What Happened in Belfast Is What Happens to Nations That Lose the Will to Survive

PHOENIX — Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes is planning to secure a new grand jury indictment against several allies of President Donald Trump accused of participating in efforts to challenge Arizona’s 2020 presidential election results, according to a report by the Washington Examiner.

John Bolton spent years telling you that Donald Trump was a threat to American institutions. That the rule of law mattered. That classified information was sacred and the men who mishandled it were unfit for public trust.

The Roman Republic did not collapse because its legions were defeated in the field. It eroded, gradually and almost imperceptibly, from within. Sallust, writing in the generation before the Republic’s final crisis, identified the mechanism with uncommon clarity: when a civilization abandons the virtues that built it, the language through which those virtues were expressed becomes the first casualty. Words grow contested. Then they are redefined. Then they are replaced. By the time a republic wakes to what has happened, the vocabulary of self-governance has already been emptied of its meaning.