Trump Has Done Us a Favor: He’s Reminded Us of the Values BOTH the (Better and Saner Parts) of the American Right and Left Share

Trump has done us a favor.  He has reminded anyone patriotic on the left and right — that has even part of their brain working — that we “enemies” share common ground. Trump did this by relentlessly spewing his sham huckster version of a bleak worldview rooted in white nationalism, authoritarianism, hatred of ethnic variety and religious difference. And Trump seems to just love authoritarian dictator types. Trump shows more public liking for journalist-murdering Putin, terror-sponsoring Muslim-extremist Saudi princes and the anti-Semite Catholic-fundamentalist white nationalists in power in Poland than for pro-democracy pluralists such as Germany’s Angela Merkel and France’s Emmanuel Macron. He berates journalists yet coddles dictators who share his fear of a free and open press.

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Here are just some of the best of our American bedrock beliefs many of us on the moderate sane Left and moderate sane Right share:

• an appreciation for what the modern world has achieved from antibiotics to women having a right to work
• an optimistic vision of what could lie before us if we use our brains well for everything from new energy tech to education
• a commitment to democratic truths as the basis of the free and open lives we want mirrored by a free and open press
• a belief that ethnic diversity and religious tolerance are things to defend rather than to be feared