Thanks for looking at The War After the Election and your kind response.

I want to clarify something, however. The Pledge to Safeguard the Constitution is not about constitutional reform (which would obviously be a long, difficult, uphill process). Rather, it is about petitioning Congress to take back power it has ceded to the executive branch for centuries and particularly in the past several decades culminating in the Trump administration’s interpretation of the unitary executive theory. It is an attempt to create a political vehicle around which citizens and activist groups can pressure politicians to strip away presidential powers and put guardrails around others to prevent what made January 6 even POSSIBLE. I doubt the average citizen has any idea what emergency powers are available to a president (which made the potential of martial law so plausible on January 6). I know I didn’t know how extensive these emergency powers were until I began working on The Pledge Site. I tried to identify and address the most urgent and important areas of reform in the petition (ideas which are more fully developed at ThePledge.site with explanatory articles), including areas go beyond presidential emergency powers.

I don’t take credit for predicting the events – the Transition Integrity Project did that. Also, I picked up on and linked to Bryan Dijkhuizen’s very good Medium article “The US Faces an Unprecedented Stress Test of Its Democracy” which clarified the immediate danger for me and actually was my introduction to looking at what TIP was warning about.

I agree with you about how “Trump is a fool” articles proliferate on Medium and get attention over much more deserving work. For example, I notice that Bryan Dijkhuizen has pulled his article referenced above off of Medium. I don’t know why he did so, but I hope he hasn’t given up trying to break through the noise. That’s what Medium is supposed to be about – helping good voices rise above the nonsensical chatter.

Thank you for an excellent article that helped clarify just how dangerous things were on January 6. I hope it gets the attention it deserves – for your sake as a writer, and also for the country’s sake so that we wake up to how close we came to a state of emergency/martial law, and so that we begin to take the steps necessary so that it won’t happen again.

P.S. - I look forward to reading your review of “Why Democracies Fail.”