This US election feels like a referendum on American democracy

Republican presidential nominee former President Donald Trump dances at a campaign event on October 15, in Atlanta, where he swayed to music for 39 minutes, instead of taking audience questions. AP

In a mere three weeks, the American constitutional system will face its greatest test since the Civil War. The depressions of the late 19th century and 1930s, the two world wars, and the Watergate scandal never put the constitutional order on the ballot. But on November 5, American voters are being asked for what amounts to a yes or no verdict on a democratic future.

What the Republican Party is offering under Donald Trump – but hardly restricted to him – effectively pits a party that remains committed to the constitutional system against one whose leader is on record as planning to dispense with it. America's Grand Old Party has become so extreme it is promoting candidates far beyond what would ever have been considered remotely acceptable.

Mr Trump is the most obvious and threatening, because he stands a good chance of being reelected president. But he is not the man he was in 2016 or even 2020. He is showing marked signs of decline, increasingly resembling US President Joe Biden in lapsing into incoherence and senior moments. He recently spent almost 40 minutes at a rally swaying silently to golden oldies instead of continuing to answer questions.

In 2016, most voters regarded Mr Trump as a successful businessman (mainly because of his stint on the American TV show The Apprentice) given to eccentric, politically incorrect outbursts many considered refreshing. In 2024, most voters know that Mr Trump's presidency was a chaotic mess and that he is now promising the very kind of misrule the US Constitution was designed to prevent.

He has spoken of "ending" crime, which is on the decline in most areas, by unleashing the police without any restrictions or restraints for "one rough hour".

He is still vilifying migrants, claiming they are killers and "animals” who are “destroying" the country and is threatening an unprecedented mass deportation of millions that he admits will be "bloody." Mr Trump justifies this with absurd allegations such as legal Haitian immigrants eating pet cats and dogs, and vows to therefore remove their protected status.

But, he says, these millions of migrants are hardly the biggest problem. That would be "the enemy within," which he identifies as "crazy leftists," which he says should be dealt with "by the National Guard or even the military." As an example of who he is talking about, he specifies the liberal California representative Adam Schiff and has vowed to prosecute, along others, members of the House select committee that held hearings into the January 6 riot that he instigated to try to stay in power despite losing the 2020 election.

Reports say that on January 6, when Mr Trump was told that his vice president, Mike Pence, was in mortal danger from a mob chanting that he should be hanged and had erected a gallows outside of Congress, the former president replied blandly: "So what?" He has repeatedly promised to pardon all those convicted of attacking Congress and police officers in that unprecedented insurrection.

His attitude towards elections is summed up in another recently revealed statement: "it doesn't matter if you lose an election, you still have to fight like hell" presumably to stay in power. And he has been laying the groundwork to reject another election defeat.

Many Trump voters don't take these threats seriously, and are more afraid of the "woke Democrats" than Mr Trump's promised violent authoritarianism. But there is no reason to think that he's play-acting. After his 2016 victory, he did his best to live up to campaign promises, including a "Muslim travel ban," restricting entry from a series of largely Muslim-majority countries. Of course he has promised to reinstate that policy immediately.

Voters also know that he is now a convicted felon, and civilly liable for sexual abuse, defamation and serial tax fraud. None of it seems to matter.

Republican extremism is hardly restricted to Mr Trump. Its worst example is the candidate for North Carolina governor, current Lieutenant Governor Mark Robinson.

Mr Robinson has been revealed – although he denies this – to have made numerous bizarre and incendiary postings online. He described himself as "a black Nazi," and recommended Adolf Hitler's memoir Mein Kampf as excellent reading material.

Mr Trump lauded Mr Robinson, one of the most prominent black Republicans, as "Martin Luther King Jr on steroids". He expressed astonishment at the nauseated look on Mr Robinson's face. We now know that Mr Robinson regards the civil rights icon as "a commie" and derided him using an incredibly offensive epithet for African Americans.

Mr Robinson was already on the record with a series of staggeringly vulgar extreme positions, including musing in a church sermon that "some folks just need killing."

The Republican Party has stopped lauding Mr Robinson and Mr Trump failed to mention him at a recent North Carolina rally. But the party has done nothing to repudiate him. Apparently this iteration of the Republican Party is content to field such candidates if they stand a chance of possibly winning. Democrats do not tolerate anything analogous and they replaced the visibly ageing Mr Biden.

Mr Robinson is the most extreme example, and Mr Trump is the most threatening, but around the country the Republican Party is being represented by candidates fully in tune with both of them. Meanwhile, traditional conservatives like former Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney find themselves politically exiled by Mr Trump, while stalwarts like Dick Cheney and his daughter Liz have endorsed the democratic candidate, Kamala Harris.

Americans are being offered a chance to either reaffirm or repudiate the fundamental political ethos of the country. It is terrifying that so many of them are either supportive of Mr Trump's overt promises of an experiment in American fascism or are so naively confident that he doesn't mean what he says, or won't be allowed by others to exercise his authority if he wins, that they will probably either return him to the White House or deliver him a narrow defeat.

Either way, the American system is facing its most severe threat since the Civil War. The Republican Party may never regain its constitutional or even fundamentally rational character. Win or lose in November, its shocking decline into extremism, with litmus tests of ritual dishonesty and the willingness to embrace the likes of a self-described "black Nazi," could well mean the venerable Republican Party is in its final stages, at least as a respectable or even viable, American political institution.