The point of a democracy is that the people rule themselves. The point of a cult is that a person rules the people.

America is called a representative democracy governed as a federal republic; if Trump wins, we will be called a cult, and we the people will have chosen to be so. In China, Russia, North Korea and many other nations the people relinquished their choice, or it was taken from them by deceit. Are we soon to join their ranks?

Locke’s social contract and liberal democracy will then be replaced by Hobbes’s sovereign authority, and a life, “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.”

"A republic, if you can keep it," said Benjamin Franklin.

But if we cannot keep it, it won't be because we couldn't; it will be because we chose not to.