Deja Vu All Over Again

I'm so afraid we're living through October, 2016 again: the favorable but wavering Democratic polls, the hope that our national nightmare will soon be over, the fear that it will never end.It's amazing how quickly the Saudis have eclipsed the Kavanaugh hearings in the headlines--and how absolutely catastrophic both stories would have been to a less catastrophic administration. It beggars the mind that the Trump and Kushner tax evasion revelations and the terrifying global warming report barely stayed in the news for more than a day. By election eve, who knows what we'll be talking about? If Trump and company have their way, the Democrat penchant for lawlessness and violence and the white male apocalypse.The big lesson that I take from the last two years is that we were never as united or forward-looking a country as forward-looking people liked to think. White high school graduates were united, no doubt, but mostly in their disdain for non-white men and women and progressives of all colors. Victories were won, of course. But Trump has exposed a racist/obscurantist/authoritarian bedrock to the American polity that me and most others of my ilk had convinced ourselves was much more crumbly than it is--and that is certain to outlast Trump and Trumpism.That whole "we" thing has turned out to be a hallucination.