Maureen Dowd, having none of Liz Cheney being the pure-hearted defender of democracy, ended her NYT oped of 5/9/2021, regarding the Cheneys, “Trump built a movement based on lies. The Cheneys showed him how it’s done.”

As we know, Liz Cheney is one of only a few Republicans to openly renounce Donald Trump’s big lie of winning the 2020 election,

I have contended for years that corporate America staged a two-generation-long peaceful coup that gutted a more egalitarian culture to make way for their hegemony over our economy, and our government. Communism had the Communist Manifesto in 1847. The Corporate blueprint for power was loosely documented in the Powell Manifesto of 1971.

Their political agent to achieve this was the Republican Party. Naturally the more ruthless, power-hungry, and thus, self-serving Republicans carved out their own power trips and at the same time served the corporate agenda.

You remember Republican leaders like Ronald Reagan in the 1980s, Newt Gingrich in the 1990s, George W. Bush/ Dick Cheney in the first decade of the 21^st century, and Mitch McConnell and Donald Trump most recently. It benefitted Corporate America’s agenda to divide and conquer the population.

Racism and identity politics became the fulcrum for political campaigns rather than social issues. Republicans saw this kind of division as a means to capture voters,  and corporations gladly funded such efforts. Individual billionaires like the Koch brothers organized assaults on democracy for Fortune 500 corporations with regular meetings.

To season the population toward their corporate will, two generations of slow changes occurred, formulating the corporate media with for-profit news and discarding the Fairness Doctrine. The most oppressive barrage of polarizing propaganda came with Ruppert Murdoch’s launch of Fox News Channel on October 7, 1996. He has made billions pushing lies and demeaning more progressive values and the Democratic Party which disbursed them.

Then the internet brought high-profit opportunities for deep-pockets corporate and political enterprises to use to effect corporate and economic power. Facebook and Twitter helped amplify the right wing media in disbursing their message to voters.

Of course, the ruthless and unprincipled will use whatever tools are needed to enhance power and control. If such tools are not regulated, all the better.

The rest of the story is America’s short-term history of an insurrection fomented and planned on that social media, and such means and efforts loom dangerously on history’s horizon of doom for the oldest and once most-stable democracy.

In our current climate of brain-washed Fox viewers and social media users, it is entirely feasible for a ruthless, self-serving political party to win a majority in the House of Representatives in 2022 and to impeach VP Kamala Harris and/or President Joseph Biden.

It wouldn’t mean the immediate dissolution of our democratic union.

But the trajectory is clear.

It is bitter irony that the first naïve and unwary tool of corporate cultural change was Ronald Reagan who clearly demonized the major threat to corporate ascendency to power, the federal government.

Reagan’s presidential farewell address in 1989 characterized America as the “beacon of hope” for the world, the shining city on a hill, an embellishment of Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount which cited a city upon a hill.

The current trajectory seems to place our democracy more firmly on the Garbage Heap of History, one translation of Russian Bolshevik, Leon Trotsky, in 1917.