In many ways, I blame Ronald Reagan. Oh, not wholly—there are too many actors and too many roiling forces percolating through every modern society to lay anything at the feet of one person. But for all his professed “morning in America” optimism, President Reagan did profound damage to the America he loved by setting its people in opposition to their own government and its entire professional class. What came to be known as “Reaganism” sowed such mistrust of his own country’s most basic institution that “government bureaucrats” became a cliche and synonym for out-of-touch, unfeeling automatons dedicated only to self-preservation…
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So the Republican Party is fracturing into two camps. One, a distinct minority, sees Donald Trump as a dire, cancerous threat to our democracy and wants nothing so much as for him to go away, freeing the country at last from the grip of his sociopathic narcissism and cruelty. In other words, they agree on this matter, if on few others, with Democrats, its obviousness there for all who have eyes to see. The other, overwhelming majority camp has fully kowtowed to Trump’s obsessive, delusional claims of election fraud and has fully embraced him as their political and spiritual leader.…




