That system of government given to us by the founders was ingenious: three co-equal branches with defined powers artfully designed to force cooperation and prevent any one of them from becoming dominant. In 1787, Benjamin Franklin described that government as “a republic,” but only, he warned, “if you can keep it.”

It worked. For more than two centuries it worked very well. The United States of America gave the world George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Franklin, John Adams, Lincoln, and Teddy and Franklin Roosevelt. It was a nation that fought tyranny in the war to end wars, that defeated the Nazis and Communism, that invented suburbia and mass production and created the middle class. There were significant bumps along the way, and at times it was brutally unfair and unjust, but it had managed to bumble along with dents and scratches and deep chips. Until now.

Until now. Until us.

The experiment is done. Put away the incubator, it’s failed. The “arsenal of democracy” is closed. The beacon of hope is extinguished. The question that needs to be answered is how. How did we let that happen?

The answer is more complex than navigating an unlit maze, with unexpected twists and turns that intentionally lead nowhere. It’s easy, satisfying, and woefully inaccurate to blame the end of American democracy solely on Donald Trump and Michael Pence, or on Ian Wrightman and now Arthur Hunter. But that was just the last act. The demise had begun long before they arrived onstage and took advantage of the situation.

Beginning during the administration of George Washington, Congress has been steadily ceding its constitutional powers to the executive branch, most often citing an emergency situation. Those grants of power have always been temporary, just for a brief century or two. Eventually more than 700 of these so-called special powers had been granted—and until recently only one, the right given to Franklin Roosevelt after the attack on Pearl Harbor to confine Japanese American citizens to internment camps, was repealed. In essence, under certain conditions those laws gave the executive nearly dictatorial power.

Later presidents used those special powers to shape the nation’s economy, to take us to war, even to suspend other constitutional rights. And almost always with the same rationale: These actions are necessary to protect the country from those who would do us harm.

It turned out that the people who would do us harm turned out to be us. Cartoonist Walt Kelly pointed that out in his strip Pogo almost fifty years ago, when Pogo himself observes, “We have met the enemy and he is us.” Americans blithely ignored history, focusing our attention and our budget on protecting the country from external enemies, while in fact the most successful attacks on government have always been internal. The Nazis were German. The Stalinists were Russian. The Maoists were Chinese. The Khmer Rouge were Cambodians. We overlooked the reality that America had been given the greatest of all geographic gifts, a vast landmass bordered on its north and south by two benign nations and on the east and west by vast oceans that made the nation almost impregnable. No enemy force was going to storm the beaches of Santa Monica or invade Baltimore’s fashionable Inner Harbor. We spent trillions of dollars preparing to defend the nation against an enemy that wasn’t coming. Our military budget was greater than the nine countries that followed us—combined. Our enemies certainly could inflict death and damage from a long distance, but they could never gain control of the country.