What were we thinking as a nation when we elected someone like Donald Trump to lead our country? What should we learn from it?

In order to do that, it’s critical to try to comprehend why it happened.

The rest of the world has watched in bewilderment and some horror as treaties were canceled, alliances were strained, and dictators were admired.

Many of us were in shock, stunned by the anger, the cruelty, the corruption, the perversion of traditions.

I, for one, never saw it coming. My response was to occupy myself with good deeds, rather than hate and argue.

It will take some talking, thinking, and listening, things few Americans are good at any more.

My perspective is that the Trump Era is coming to an end. I know many of the people reading this don’t quite believe that, and are almost afraid to believe it. But it is upon us now.

The future will be messy and disturbing, as the past four years have been, but the end of the Trump era is also becoming inevitable.

Over the next few months, people will struggle out of shock, assess the damage, try to build a better future.

Joe Biden’s numbers are so good and so consistent, it’s almost getting boring. I don’t wish to be repeating myself.

Today, on the last day of the constipated and purposefully bland confirmation hearings for President Trump’s Supreme Court nominee, Amy Coney Barrett,  the hearings have produced nothing that seems likely to affect the election.

One thing Trump and the country have accomplished is to raise many millions of dollars for Joe Biden and Senate Democratic candidates. Women are already preparing to continue their struggle for equality and freedom.  And they are angrier than I have ever seen or known them.

I see them as an onrushing train, the old white men can run or stay on the track.

Among many foolish moves by Trump lately, one is the rush to confirm Judge Barrett before the election because he thought she might protect him from the election.

Once she’s confirmed, conservatives will have even less reason to brave the virus and long lines to go and vote for someone many of them are tired of.

Trump’s contempt for women was one of his worst mistakes, and they will be a long time forgiving his replacing Ruth Bader Ginsburg with a judge who has so little regard for the work she did.

The women are taking names and writing checks.

Trump has not squelched the women’s revolution. That will not happen, no matter who gets to the Supreme Court. He has pumped blood, energy, and commitment into it.

The respected polling site FiveThirtyEight reports today that Trump is running out of time. Biden leads by double digits in national polls, and state polling is only slightly closer. Biden’s lead is so large that reliably red states like Georgia might now go blue.

FiveThirty Eight simulates the election 40,000 times every day to see who wins most often, based on polling and other data. Their sample of 100 outcomes gives a good idea of the range of scenarios their model thinks is possible.

In that model today, Biden wins 87 out of 100 times. Trump wins 13 out of 100 times.

There is not much value for me in taking him or his desperately rally tour too seriously, or to get excited by his many lies or conspiracy theories. Trump has been making people sick metaphorically for some time, now he has the power to make them literally sick, and he thinks this makes him strong.

He has numbed the whole country. Watching Trump, I feel dopey, like one of those big bumblebees numbed by the cold and asleep on a plant. I just want to take a walk on the beach.

It is painful for me to watch a human being disintegrate in that way. It’s kind of ghoulish. And even I know all of his lines by now. Hilary and Barack are not going to jail, Mr. President, neither is Hunter Biden. Your most precious goal has failed.

Trump has not only destroyed civility in government, he presides over the most arrogant, inept, and out-of-touch political campaign in modern history.

What we were thinking?

The Trump Era is coming to a close, and I have yet to fully understand it. I’m edging closer. It will take some time. Thanks for exploring this with me, your comments have been more helpful than you know.

One thing I am learning is that we grossly underestimated the impact globalization would have on the country or appreciate the damage it was doing.

Trump, of all people, did see it. He rode this disconnection into the White House.

Even some of his loyal followers are beginning to understand the difference between distraction and demolition. We are all in trauma. We need some normalcy.

We have also grossly underestimated the corrosive impact of social media on truth, fact, perspective.

We didn’t foresee the ways in which disparate social and political groups online create their own reality, promote hatred and conspiracy,  no longer listen to anyone else or join in the common dialogue so essential to a democracy.

