Many years ago, when I was teaching the Constitution at the Air Force Academy, I was asked to give a talk on elections to a local elementary school assembly. That long-ago talk occurred on an Election Day, like today.

Well, not exactly like today after all…

I was introduced to the kids as a professor and I received a smattering of applause as the kids settled back for what they assumed would be yet another boring talk about voting. Instead, I had them get up on their feet, and urged them to jump up and down yelling “hurrah for elections.” After a bit of encouragement, they did, though most didn’t know why.

I then explained to them that for the vast majority of human history, there were no elections. For nearly all of human history, the strong ruled and the weak suffered what they must. Governments, such as they were, saw kings, pharaohs, emperors, czars and other potentates ruling from what they claimed was divine right. God, they proclaimed, had picked them to rule, and to oppose a king was to oppose God himself.

Thomas Hobbes, a philosopher who lived in the 15th century, said that without such powerful rulers, we would live in a state of nature that was, as he put it, “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” I’m thinking Hobbes must have been a real hit at cocktail parties.

I told the kids that elections were something to celebrate, to rejoice in, and to embrace warmly as a radical new way to think about government. Thomas Jefferson’s remarkable second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence states: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” To a modern audience, those words may not seem terribly sweeping, but they were, in fact, just about the most radical thought ever expressed up until 1776. The idea that people have rights, not because a king gives them to us, but rather because we were born free, with certain natural rights untainted by any monarch was truly radical.

Jefferson goes onto say that governments exist to serve the people, and not the king, as things had been for millennia. We should rejoice in that remarkable notion, I told the kids. We hold peaceful revolutions every two, four and six years in this country when was cast our ballots, and that is worth celebrating. I kind of got them jumping up and down, in celebration of elections.

The founders of our great nation got lots of things right. But there is one thing that they didn’t get quite figured out, and that is the idea of a dishonest demagogue achieving power. Hamilton and Madison both wrote in the Federalist Papers that no such person would be able to achieve high office, because the natural competition between ambitious people, as well as the powers of impeachment and the role of the Electoral College, would prevent such a person from being successful. Oops. And so, on Election Day 2022, I note that the founders were, well, way off on this one.

We are just a couple of weeks away from Donald Trump announcing his next run for the White House, and we will yet again see the Republican Party fall obsequiously and dangerously in line, supporting a person who, for the first time in national politics, declared a priori of his election, that if he didn’t win, he was cheated. The idea that a person could be so unspeakably arrogant, declaring that the voters couldn’t possibly choose someone else, so if that person won, the system was corrupt, is a new one in U.S. election history. Never mind that in that same supposedly corrupt election, dozens of other GOPers won their elections but never got around to declaring their races corrupt.

On this Election Day, the GOP is likely to have significant wins around the country on the basis of a series of lies. That includes declaring our economy is in ruins in spite of the fact that, overall, it isn’t too bad – and the nasty inflation we see is a global response to the attack on Ukraine by Russia (remember back when the GOP was anti-communist and anti-Russia? I do…).

The GOP, if they win as expected, won’t denounce any of their elections as corrupt, but many have said that if they lose, they refuse to say they will honor the will of the people. That, my dear readers, is a treacherous and ominous step on the path to tyranny. Recall, please, that many nasty and repressive countries around the globe gird their image with the word “democratic” in the name of their country. But without the accepting of free and fair elections, no democracy (and I know, we are actually a “republic,” but you take my point) can long stand.

Two years after the U.S. president declined to ever accept defeat, in spite of dozens of courts (including many Trump-appointed judges) stating there was absolutely no evidence of cheating – and in spite of multiple recounts run by Trump supporters all finding the Biden won, often by more that was first reported – we find our country in a shocking place: a majority of a major political party reject, without evidence, the fairness of an election. That continues to scare me.

Those long years ago, the kids eventually got excited about the idea of an election. I hope that they, now in their 30s, still embrace the power and the importance of free and fair elections. I worry, though, that far too many of them may have embraced the radical and fabricated view that elections are only OK if my person wins.

That, dear readers, would be another unfortunate and dangerous step away from democracy.

Hal Bidlack is a retired professor of political science and a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel who taught more than 17 years at the U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs.