King Louis XV is said to have remarked, “Après moi, le dèluge” — “After me, the flood.” He meant that once his reign ended, chaos would follow. The phrase has endured as a warning about complacency in the face of looming disaster. We cannot wait for the end of the Trump reign to secure our republic.

A deluge is a flood, the accumulation of many streams and rivers, all converging. America is now standing at the edge of its own floodplain. The streams seem small now, but they are starting to converge, and together, they threaten to converge into something far more dangerous.

We are watching, often passively, as key government institutions are hollowed out; as public health and education budgets are slashed; as the military is deployed in cities; as political rivals face “revenge prosecutions” and as the justice system bends under pressure from those who see it not as a safeguard of liberty but as a tool of retribution. We see tariffs that raise prices, the defunding of humanitarian aid and school lunch programs, the appointment of unqualified loyalists to critical posts, and the normalization of corruption and cronyism.

History tells us that democracies rarely collapse overnight. They erode, slowly, under the weight of tolerated abuses. Martin Niemoller, a German pastor who witnessed the rise of Hitler, captured this truth in his famous warning about indifference: “First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out…” Today, he might have said: first, they eliminated foreign food aid, but I was neither foreign nor hungry, so I did nothing. Then they gutted the Education Department and dictated what colleges could teach, but I was already educated, so I did nothing. Then they sent masked thugs to round up undocumented workers, but I was a citizen, so I did nothing. Then they arrested political opponents, including former government officials, and falsified charges against them, but I was too small a target, so I did nothing. Now, please excuse me, there is someone at my door.

It is the silence between each act of overreach that allows tyranny to grow.

The “frog in boiling water” metaphor remains spot-on: people will endure slow, incremental harm that they would never accept if it came all at once. The temperature is rising — politically, socially, environmentally — and still, we sit. Yet there are signs of movement. The “No Kings” marches across the country suggest that the many streams of dissent are starting to merge — progressives and moderates, students and retirees, veterans and newcomers, all demanding that we preserve our democracy. The administration’s reflexive response — labeling dissenters “un-American” or “Antifa” — reveals both fear and misunderstanding. “Antifa” is not a shadowy organization plotting violence; it’s shorthand for “anti-fascist.” The administration claims that Antifa is a real movement that dates back to the Weimar Republic in Germany. But perhaps they forget or did not know that in Weimar Germany, the original anti-fascists resisted Hitler’s rise. That history should not need to be relearned.

Prominent attorney Mark Elias said, “We are not approaching a constitutional crisis; we are in one. We are not risking authoritarianism; we are experiencing it.”

Most Americans, regardless of party, oppose the administration’s economic, social, and environmental agenda. They reject tariffs that act as hidden taxes on consumers, tax cuts tilted toward the wealthy and government interference in women’s healthcare. They reject the dismantling of climate policy and the withdrawal from international environmental commitments. Above all, they reject the corruption of the Justice Department and the assault on an independent judiciary — the cornerstone of any functioning democracy.

But rejection is not resistance. To resist, we must channel our outrage into coordinated, peaceful action. Violence will play into the hands of those eager to declare a state of emergency or claim an insurrection to consolidate power. We must not let that happen. Violence would create an excuse for even more violence. Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., and Nelson Mandela all proved that disciplined, nonviolent resistance can move mountains — and governments. Peaceful marches, local organizing, economic boycotts, even work stoppages if necessary — these are the tools of people who still believe in the rule of law and the promise of the Constitution.

King Louis XV may not have cared about what came after him. We do not have that luxury.

I am happy that we are all in this together.

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Lee Keet lives in Saranac Lake.