There is little of what the sociologists call “equality of condition,” in the United States today. That has a lot to do with bitter partisanship, economics, alienation, and the election of Donald Trump.

In his new book  The Tyranny Of Merit: What’s Become Of The Common Good,  Harvard political philosopher Michael Sandel writes that four decades of market-driven globalization has brought inequalities of income and wealth so pronounced that they lead Americans into very different and separate ways of life.

Public spaces that gather people across class, race, ethnicity, and faith are few and far between in contemporary America. Instead, people go online and find ways to talk to one another and screen out everyone else.

People who are wealthy and those of modest means rarely encounter one another in the course of daily life.

We live and work and shop and play in different places, our children go to different schools, we label ourselves red or blue, and see everyone else as an enemy, not a civic partner.

Mandel argues that when the meritocratic sorting machine has done its work, those on top find it hard to resist the idea that they deserve their success and those on the bottom deserve their struggles.

This is how elitism happens.

And since most people hate being judged or looked down on, it is also how elitism makes a Trump possible. The people on the bottom get angry. There is nothing in this experiment for them.

There is plenty of blame to go around in a mess as big as this one.

This separation, says Mandel,  feeds a politics so poisonous and partisanship so intense that many now regard marriage across party and ideological lines as more problematic than marrying outside of the faith.

Small wonder that we are strangers from one another.

It follows that we have lost the ability to reason together about large public questions, or even to speak with one another, let alone listen.

Democracy when it works is a shared and common enterprise, not a war between red people and blue people.

The big idea behind America and its revolution was that our country operated on a merit system, open to all. There was this exciting and empowering idea that we can, through work and faith, and God’s grace, raise ourselves up, generation after generation.

Both political parties supported voting rights outside of the South. Now, Republicans openly and brazenly support voting suppression wherever they can.

This promise of individual freedom and opportunity is the most exhilarating idea to come out of America. Our fate is in our own hands. All we have to do is try, and if we try, we can all make it.

But this new notion of opportunity means getting something we are due, not something we are lucky to have. This new reality, says Mandel, collided head-on with the obligations of a democracy, which is in all aspects an equal enterprise.

When 40 percent of the country’s wealth ends up in the hands of a handful of people, then achieving equality of condition becomes a cruel joke.

The Stanford Center on Poverty and Inequality reports that over the past 30 years, wage inequality in the United States has increased substantially, with the overall level now approaching the extreme level that prevailed prior to the Great Depression.

In 1965, CEOs made 24 times more than the average production worker. In 2009, they made 185 times more. In 2020, it is expected to be much higher than that. Only college graduates have experienced growth in median weekly earnings since 1979.

When politicians talk about how the country is doing, they talk about employment or the stock market. That is not the world of ordinary people. They never talk about how people are living, or whether people are free to improve their lives.

If democracy is simply economic,  as it is under President Trump, if all that matters is a booming economy and rising stock market, then there is no longer any moral bond between citizens.

There are successful people and failed people, and we lose the very thing that held us together.

One of the fascinating things about Trump is that he persuaded so many working people that he is the solution to their problems rather than their cause. Only a true demagogue could pull that off.

He was – is – campaigning on grievance, not reality. Demagogues rarely last long. They can arouse, but they can’t govern.

Trump’s many promises are now just cake.

Let’s go get the people who are screwing you, he promised, masking the fact that he was one of them.

Without this deepening separation and isolation in our culture, he would never have had had a chance to win.

This is what the economists call a consumerist conception of democracy.

If the Gross National Product is high and employment is low, then we have accomplished our goals, or so we are told. Everything must be good. The administration is successful.

Trump has never been known as a fighter for little people, let alone a messenger from God. He laid bare the emptiness and hypocrisy of much of Christianity.

People who don’t make it are lazy, stupid, or without drive. We succeeded, why didn’t they?

