Indeed it is serious. The republic is in great jeopardy.
To make matters even more serious our federal agencies have been politically weaponized and now serve as enablers for law breaking by the administration.
Congress doesn’t seem at all interested in exercising its oversight functions. The executive branch, the administrative agencies, and the courts have effectively subsumed what was previously the role of congress.
I have zero faith or confidence in the GOP to get the country back on course. The GOP makes excuses, they appease, and they enable the Democrats regardless of whether they are in power or not.
When you enable bad behavior you get more of it. We need a party that stands for something and is committed to fighting for it.
Look to the example of Rome. From a Republic to an empire then disintegration. We may not be a direct comparison, but decline into corrupt despotism, lawlessness and cultural collapse is the same. Our turn in that barrel has evidently come up. Voting our way out I don't think is a realistic option. The rot is simply too deep at the federal level as well as many state and local jurisdictions. As we have seen even if we were to ever have legit office holders the administrative state would simply refuse to cooperate and NGOs would activate to assault them from without and further paralysis. Sure we could have some Pinochet-type who could forcibly clean out the scum, but that would set a precedent that there doesn't seem to be a discipline to ultimately relax back to a fully functional Republic, still leading down the same road of dissolution as Rome.