Proud To Be A Democrat

I am trying to be optimistic about America's ability to rise to this cultural moment, but it is hard to overlook the historical fact that its impulse to fight Nazis kicked in about three years after the rest of the world had been hard at it, and only after being attacked by an Asian country. I do not see how America can find its identity, much less avoid chaos, unless a massive citizens' resistance develops which is opposed to exploitation and impersonality on the one hand, and to jack-booted radicalism on the other. It would not be a new movement, but simply the will of the people as a genuine society strong enough to contain and dissolve all mobs. It would be based on a conception of freedom as the social expression of tolerance and on the understanding that violence and lying cannot produce anything except more violence and more lies. Social movements may not be conservative or radical in their direction, but both at once. On the Venn diagram of shortsightedness and stupidity, there is a 90% overlap between people who voted for Trump and people who right now are googling, "how to survive a nuclear war."