Stephan:   I have been writing about what I call The Great Schism Trend for a decade, but this trend has taken a turn I did not think we would get to. Recently I have done story after story about how the Republican Party at the state level is trying to gut democracy, keeping the form, but not the substance. Doing this through surgically targeted voter suppression and gerrymandering. I confess that a part of me feels the voters in those states have gotten what they voted for. But now there is this. At the same time as Republican-controlled states are moving to authoritarian fascism, states controlled by Democrats are going in the opposite direction; they are making voting more universal and fair. Wonderful good news. The result of all this is that if you live in a Republican-controlled state you will no longer live in a democracy, but if you live in a Democrat-controlled state democracy is not only supported but thriving. Can a nation endure when part of it is fascist and part of it is democratic? I guess we are going to find out because the U.S. government at the federal level is constipated to the point of dysfunction. The obvious thing to do would be to pass universal federal election rules that overrule all the state fascist nonsense, and that support ease of voting, and a voting environment where there is a high probability that any voter who wishes to vote can do so. But the Democrats can't seem to figure out how to do that in the face of a Republican Party that won't even talk about the issue.