The ugliness, confusion and hatred of our political struggle has  penetrated the peace and rhythm of the farm, in some ways I have fled the real world, but I don’t want to hide from it. I am certain the animals pick up on our human frailties and emotions, they seem jumpy to me as well.

I felt drawn this morning to write about the presidential election. About our perhaps inflated expectations of poltics, and the way in which I personally put it into a larger context that makes it more revealing than frightening for me.

Our political system is not perfect, and that is because we, the people who constitute our political system, are not perfect. Democracy is a messy, unpredictable and sometimes frightening process.

In some ways, I think our system is working brilliantly to awaken us, reveal our problems and divisions, force us to ask not just who they are but who we are.

In other ways, it seems broken, and it shows us how we are broken as well, because this is the system we have made – greedy, aspiritual, dominated by warring men, corrupted by money, blind to the bleeding of the Mother Earth, to the plight of the animals, forgetful of the poor, the sick, and the many millions left behind in the Corporate Nation, which exists only to serve profit and loss.

They keep making promises to us, all of them, mostly promises that can’t be kept, and then we wonder why so many people feel betrayed.

Why should be be surprised that our presidential campaign reflects our own values, our own obsession with money, a false idea of security, a technological universe that promotes hatred and conflict. Just go on Facebook and try to talk to people, then turn on cable news and wonder why our leaders can no longer speak to one another?

I have no great need to make Donald  Trump or Hillary Clinton into Satans, the people I know who need to do that are broken themselves, something is damaged inside of them, anger and disconnection simmering and unhealed. They are neither inspiring or persuasive, I can’t imagine listening to them.

When I was a child, people in my family used to scream and argue about politics over the dinner table, and I hated that. But I would much prefer that to the new etiquette, in which people at the dinner table are afraid to speak about politics at all.

I can’t support Donald Trump for many reasons and Hillary Clinton, is to me, the imperfect politician, not an evil one. But I can comfortably vote for her.

I covered politics for some years, and she is a fairly typical politician in so many ways, better than some, worse than others, perhaps more competent and experienced than most. Her considerable mistakes – secrecy, paranoia, greed, willfulness – are the common mistakes and poor judgements of conventional politicians, she does not rise to the level of evil for me.

Donald Trump is a different story, not because he is Satanic, he seems much less than that to me, but because he is so familiar. He is the king of angry and displaced men, those that are left behind, and those that are terrified at the new America springing up all around them. It is very hard for anyone, let alone white men in America, to stand back and let others pass them by.

Democracies, I think, preach equality, but no democracy in human history has been able to make everyone completely equal to one another at all times, there are always winners and losers, and the measure of democracy is how gracefully the losers accept change.

I am not afraid of this election, I am fascinated by it.

It is awakening me to my love of my country, the idea of citizenship, my own inner strength and ability to reason, and my passionate belief that you cannot understand the present if you do not understand the past. In our political system, in our media, there is no past, only the bitter and angry present. I see that I do care, I want to find a way to do good.

I am not afraid of Donald Trump, or the crippled process that created him. I know Donald Trump well, I have worked for him metaphorically in many times in many different places and guises. He is no stranger to me. He is no stranger to most women either.

People who hate are beyond reason, that is the very definition of hatred. There is little point in trying. No supporter of Donald Trump has ever asked me why I can’t support him, and I have asked only one supporter of Donald Trump why he supports him. He told me it was because he has been left behind.

But we as a people seem to have lost one another, we no longer speak to one another or listen to each other. We have lost almost any sense of common ground, empathy or decency in our views of one another. There is nothing like a true dialogue.

Why is this happening?

You can blame it on the media, I suppose, or on the extreme political elements that have taken hold in the past generation. I suppose I have a wider, more elemental view.

Culturally speaking, we are having another battle of Gettysburg, another great collision of opposing points of view,  inevitable and historic – and very painful – change. This is what the Founding Fathers foresaw, and why they designed this unique system of governing, we will see soon enough just how smart they were.

I think they were plenty smart.

As a country, we are at  crossroads. When I think of the campaign personally, I don’t really think of Donald Trump himself,  he is to me, another in a line of transient demagogues who pop up every now and then to exploit the fear and hatred and people, and then flame out like some comet streaking through the sky. They are, as H.L. Mencken wrote, good at making mobs, awful at governing.

It was Mencken who cautioned us to not idealize the democratic man. “…the vast majority of men are congenitally incapable of intellectual progress. They cannot take in new ideas, and they cannot get rid of old fears. They lack the logical sense; they are unable to reason from a set of facts before them, free from emotional distraction.”

I think of Mencken when I listen to all these so-called surrogates shouting at one another on television.

Trump is a prophet risen up to tell us that we have urgent issues to face, that we have left too many people behind, that we ask nothing of people other than they get angry on Facebook, rage on blogs,  are given things by government, and learn to hate what they fear or disagree with.

The country is changing. When I think of Donald Trump, I think of the angry old  white men – and some women –  clustered in a circle around him, spitting and rolling their eyes and making their last stand for a world coming apart even as they rage and shout about Armageddon.

