...and arrogance will take them down. It won't be much longer now.

Soon, not much longer...it has been too long already. I do not have faith. The damage they are doing continues and will take a generation (at least) to repair.

their destructive actions are finally being recognized now, even if most people still don't know who's pulling the strings on the actors up front. They could still win, but this was an intensely dangerous period for them as nearing victory exposed them. And it now appears that even the overall weak, uncertain, divided resistance resulting from this low level of new awareness will probably win out. After all, there are 330,000,000 of us, 200,000,000 registered to vote, and only thousands of them, and we don't like what's happening.

As for rebuilding, Germany rebuilt a nation in a generation after WWII. It won't take half that long. Our Democratic agenda from 20161 is still waiting to be fulfilled. And some things needed reworking, updating, eliminating. A lot of laws, procedures, departments that became obsolete weren't done away with because they were protected by special interests, or just by being there. Plus, they haven't been able so far to do nearly as much damage as they intend. Even the ACA is still mostly intact, badly damaged but still functioning.

What experts worry about is our standards, practices and expectations of ethical behaviors within government. Those have developed over the life of our nation. But institutions have institutional memories, and the culture they arose from is still here, in some of us anyway. As long as we elect and appoint people of good character who believe in humanist principles of justice and personal rights and that our government exists to serve the people, we'll be okay.

Until the Republican Party is reborn from ashes, that of course requires committing to electing Democrats. We're the party that believes in and works for government of, by and for the people.

As it puts them on record as supporting or opposing any particular issue. This means that opponents have less record to run against. “Gee, I wanted to do something, but it never got to a vote so I couldn’t” in a speech to one group and “I would have had to oppose such a issue, had it come to the floor” in a speech to another. That way the senator can have their cake and eat it too.

Extremists have been driving the Republican Party's agenda.

Their ideology is anti-government, anti-regulation, anti- labor rights, anti-tax, anti- women's rights, often anti-secularism, and intensely pro wealth and power accumulation and belief in the need to limit the ability of the electorate to interfere.

All their actions have been and are to those ends even though they know almost none of their constituents want it, even those who think they do. That's why Republican politicians and advocates lie almost every time they open their mouths or write articles. They can't tell the truth.

Their message is more like, "we SHOULDN'T try to do most things -- because government is bad, government is hurting you and took away the good jobs, but private unregulated power will give you good jobs and plentiful cheap healthcare."

They are trying very hard to roll back the nation to pre- New Deal days. And those more extreme want worse, such as eliminating mandatory universal education and with it most of our tax-funded school systems.

It's not so easy in a democracy to destroy institutions that have worked well for us for several decades and more, and the proven route for those is to destroy public support for them by underfunding and appointing directors who sabotage their mission and dismantle from within, such as by driving off competent bureaucrats and leaving their positions empty or filling them with incompetents. All the while telling the citizenry they're doing poorly because they're government and can't work well.

And this is all happening largely because we allowed new billionaire/centimillionaire classes to arise, from which ultraconservatives stocked the Republican Party with people who'd serve their wishes, not ours.

is being so efficient at destroying public education, the environment, consumer protections, ad infinitum