Ever since passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964, the GOP has been a coalition of racists, plutocrats, and conservative thinkers. The thinkers were comfortable in the party because the other two groups were pretty much complacent and quiescent. Then we elected a black community organizer as president. Their privileges at apparent risk, the bigots and plutocrats simply threw the thinkers out of the party.

The left is no better. There is no intellectual core to the “progressive” agenda. It is almost entirely personal. Their enemy is not global warming or automation or any other of the material sea changes occurring in the real world. Their enemy is the racists and plutocrats who have captured the GOP. The candidates who put issues first get no traction while the ones who put resentment first get all the votes.

America has become a shithole country. We ignore the best and brightest and boost the worst and angriest. Unity, negotiation, and compromise are losing propositions. Under these conditions, we are ripe for attack by foreign trolls and what Ms. Ross rightly calls domestic grifters. The latter are traitors in all but, perhaps, the technical legal sense of the word. They promote themselves at the expense of our constitutional system. They are profiteering on our collapse. They are awful, awful people.

I find myself rooting for the economy to do very poorly over the next twelve months, hoping that Congress will fail to pass infrastructure and immigration reform, etc. I don’t wish the resulting hardships on anyone — indeed, just wishing it is physically upsetting— but we have reached the point where defeating Trump in a landslide is the only way to expiate the sin of electing him. I oppose impeachment for the same reason; the electorate needs a mulligan for redemption.

Whether the Democrats can nominate a uniter remains to be seen. I support Biden because he appears to be the only viable candidate in that lane. I would prefer one of the younger moderates— Bennet, Bullock, Inslee, Klobuchar, or Ryan —but none of these seems able to beat hotheads like Warren and Harris. So, Biden it is, for now.