"A Republic, if you can keep it"

That's the answer to the question posed to old Ben Franklin right after the Constitution was drafted.  He was asked what kind of government had they just created, and that was his answer.

We kept it for a long time, but we are definitely losing it.

What is the cause?  What it has always been, and that is the evil that is within men.  In order to check these impulses, we had developed a culture that could check such evil.  That culture is being destroyed and replaced by one that will not support the current system, and because of this, it must fall and will fall.

It happened that way with the Romans.  The Romans had their checks and balances too.  Maybe not as systematic as ours, but they had them.  They had a check against the classes: they had tribunes and laws.  What brought it all down?  Perhaps you can blame Caesar for that, and you may be right in doing so.  Highly ambitious and capable men like the Caesars won't be satisfied with the constraints imposed upon them by such impediments such as the rule of law and checks and balances.  They will break through the constraints and destroy the safeguards of the Republic.  Such was the case during the Roman Era.  Such will also be the case in America.  Indeed, it has already happening and is continuing to happen to this very day.

In order to have a balance, somebody has to be willing to supply the check.  You might say that the check is in the mail, because the opposition has mailed it in.

We will follow the Romans unless we learn from history.  The track record for that isn't too good, though. Killing off a Caesar isn't going to work now any better than it worked then.  The thing has to be nipped in the bud at an early stage.  It is like cancer that spreads.  But we are pretty far along that path already.  The prognosis is not good.  Since the culture has changed so much, one can only dream of a better day when the culture would be the bulwark of the Republic.  This culture has probably passed the point of no return.  The coup de grace may come with the Supreme Court ruling on same sex marriage.  Same sex marriage may be the straw that will break the camel's back.  It doesn't seem like much, but it may as well be a mountain.  A house divided against itself cannot stand.

If the culture isn't too far gone, it may be restored.  Once restored, the checks and balances could be strengthened.  One that I am fond of was the tradition once employed amongst the early statesmen in the late Republic.  It was the refusal to run a campaign on one's own initiative.  One had to be "called upon" in order to serve.  It wasn't formally in the law, but it should be considered as a law because it is this very thing that goes down in a culture before all the rest goes subsequently later.  It is the cancer cell that starts to metastasize.  As cancer grows within a body, so will such a cancer grow within the body politic.  Just as that cancer destroy life, so will go the Republic when ambitious men like the Caesars are no longer are restrained by the rule of law.