We’ve had a lot of opportunities to be afraid this year. Most of them don’t worry me all that much:

• COVID-19 is serious, and taking reasonable precautions against it has upended our lives and our economy, but reasonable precautions seem to be a pretty good defense;
• The economic impacts of those reasonable precautions are a bigger concern, but I’m in the camp that thinks ignoring the virus is the bigger threat;
• BLM and Antifa are largely nonviolent movements whose violent sides have been overplayed (and often incited) by agitators who seek to capitalize on any chaos they can trace to them;
• The Proud Boys and groups like them are so far outside U.S. mainstream culture right now that any long-term damage they can do seems pretty limited;
• An unbalanced Supreme Court is problematic, but the near-universal lack of courage among our national leadership right now seems likely to dampen any harmful rulings the Court might seek to impose;
• Even President Trump seems unlikely to win a second term, and if he does, it looks like he’ll face opposition majorities in both the House and Senate.

I’m certainly not about to start crowing about a return to anything like normalcy, if such a condition can be said to exist in a country that’s constantly trying to walk the line between oligarchy and mob rule. It’s clear that what was normal last year won’t be normal next year–but what was normal last year wasn’t normal ten years ago, and that wasn’t normal a decade before that, and that wasn’t normal two decades before that. And none of it was normal fifty years ago.

Because whether they were conscious of it or not, our founders conceived and dedicated a nation in a state of constant tension with itself, a nation that would be aware of its own weaknesses and striving to improve itself. The Constitutional Convention gave us a framework for a first-of-its-kind governmental system, a government that defined itself not by limiting the rights of the people it hoped to govern, but by limiting its own powers, defining (by the ratification of the Constitution in 1788) what it must do, and (by the ratification of the Bill of Rights in 1791) what it may not do. They gave us the scaffold and the tools to shape it, provided a few precedents to get us going, and wished us well.

Since then, it’s been up to us. We’ve been tested–sometimes by outside forces, sometimes by disagreements among ourselves–and each time we’ve managed to get through the trials with the scaffolding more or less intact.

And in the last half century or so, we’ve done our best to weaken the scaffolding until it seems to be nearing its load limit. From Johnson to Nixon to Reagan to Clinton to Bush to Obama to Trump, we’ve shifted away from government whose mission is to serve its people to government whose mission is to serve itself. Until it feels like a few more unprincipled presidents and senators and representatives might be all it takes to topple the whole thing.

That’s what scares me.

Not that Trump might kill our government. The Constitution is strong enough, I think, to withstand a hamfisted blowhard.

But what about the next one? What happens when somebody shows up with Trump’s disregard for precedent and process and consequences, but Obama’s oratory skills and Clinton’s charisma? A candidate who can surround themselves with ruthless patriots and charm us into making them Caesar by degrees? A candidate we don’t even identify as a threat until it’s too late?

Washington could have done it. It’s thanks to the precedent he set that few presidents since have had the opportunity to test the Constitution in such a way. And of those, none was equal to the task.

But in the win-at-all-costs political environment we’ve built for ourselves today? In the environment where moral is less important than legal, where can we spin it is a more pertinent question than should we do it? Where a catchy Tweet is more important than the good of the people?

So, yeah. That’s one thing that scares me.

Trump doesn’t appear to be a threat like I’ve outlined above. Neither does Biden.

But I won’t be dropping my guard any time soon.