It is in every politician's best interest to obstruct their opponents, prevent their opponents from voting, destroy ballots, jail their enemies on made-up charges, halt investigations into themselves, pack the court that will oversee their cases with allies, etc.
"Democratic norms" are a gentlemen's agreement to not use these highly effective tactics against each other, in the mutual interest of republicanism and democracy. They are highly advantageous, but the consequences are dire.
This is why, during the Obama presidency when Republicans first started deploying them, they called it "the nuclear option". Once one side has gone nuclear, the other side must reciprocate or die.
This, more than any one election outcome, is what scares me most about our present moment. We've certainly seen malicious and undemocratic practice in the past and survived. Presidents from Nixon to Jackson have been utterly ruthless to opponents, and while Trump criticizes the press with particular zeal, he seems to achieved less actual influence than a lot of predecessors. (GWB, Nixon, and FDR all come to mind as having more actual influence over the press.)
What's more alarming is that it looks like our actual infrastructure doesn't work right and it simply took ~200 years for some of the cracks to show (or develop). The filibuster went from a rare protest or blackball to a motivator for bipartisanship to a minority veto, and then it went away. "Advise and consent" becomes a way for the legislative branch to cripple the others. Failure to appoint (and recess appointments to back it up) lets the executive cripple the judiciary and bypass the legislative. The only legal check on the executive is reserved to an increasingly partisan Congress, under rules of impeachment and pardon which have never been put to a full test. And all of that is before we touch on any of the more controversial representation, districting, and voting rights issues.
I'm not predicting national doom like some people have, but I'm definitely worried about a situation that alternates between paralytic divided governments run on recess appointments and executive orders, and united governments openly favoring their constituents in the absence of real minority-party or judicial checks.
(As for the nuclear metaphor, I can't help noticing that it seems to be about attack, rather than armament - in which case the dying part happens regardless of reciprocation...)
Isn't this a necessary action in order to preserve any semblance of norms? If no one said anything, we'd just silently drift to a new field, let alone a moved set of goalposts.
Rome survived when their political structures fell apart in the first century BC too. Does that mean you would be equally happy to live under the thumb of Nero as you would to live in the free and open democratic society of the second century BC republic?
The jury is still out on whether or not the US will survive.
The current US government is actually not all that bad in practical terms by the standards of its behaviour in the 60s and 70s, but this is mostly because it's corrupt and ineffectual. They can't even prevent their own money launderers from being jailed.
We are in the anti civil rights era. Where the position of segregation and identity politics is being sold as the answer for the outcome of the equality era.
This is not a position argued , but a position felt. Many dont like minority quotas and many dont trust white men. The diversity is our strength idea while not wrong does not come without costs.
If I told you a new norm would be secession would you accept that?
Not that they’re wrong, but the people (at least almost half of them) voted for someone who promised to break these norms. As far as I’m concerned, we signed a contract for 4 years of bull in china shop. Smart people need to be focusing on he silver lining and coming up with new, better norms and institutions that we will need when the rage winds down.