20. Persuading your voters that the other side cheated starts a downward spiral. Your voters will expect you to cheat next time. Take responsibility, Republicans.

The long cheat is already well underway. It started with disenfranchising the freedmen after Reconstruction and primed the imagination for full acceptance of bald lies. We might accurately say that ‘both sides did it,’ except that it was the Democratic party that was revanchist, dishonest, cheating and violent in 1876 and now it is the Republicans who are dishonest, cheating, revanchist and violent. The Republicans in 1876 were morally exhausted and so — since it didn’t outrightly oppress white people — they let the Democrats do it in what is surely the saddest part of that sad chapter in our history.

The problem you don’t address, perhaps particular to the US, is the immoral belief in, or nakedly amoral use of, lies and deceit. Not the tyrant-wanna-be’s making use of falsehood, but that mix of a (perhaps earnest) citizen too-easy credulity with the thuggee cult of political combat.

We solve that problem and we won’t have to worry much about the rest.