We are frequently bombarded, particularly by the so called "main stream" media as well as centrist politicians with the notion of the fierce urgency of "fixing the national political divide". As if that were even remotely possible. I think we all need a reality check. It is often said that we are now the most divided we have been since the civil war. I do not dispute this, what I dispute is the remedy. The constant need for one side (almost universally ours) to have to pander to the other side and start "reaching across the aisle".
To this I have just one word; "STOP". Just stop, period. We need to start looking at this realistically. We are talking about reaching across the aisle to people many of whom quite literally want us all dead. They are not interested in negotiating, they won't listen to our point of view, they don't even care that we have one, much less what it is. The right has become a cesspool of miscreants who have consciously decided that they are OK with putting migrant children in cages. With vindictively separating children from their parents because their parents in desperation have committed the grievous offense of asking for asylum. These people have decided that Trump's open commission of treason by offering comfort to an openly hostile foreign power is just no big deal. And now, in the face of overwhelming evidence, they still refuse to acknowledge the president's criminality. Incredibly, their actual defense is not even that he is innocent, but that selling out our national security interest for his personal political gain is not the high crime that it obviously is. This they actually have the unmitigated gall to do with a straight face.
These are people who are already openly clamoring for civil war. They are willing to turn on their own neighbors and often even their own families because of political disagreement. In short, they are irredeemable. They are vastly beyond any possibility of persuasion. That is reality and the time for persuasion is over. We can not convince them, we must defeat them. They must be crushed into oblivion, marginalized and ridiculed until they crawl back in disgrace under the rocks from which they emerged.
It is sad, even pathetic, that it has come to this, but history has already provided us a model. At the end of the second world war the allies forced local town's people, the local "good Germans", to help with the cleanup efforts at the death camps. Essentially rubbing their noses in what they had at best turned a blind eye to, if not actively participated in.
In our current dilemma, we may not be able to lay bare to Trump supporters the depth of their depravity the same way, as they are at this point most likely immune to shame. Their belief in their evil ideology is palpably religious in it's depth. It is not based on fact nor on logic, but on faith. Willingness to buy into the most outrageous conspiracies that Q-Anon, Fox News, and the likes of Alex Jones can come up with, is what guides them now. They have now even abandoned their own cherished actual religious beliefs and tenets in order to follow a man who has far more in common with their descriptions of an Anti-Christ, than of their cherished savior, yet this is with whom they have chosen to throw their lot.
They are beyond rehabilitation, they are beyond re-education, they are beyond redemption. They can not be reasoned with, nor bargained with. They can not be expected to participate in a good faith discussion. They have made their choice, and it is immutable. In short they are a lost cause and we cannot help them.
They must be left behind, consigned to stew in their own self pity for all time. And if there is ever to be hope of moving past them, they must be ostracized, shamed, mocked, and shown to be the laughingstock they actually are. Only when society asserts itself in the notion that their ideology is utterly unacceptable and not ever to be yielded to, will we be rid of it once and for all. Just as fascism was made to be universally and publicly unacceptable after WWII, so must Trumpism be shown to be the disgusting spectacle it is.