I have to thank this guy for giving such eloquent voice to my own feelings of grief.

On the other hand, grief implies a loss, and my loss is not, I've come to see, actual. It is perceived. American was basically an Apartheid state until the 1970s, has had a brief flowering of highly conflicted social democracy, and is now descending into authoritarianism. The only reason I am so shocked and depressed at not recognizing my country of birth anymore is that I misconstrued it to begin with. I am a white heterosexual male, born to so much privilege that I didn't even recognize it and just assumed it existed for all.

The reality is I was born into a plausible dream and the dream has evaporated in the face of its own unreality. Minorities probably aren't so surprised; blacks for example have had to deal with poverty and police brutality and mass incarceration and other forms of structural racism (and in fact with Jim Crow in my formative years), so the ugliness has been manifest to them all along. Black men have been shot in the back by police while doing non-threatening things like running away, all these years. I only noticed it recently because it's impossible to discount anymore now that most citizens have video cameras and Internet access and can self-broadcast these events as they happen.

Trump did not invent the cruelties of unbridled capitalism, he is simply a mirror that reflects it. The facile adoption of his overt sociopathy by the GOP only rips the mask off something that was always there. The GOP is a party of plutocrats, for plutocrats. It has always been about duping Hated Others into giving up their power. Its cynicism now doesn't even need to be concealed behind a genteel facade of country club civility.

Sanders has done us a similar favor in the other direction, revealing the co-option of the Democratic Party by plutocrats under the guise of "centrism" or "moderation". He is hated by the party establishment, and the ridicule machine has already been fired up well in advance of the 2020 election.

So one of our two national parties has revealed itself as the Joker, who wants to watch everything burn so long as the uber-wealthy can escape to their silos in New Zealand. The other has the same objectives, it merely wants to maintain a facade of civility and benign egalitarianism and avoid the appearance of cynical indifference. Who can plausibly argue that it won't ultimately rip its own mask off?

The only hope for a country like ours that operates on a two-party system is that the smoking husk of one or both parties will be taken over by reformers who move things in a fundamentally different and civilized direction. The Sanders wing of the Democratic party (whether led by Sanders himself or not) strikes me as our best hope, but even that is a guttering candle in a windstorm anymore.

THIS! This is exactly how I feel.