If the Republic is Dead, it has been dead a long time already

Barnhardt says the Republic is dead.  Let's start with that premise and say okay, it's true.

How then, did it happen?

If the Republic died, something else had to replace it?  What was that?  Could it have been Democracy?

Yes, since it was certainly not a Democracy in the beginning of the Constitution.  Only one branch was elected and it was balanced off by another co-equal House, which was the Senate.  Clearly, the Framers did not trust Democracy.  Asked what kind of government that they had just created at the Philadelphia Convention, Benjamin Franklin said "A Republic, if you can keep it."

Apparently, it did not keep for long.  Measures that should have been considered unlawful in a Republic guided by the rule of law were accepted as lawful.

Marbury v. Madison was decided in favor of judicial review.  Thus, the Supreme Court gave itself the authority to decide upon the constitutionality of a measure.  But there's nothing explicit in the Constitution that grants this power.  Some may claim that this is implied, but if it is implied, who is to decide that?  Why those who gave themselves that power, that's who.  Perhaps something's wrong with that.  It is the rule of men, not the rule of law.  It may take a man to decide something in the moment, but the law has to sort thing out legally.  A temporary expedient is not a solution.

Yet, if Marbury v. Madison is wrong, then a lot of our history is wrong.  For that occurred in the first decade of the nineteenth century.  It was less than 20 years after the adoption of the Constitution.  This may be considered one of the first signs of trouble.  If memory serves, George Washington thought the Constitution would be good for 20 years.  By George, I think he was right.

A better solution would have been to defer that to some process that could have decided it better.  While the process was being set up, the decision would have applied in the interim.  The process could have been a proposed amendment, or just an election proposition.  Or a time limit imposed upon any decision so that the political process could sort things out.

That decision led to many others, plus still other encroachments until we are at the place we are today.

For example, the Civil War was once said to have turned the United States from an "are" into an "is".  Prior to the war, when referring to the United States, it was spoken of as in the plural, as opposed to the singular.  As in --- "The United States are declaring war", rather than "The United States is declaring war".  The collective action taken was no longer accomplished by an entity that existed in the plural state, but one that had become a single entity instead.

It had changed from an association of states to a single entity which was composed of several lesser entities.  In other words, it went from a Confederacy like the European Union to what it has been since that time---a more centralized and powerful state.

The European Union is said to be weak, which may be true.  But being weak isn't necessarily bad if the individual states composing it retain their fundamental nature.  Such was the issue before the two sections in the United States.  Nothing in the Constitution gave the North the right to take the Southerner's property, which was the slaves.  But the war changed all that.

The price for freeing the slaves may have been the Republic.  It has been on the same trajectory all along.

Eventually, it has to lead somewhere as all trajectories do.  We seem to have a smidgen of a Republic with a strong Democratic component to it.   That may well lead to an complete end to the Republic and the rise of another form of government.  Perhaps a dictatorship of some kind.

The Republic isn't completely dead, but it may well be on life support.  So, I differ from Barnhardt.

In theory, at least, the Constitution can still be altered in order to change this trajectory back to a more Republican one.  For Democracies are not stable.  They always commit suicide.  If there's anything that happening now, it is that the West is committing cultural suicide.  A "con-con" can confirm that, or confirm that the Republic is not dead after all.