Looking at the multiple indictments against Trump, culminating in the former president's humiliating arrest procedure in Fulton County, Georgia on August 24, some of us may feel dismayed by these highhanded actions. Both the Democrats and their allies in the Deep State and media are working, or so it seems, to create a one-party dictatorship, one in which the opposition party functions as an ineffectual check on the wielders of power.

Democrats are trying to prevent Republicans from ever again challenging elections in which the Dems can have the upper hand and roll out their bag of tricks undisturbed. Trump and his advisors have been indicted for racketeering and other criminal offenses for questioning the legitimacy of the 2020 election. Such a harsh response did not occur when Democrats contested past Republican victories. Now morality is being reduced, as Socrates's interlocutor Thrasymachus put it, to the "advantage of the strong."

The, for me, most intriguing question is why the Left is moving right now to crush its opposition. It is no mystery that aggressive powers throughout history will pounce on what they crave. But the big question is why they act at one time rather than another. The Hellenistic historian Polybius distinguished long range causes, like the Roman striving for empire, from occasions for particular wars, e.g., the circumstances leading up to the struggles between Rome and Carthage. In the present case we might ask why the Left is going after total power at this point in time.

The Republican media offer some of the more obvious reasons. Those in power are diverting public attention from the crimes of the Biden family, by making the story about Trump and his multiple indictments. Thus, the Democratic Party, with the help of a weaponized Department of Justice, has moved against Biden's likely opponent in the presidential race next year. Merrick Garland and his collaborators hope to make sure that Trump will be so entangled in criminal proceedings that he won't be able to compete effectively against a mentally debilitated president, whom the Left is now shielding from attack. Both the trials and the negative publicity generated by the media for Biden's opponent will allow the incumbent to remain full-time in his basement while his handlers win re-election for this plainly unfit officeholder.