I’m with Stupid and Stupid Is Me
by Bob Schwartz
I see that today a few people were reading a post I wrote a little more than a year ago, You Can Stop Worrying About Trump Being the Republican Nominee. But You Can’t Stop Worrying.
At the time, David Duke, ex-KKK Grand Wizard, gave Trump his imprimatur, saying he was in essence “one of us.” I totally believed this would end Trump’s chances of the Republicans giving him the nomination.
I was wrong about so many things. I overestimated the Republican Party. I underestimated the haplessness of the Democratic Party establishment. I overestimated the news media. I should have known better on all those scores but as the poet/political analyst Emily Dickinson said, “Hope is the thing with feathers.”
What I wasn’t wrong about, then or now, is this:
Forget all the talk about people flocking to Trump because of their frustration and anger about political gridlock and ineffectiveness. You don’t have to take a deep dive into the research to see that tens of million Americans want to roll back progress not to the Reagan years, but to the years before civil rights and other modern principles of tolerance and equality. (My sad favorite remains the Trump supporter wearing a baseball cap saying “Make Racism Great Again!”).
These people may not be your friends, but they are your neighbors and fellow voters. Whether there are enough of them to elect a President of the United States is an open question.
That open question is answered and closed. I am stupefied. I’m with me, and I’m with stupid. And for the moment, so are we all.
Bob Schwartz 
I might be wrong but weren’t the Republicans the cause of the political gridlock during the Obama years? It would appear that party politics is ripping your country apart. As my father used to day (shaking his head)…..what a way to run a railway!
Thanks for the comment. (Big sigh) You are completely correct that partisan politics is leaving a big gap into which the country seems to be falling. But to all who know even recent American history, it was not always thus. Back in the 1970s, after Nixon had used partisan divides to split the country, his efforts to subvert democracy were thwarted by his own party. The Republicans joined the Democrats in upholding higher principles of truth, trust and law–that is, no one, whatever party or belief, is above the law. Getting back to that is still the ideal.