Right before my eyes, there is the vision and reality of a new kind of country, more diverse and female and more colored than ever before. Donald Trump has shown us – and will show us again in a week or so – that women are no longer willing to accept the efforts of men to keep them in their place, dismiss them, or take away their authority. And millions of new immigrants are not going to vanish into the mist.

My own sense is that we have been living through a kind of political coup for years, a great army mostly of older men, almost all white, seeking to seize and retain privilege and political power, keep women and people of color at bay, make it harder to vote, more difficult to organize, to  grow corporate profits, and preserve their palaces and power and control. They see themselves as a moral, sanctified movement, often marching under the flag of righteousness and God.

In our country, it seems, it is no longer enough to worship God, we must force everyone else to do the same.

They seem to me to be constantly decrying big government, even while telling me who to marry, how to die, where to go to the bathroom.

They are arrayed against a classic new kind of army, young and old, wired and tolerant, of all kinds of colors, but increasingly led by women who seem unwilling to be bullied, intimidated, harassed or trivialized into submission. Hillary Clinton seems, to me, to be a symbol of this, perhaps unwittingly, and she is no charismatic leader but an avatar of competence and steadfastness. And ironically, it is Donald Trump who made her into into the leader of a movement. Like his own followers, hers are not going to go away anytime soon.

Like Gettysburg – a battle I have read about all my life – this is a great conflict raging around us, like that conflict, it will determine how we see the soul of our country. It will remind many of us that this is the battle that reminded us that our country is precious and worth fighting for, and that goes for both sides. It will force us – everyone of us – to crawl out from behind our screens and devices – and decide where to stand.

Like Gettysburg, it will be a long and violent and bloody slog – just think of this political campaign – but ultimately, there can only be one outcome, whether is this time or next time or the one after. Change is the most powerful of all weapons, and there are people who get this and people who don’t, and they pretty much make up the ranks of the very different armies.

Robert E. Lee, a brave and thoughtful man, said he knew from the beginning he could never win the Civil War, he would only prolong it and hope for better terms.

I have to say, I do think of the old Confederacy when I watch this election, another great army led by white men, disbelieving to the very end that the cause they insisted was so noble and just could not possibly triumph over time, so thoroughly rotted from below by their defense of slavery.

This new confederacy seems rotted from the bottom as well, it seems, like the old confederacy, only able to look backwards, not forward to the future, to the new reality of the modern world. It rejects facts and science, which make it feel like a raging mob more than a movement.

It cannot possibly triumph over time, I don’t believe it can triumph in November either.

Mencken reminds us that there is nothing new in politics, it is dangerous to romanticize the “citizen.” Fear, he says, is the chief emotion for most people who vote. The demagogues, the true professors of mob psychology, are well aware of that fact, and make  fear the corner-stone of their campaigns.

It is the role of the elites in a democracy, wrote Mencken, to keep the demagogues at bay, and when they are divided or lose their moral purpose, the demagogue runs amok.

To me, Hillary Clinton’s real crime, the reasons she is hated so deeply, is her defiance. She simply refuses to submit to the idea of so many men that they must be in charge, that they are invincible, that she must tremble or crumble before them.  I think that is what drives so many of her male opponents crazy with rage.

She is no Lincoln or Robert E. Lee, but there is, to a me, a kind of heroism about her. She will not surrender, stand down, or do what is demanded of her by everyone, including so many women: show weakness or submit or step away or ever give up. She reminds me in some ways of the inarticulate and uninspiring and much-reviled Ulysses S. Grant, whose doggedness and steel won the war.

Watching these furious old white men thunder on the cable new channels, I can’t help but sense how profoundly threatened they are by the very idea of her. Her very refusal to bow to or break before her many and almost always male accusers is her greatest crime to them. She is an idea and a symbol that must be broken in order for things to stay the same. This is not a new phenomenon in our history.

Sometimes, I think, women hate this idea and are threatened by it even more than men, calling this very conventional politician a murderer and criminal, chanting for her to go to jail. By her very existence, she turns the world we know upside down, and that is precisely why it is so intense and ugly and hard-fought, right down to the wire, just like Gettysburg.

It is a 30 or 40-year war,  a struggle for the heart and identity of a nation, not simply a political campaign. It is one of the epochal struggles of the movements we call the left and the right, and it makes no sense unless one sees it in that way. Women are, by their existence,  a  gathering revolution, Trump has helped me to see this more clearly than before. Revolutions are never peaceful or pretty.

I think the same thing I think when people are stunned when their dog dies. What did they expect?

Hillary Clinton, the politician who hates politics and is not very good at it, is,  like it or not, the face of the future, and you can not ever fight the future and win. History is so clear on that point, time after time. Women are the the future, and for my money, our best shot at having one.

The angry old white men are standing, like Custer, with their pennants planted and their swords drawn, they refuse to compromise, negotiate, or surrender.  They will go down with their battle flags draped around them, shouting at fellow panelists and frustrated anchors, but they will go down nonetheless. They reek of staleness and doom. They do not get it.

My belief is that if you love democracy, and I do, it is never acceptable to fear or dismiss the will of the people. It is wiser and more powerful than we often can see.  I know of no better system in the world or one I would rather live in. Donald Trump has challenged me, not so much to understand who he is, but to understand who I am.

And I am clearer about that than I have been in the longest time.