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Trump is an aberration. His base is demographically doomed. While we’re ensuring that we defeat them politically, let’s also ensure that we’re not carrying the infection of anger and hatred forward into a future that doesn’t need to be defined by them.

The left and the right both think the other needs to look in the mirror, and on that point, they are both right. What’s more, to an extent greater than either want to admit, they are looking into that mirror when they are looking at each other and just don’t know it.

I know how eager we all are to claim “false equivalency!” And, yes, there is much that is not equivalent. But I’ve noticed for quite some time that, as a general rule, those who are quickest and loudest in shouting that refrain are the ones who have the least justification for doing so; it is the ideologues who fancy themselves most different from their counterparts while being in some very essential ways most alike.

There is less moral hazard in being eager to confront our own fallibility than in being eager to deny it. There is less moral hazard in being willing to acknowledge our opposition’s humanity than in doggedly denying it. We risk less by trying to ratchet down the vitriol than we do by refusing to. A future committed to human decency can’t be achieved through anger and hatred.

The Roman writer Livy said of the Greeks that they had “conquered their rude conquerors,” because though the Roman military captured Greek territory, it was Greek culture that captured Roman minds. We face a reverse problem, threatened by the contagion of vitriol rather than the contagion of more edifying sentiments, and I look at a future in which the left prevails with more trepidation than relief, because the left is growing angrier and meaner and more Intransigent, and that is not the spirit I want to prevail.

So let’s start now trying to be kinder. Let’s oppose the hate without hating. Let’s oppose irrationality with reason rather than another brand of irrationality. Let’s look inward as well as outward. It’s up to us to create and follow a better path. And it’s well within our reach to do so.

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