Judgment year has arrived: Will America pass her greatest test yet or will she fail?

Not because I consider it a banner year in the annals of my lifetime — quite the contrary. That year is now etched into the gravestones of my little sister, Suzanne, and a sister-in-law, Peg.

These two terrible losses, while almost too much to bear, were also tragically inevitable. One of them had incurable cancer, and the other extremely aggressive dementia.

None of us make it out of here alive, but both of them were honest, tough, accomplished women who should have had many, many years ahead of them to love, and be loved.

No, the reason I am sad and apprehensive to see 2023 trundle into the past, is because of what 2024 will most certainly bring. Like my departed loved ones shortly before their deaths, our Democracy is very sick and in decline, as it fights the ravages of one of the most dastardly ailments of all: hate.

Hate is being inflicted on us by a political party that can no longer accept losing, or our past and present realities as a nation. Because of their insipid, backwards thinking and gross hostility toward things as elemental as science, they have been reduced to a minority of our electorate.

MAGA Republicans are lashing out, and it is disgusting to watch. They are armed to the hilt, and frothing at the mouth.

As they reach back toward the better days when women had no rights and no vote, and slavery was stitched into the American fabric, it’s ironic and terribly sad that only the backwards Electoral College still makes them at all relevant.

Thanks to this foul “Democratic” recipe for electing our leaders, Joe Biden walloped the traitor, Trump, by more than seven million votes in 2020, but the election was still somehow close.

Only four years earlier, Hillary Clinton beat America’s greatest all-time loser badly by nearly three million votes, but somehow “lost.”

There is no damn sense in this. None. We are being forced to play a game that is already rigged against us — a game where the team with the most votes can lose.

Democrats have become far too accepting of this silly, dangerous game. I could stand to hear a helluva lot more about doing away with this stupid system.

It may in the end cost us our Democracy.

Just in the past few days alone, we have seen the leader of the Republican Party, Trump, type the most disgusting Christmas message on record when he threw a baby tantrum, before ending his reckless screed by typing he wished Democrats would “rot in hell.”

Not to be outdone, one of his chief challengers for the nomination, and a budding GOP vice presidential candidate, Nikki Haley, was asked in a CNN town hall event Wednesday what started the Civil War.

Haley has failed this easy test before during her rancid political career, so I guess it was no real surprise when she once again found it impossible to answer with the word, slavery.

Haley, of course, was once the governor of South Carolina, the state that was first to secede from the Union. South Carolina’s sole intent for their treason was, in their words, "(Because) of an increasing hostility on the part of the non-slaveholding states to the institution of slavery.”

And because it’s always worse with reprehensible people like Haley, her horrendous disregard for our nation’s original sin was completely intentional — she knows better — because she was still trying to make a bunch of butt-hurt, sore-loser racists feel better about themselves nearly 160 years after slavery was abolished.

As a white man, I am disgusted by slavery. It makes me sick to my stomach. It is America’s ugliest stain. See how easy it is to answer that question, Nikki?

There was a time not so long ago when there were, at the very least, half-decent choices for president on both sides of the political ledger. I remember thinking in 2008, that if Barack Obama wasn’t elected I could live just fine with a John McCain presidency.

I knew for sure McCain would protect our Democracy, because back then, that was the VERY LEAST we expected of a political candidate running for our highest office.

That officially ended on January 6, 2021, when one man and his party led an attempted violent overthrow of our government and tried with all their might to incinerate our votes.

There are absolutely no good choices on the Republican side for our presidency this year. Republicans now spend all their time trying to go lower, and they are damn good at it.

As 2023 ends, the repulsive Trump hopes we rot in hell, and another Republican candidate would rather we just forgot about America’s original sin altogether.

Today’s Republican Party tells us there are fine people on both sides of a KKK rally, grabbing women by their private parts is a right of privilege, denigrating disabled Americans is funny, lashing out at our war veterans as “suckers and losers”is completely patriotic … destroying our Capitol and stomping on cops is nothing but a harmless tourist visit.

This will all be back in 2024. We know who these Republicans are now. We know what they represent. We know that rather than bettering themselves and trying to evolve, they will instead be digging even deeper, always going lower.

There are no John McCains left in that party, only ill-mannered scoundrels and pathetic cowards, who cling to Jesus Christ, even if they hate everything He stood for.

In 2024, we will be fighting an opponent of this country and his henchman who will say or do anything. They are dangerous as hell. Bound by their white privilege, they somehow don’t think they are bound by laws.

We have Attorney General Merrick Garland in large part to thank for that. This all should have been over and cleaned up two years ago. Justice delayed is justice denied.

Instead we are digging our nails into our seats and holding on tight while states like Colorado and Maine show us what love of country is really about.

There will be scary polls, followed by fear and loathing by too many in my party.

There will be incessant whining that Biden is too old, while Republicans literally tell us they are coming for our Democracy and with it women’s rights, human rights, healthcare rights, voter rights, science, infrastructure, social security, Medicare, and our books and history itself.

There will be petulant babies threatening not to vote, because they can’t get everything they are screaming for. We will hug them and pat them on their little heads, begging them to turn out at the polls.

The press will run their horse race, absolutely ignorant of the fact that the first thing to go in an authoritarian government is freedom of the press.

It will be a lot to deal with, folks.

So goodbye, 2023. Now it’s onto American history’s main event.

Get ready, and remember, to quote the great Vince Lombardi: “Winning isn’t everything; it’s the only thing.”

D. Earl Stephens is the author of “Toxic Tales: A Caustic Collection of Donald J. Trump’s Very Important Letters” and finished up a 30-year career in journalism as the Managing Editor of Stars and Stripes. Follow @EarlofEnough and on his website.