People who make their livings dealings with such things (well, at least some of them), know and will tell you that there is nary the first reference to political parties in either the Declaration of Independence nor the Constitution — a fact for which there are several reasons, not the least of which is the collective wisdom of folks named Jefferson and Madison and Hamilton and Adams.

In what is lesser known, but what I would maintain is not unrelated, neither is the word democracy. That’s right, the word democracy, thrown around today like a frisbee, often inappropriately and incorrectly, is to be found nowhere in either of this nation’s most famous founding documents.

The reason for the second of those things is that the United States is a constitutional republic, not a democracy, and the reason for the first should now be all too obvious — political parties eventually, inevitably, devolve into the intellectual and ethical voids of partisanship which are responsible for the unholy mess in which that constitutional republic of ours finds itself today.

If you want substantiation for the proposition that one cannot return from the dead, look no further, because if it were possible, folks named Jefferson, Madison, Hamilton and Adams would, at present, have their skeletal hands around some throats in Washington.

And Lord knows, Washington is slap dab full of folks in serious need of throttling.

Longtime followers of this column will recall that I quite often refer to Democrats as lemmings, perpetually in search of a cliff, and it appears they have once again found it in the far left liberal, oh, forgive me, the far left “progressive” wing of its party, populated primarily by socialists, would-be socialists and barely grown children who haven’t lived long enough to recognize the vacuousness that is socialism.

This is where “all the energy lies” in the Democratic Party, we are told, but if that energy produces such splendid positions as snatching private health insurance from some 150 million people or writing checks to every man, woman and child in the country, the Dems are once again cliff bound.

“Extremes to the right and left of any political dispute are always wrong,” President Eisenhower once rather sagely observed.

But as bad as the Democrats are, the Republicans-turned-Trumplicans are worse.

Their president/cult leader Donald Trump brags he could shoot someone without consequence of losing support, and that may be true, but what certainly is, is that any of the above-named Founders would much more righteously shoot Trump on sight, as he manifests the hypothetical potential authoritarian fear that so many of them harbored.

Just read the Federalist Papers. I promise that you will get more out of those long-ago writings than you will from “The Bachelorette” and “American Idol.”

Republicans were strict constructionists who believed the Constitution was sacrosanct exactly as written; Trumplicans believe the First Amendment should be ignored, allowing as it does only biased or “fake” news and that the entire news media is engaged in conspiracy against them and should rightly be seen only as the so Leninesque “enemy of the people.”

Freedom of speech? Not if it isn’t praising of Trump and consistent with his pronouncements, ever changing as they may be.

Freedom of religion? Only if it is the right one.

Having adopted Trump’s long-held view of immigration as nothing short of invasion of Fortress America by “those people,” as opposed to Lady Liberty’s invitation to the “masses, yearning to live free,” his increasingly zombie-like devotees have found it a short stretch of justification from “lock her up,” to toleration of kids in cages without diapers or clean clothes, with little food to eat, water to drink and none at all in  which to bathe.

After all, they shouldn’t have come in the first place.

Regrettably though, history reminds us that once lost, such things of enormous value are rarely regained.