It doesn’t matter that more than half of the country’s wages are so low that they can barely keep up, let alone advance.

A generation ago, parents hoped for a better life for their children. Polls and surveys today find that parents don’t expect their children to have a better life than they have.

That is fuel for a demagogue.

I am not a socialist, but I wonder at how the wealthy and powerful have turned the very idea of socialism into heresy, even treason.

Candidates for national office are constantly prevailed upon to deny they are socialists in any way, even though socialism would at least partially address some of the most disturbing social problems in America, the ones that helped Trump get elected.

At its core, socialism is really only about sharing wealth more equitably between employers and workers. Bosses would not be permitted to make nearly 300 times more money than their employees.

All that money would be stopped from flowing right up to the top. Profit would be shared. I have no idea if socialism could work in America. I do know that in the Democratic socialist countries of Europe, they live longer than we do, retire earlier, get paid health care and vacation and paid family leave.

So people who advocate for workers are Communists and radicals and anti-America? What are we thinking of now?

Democratic Socialism really doesn’t mean much more than that, but to listen to Donald Trump and the Republican Party rail about it, one would think it is a demonic plot to destroy the country.

The truth is, it is the billionaire’s worst nightmare.

I can’t imagine how the MAGA parents will explain to their children how a callous and greedy billionnaire sold himself to them as the champion of working-class people.

I think we will all have some explaining to do.

I am taken with Mandel’s argument that a democracy can’t be indifferent to the character of the common life if we wish to work together with our fellow citizens about the purposes, ends, and challenges of our lives.

How can this happen when the gap between the rich and everybody else is bigger than it has been in all of American history and millions of people are cut off from progress and prosperity?

Trump attracted the wealthy by delivering tax cuts and reducing government regulation. He attracted poorer and working-class Americans by exploiting the class differences that increasingly separate the rich from everybody else.

He gave the rich a lot more money and thus denied opportunities to the people who elected him, all the while projecting himself as the new Robin Hood. Wow, that kind of blows my mind as I write it.

If he hadn’t turned out to be such a dysfunctional – and corrupt –  nasty old white man when it came to everything else, we would be waiting for a very different ending to the November election.

But we need to understand why we came so close to Armageddon. I am told morale was vastly higher during World War II than it is now.

Whenever I wrote about the poverty of rural and mostly white America, I get angry messages from people telling me that others have it worse – women, Blacks, Native-Americans. Besides, working-class white men have not been busy piling up supporters lately.

It’s as if we are in a competition to see who suffers the most in order to decide who gets the most help.

But it’s not a competition.

Trump became president because he exploited the growing inequality in class. We are not the meritocracy the founders foresaw. We lost the idea of promise and equality for all. We left a big hole for a demagogue to fill. That’s on us, not them.

We are becoming just another country where there are rich people and poor people, and nobody else, and the opportunities for the poor to climb up the ladders are shrinking.

Demagogues appear when governments break their promises to people, and if it wasn’t Trump, it would have been someone else. And it will be someone else unless we awaken to the inequality of condition Mandel and others are warning us about.

Mandel suggests that as the wealthy become richer and richer, they value themselves so highly that they are less likely to help the less fortunate.

Finding ourselves in a society that prices our talents is our good fortune, not our due. Humility, he says, is the beginning of the way back from the harsh ethic of success that drives us apart.

Donald Trump is not the leader to embrace humility to bring the country together. But he has shown us the consequences of our citizens leading such utterly separate and unequal ways of life.

Progressives cannot fathom how people can overlook Trump’s scandals and cruelty and incompetence. His followers see privileged elites jeering at him and them. They can’t even imagine that he could be defeated honestly.

Outside of Facebook, we never actually get to see or know one another, it is so easy to demonize people you never see.

I’m not sure that being humble alone with help to rectify the catastrophe that was Trump and could still be.

For me, the first step back to normalcy is to figure out ways to bring us together in some common purpose again, not just continue to tear us apart.

We have to try something new.