He’s sought to dismantle environmental protections, health-care rights, congressional oversight, strategic alliances... the list goes on and on. But he hasn’t replaced them — or even suggested replacing them — with anything.

This wouldn’t have mattered if other politicians had maintained the boundaries set up to protect the system. That’s what they did during Watergate.

They’re not doing it now.

Zero self-respect

The first sign that they wouldn’t have the character to do so came when they failed to maintain their personal boundaries against Trump.

Trump questioned Ted Cruz’s right to run for president, claiming he wasn’t a real American because of his Canadian citizenship. He insulted Cruz’s wife and made a veiled threat to “spill the beans” about her (whatever that meant). He suggested, without evidence, that the Texas senator’s father had been involved in the assassination of JFK.

You’d think that Cruz wouldn’t want anything to do with someone like that. But after initially distancing himself to Trump, he embraced him after he got elected. Political power is clearly more important to Cruz than family.

It’s more important to Lindsey Graham, the senator from South Carolina, than his (supposedly close) friendship with the late John McCain, a fellow Republican whom Trump repeatedly insulted. It’s more important than his own credibility: He’s now a regular golfing partner with the man he once called a “race-baiting, xenophobic religious bigot.”

Maybe it takes one to know one. Or put up with one. Or maybe it just takes someone with no real principles. If Cruz and Graham were the only two people to have ignored their own boundaries in their thirst for power, it would be one thing. But nearly the entire Republican Party appears to have done so.

What they’re fighting for has become less important than winning.

“Just win” is one of 12 principles Trump has used to con America. Learn about the others in Political Psychosis: How Trump Took America Hostage, and How to Take Our Power Back.

Undermining America

It’s bad enough if they’re forsaking their own principles for the sake of personal power. Or throwing their party’s stated principles (free trade, fiscal conservatism, traditional morality) under the bus. But this goes beyond either of those things.

They’re throwing the entire system — the “American Way” — under the bus for the sake of power.

In doing so, they’re not just traitors to their own oath. They’re traitors to the founders’ vision for the nation, as contained in the Declaration of Independence: the affirmation of “self-evident” truths, declaring that “all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights” including life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

It was an ideal to which they aspired but could not claim to have attained. Sure, all men were created equal, but women didn’t get the right to vote. Black Americans were oppressed and excluded from any semblance of power. A draft of the Declaration included a passage that condemned slavery; it was removed.

But at least the ideals there. At least, over the course of the decades that followed, changes were made to better reflect those ideals: the 13th, 14th and 19th Amendments chief among them.

Now, we’ve begun to forsake those ideals, led by Trump’s Republican enablers.

Abandoning our ideals

The ideals in the Declaration of Independence were, and are, worth aspiring to. These rights were worth preserving. But if we neglect to strive for them, they lose their power. Throughout our history, we’ve often ignored them — through slavery, voter suppression, misogyny, “manifest destiny,” and in many other ways. Now, though, we’re doing something worse: we’re abandoning them.

And that’s the one thing the founders knew would destroy any system designed to uphold them.

Governments, they said, were created to “secure these rights,” and that they derived their power to do so “from the consent of the governed.”

If governments ignore those rights instead, as Trump and his Republican enablers are intent upon doing, they cannot be secured. If the governed cease to value them, exchanging them for promises of power, those rights will be violated. Repeatedly and tragically.

But Trump’s promise of power is an illusion. Autocrats and would-be autocrats like Donald Trump aren’t interested in empowering their followers. They’re interested in draining their power, to maximize their own.

Trump seeks to invoke patriotism while destroying it by attacking the separation of powers. By destroying boundaries.

His followers, even those who claimed to have opposed him, have joined him in this vile endeavor. They’re not just enemies of the state, they’re enemies of the ideals upon which our nation was founded. We’ve never managed to live up to them, but that doesn’t mean we should tear them down.