The insurrection of January 6, 2021 was an epiphany in more ways than just a calendar holiday. The assault on the US Capitol by «stop the steal» militants appears now more than ever just one part of a detailed plan to subvert the peaceful transfer of power and American democracy. A year on, the GOP remains in the thrall of Donald Trump and appears poised to repeat the subversive playbook in the coming mid-term election and the presidential contest of 2024. One of the parties to the two-party system has, for all intents and purposes, abandoned the basic tenets of participatory democracy and chosen to embrace the populist route to minority rule. This post-democratic plan relies on voter suppression, gerrymandering and weaponized disinformation. Should these not suffice to produce victories, unfavorable results will likely be challenged and if necessary denounced as fraudulent. If Republicans should seize Congress they would control two branches of government and a majority of state legislatures and be in a good position to facilitate Donald Trump’s return to power in 2024, if necessary deploying tactics similar to those which almost worked on 2020, but with better prospects of success even with a predictable loss in the popular vote. These circumstances point to an unavoidable structural crisis of the «founding Western democracy». They have been brought about by a populist agenda fully coopted by a radicalized GOP which has embraced a charismatic demagogue. The circumstances of American democracy are also the terminus of a decade-long slide toward fundamentalism. Beginning with Reagan’s «moral majority», culture wars have increasingly sucked the oxygen from American political discourse setting the stage for successive generations of extremism leading to the current «epistemic fracture» and loss of a shared reality. The result is a deeply fractured country facing a possibly terminal crisis of representation and governance. The coming months could determine the fate of the American experiment as aspirational multicultural society.