Rich Lowry:

We are about to embark on what might be one of the wildest years in the history of American politics, and it may end up merely as a prelude.

If 2024 is set to be tumultuous and unpredictable, just wait until 2025 if Donald Trump wins the presidency again later this year.

His adversaries don’t have a history of accepting his victories with equanimity. Trump’s unexpected victory in 2016 launched conspiracy theories about how Russia had helped him win, catalyzed a yearslong law-enforcement investigation into him and his campaign based on those theories, and set off protests in the streets.

All that was mild, given what may yet be in the offing.

Trump’s opponents are sincerely, and to some extent understandably, alarmed by his conduct after the 2020 election and how he’s branded his political comeback as a revenge tour.

For most of them, though, saving democracy doesn’t mean upholding the rules no matter what and letting the voters decide the election and the fate of the next president. No, it means blocking Donald Trump by any means necessary, regardless of the consequences for the rule of law, democratic politics, or faith in our system of government.

In this view, democracy has only one legitimate outcome, and it doesn’t involve Donald Trump back at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

Some Democrats deserve minimal credit for distancing themselves from the Colorado and Maine decisions striking Trump from the ballot and arguing that the right way to defeat Trump is via the voting booth, although this isn’t much of a concession.

What’s already happened has put the country in an unprecedented place. It is hard to imagine what’s more extreme than one side in our politics indicting its leading opponent, creating the real prospect of jailing him in the months prior to an election, and excluding him from the ballot in select states.

Yet, if Trump wins, we have to assume that this is only a taste of things to come. It’s not as though his enemies are going to conclude that Trump was an intolerable threat as a candidate, but once he’s been elected president again, the voters have spoken and everyone should revert to politics as usual.

The Washington Post ran a long, much-discussed essay by respected foreign-policy writer Robert Kagan arguing that Trump has brought the U.S. to the brink of dictatorship. If he returns to power, it will mean “the price of opposing him becomes persecution, the loss of property and possibly the loss of freedom.”

This dire view depends on every institutional bulwark of America’s system — from the courts to the military to public opinion — surrendering to a one-term president who, if history is any guide, will get rebuked in the midterms and become a lame duck by his third year in office.

But if tyranny is where you think we are headed, what’s the appropriate response? Running anti-Trump super-PAC ads this year? Canvassing for President Biden? Going on CNN panels to sound very concerned? In other words, simply all the standard means of political organization and persuasion?

And if Trump emerges victorious, and the alleged dictatorship is underway in earnest?

Certainly, the reaction will make the pro-Hamas protests that have roiled college campuses and disrupted transportation nodes around the country look small-scale by comparison. If the republic is supposedly on the verge of falling, extra-legal means of resistance are justified.

At least some portion of the Left will convince itself that only a color revolution can save the country.

Prior to the 2016 Trump–Clinton contest, one school of Trump supporters posited that it was the “Flight 93 election” — possibly the last chance to save the country. The consequences of failure were so awful that anything was justified to win. Now, that’s the way the Left feels, except Trump won his Flight 93 election, and Joe Biden could well lose his.

If so, there will be much to fear from democracy’s self-styled defenders.