I realize this will sound snarky and/or overly aggressive. However, I'm being entirely serious and can't quickly come up with a better way to phrase this:
How do people with functioning moral compasses come together with the kind of people who see pictures of children in cages and say "America, fuck yeah?"
How do people who want some form of democratic government come together with the kind of people who think it's entirely right and proper for a president to do his best to prevent his political opponents from voting -- by disrupting the postal service, by soliciting the help of multiple hostile foreign governments to smear his opponent, calling for his opponents to be imprisoned without charge, and by attempting to halt vote counting in the courts?
How do people with any kind of respect for the value of human life watch video of the George Floyd killing and come together with the kind of people who watch the video and argue that the police did nothing wrong?
I don't think these divides can be healed. These issues are not matters, like arguments over the size of government, where compromise is both possible and mutually beneficial. Instead, they are moral red lines about which compromise is neither possible or desirable. What the 70-odd million who voted from Trump want out of their country isn't compatible with the basic moral outlook of the 75-odd million people who voted against him.
To take an extreme example, if a bunch of Nazis want to kill 10 million people, 'compromising' by agreeing to let them kill only 5 million people isn't acceptable -- and yet, this is exactly the kind of moral compromise (truly in the other sense of the word) that would be involved in bringing together Trumpist and anti-Trumpist factions.
In addition to the moral divide, there is a reality/gullibility divide between the Trumpist and anti-Trumpist factions. Trumpists believe an awful lot of stuff that is factually untrue. They reject global warming and dismiss the scientific evidence as the product of a Chinese hoax to destroy America. 56% of Republicans now believe in Qanon (an ideological conspiracy theory born out of the argument that Democrats eat babies) to some extent[0]. The overwhelming majority of Trumpists get their news from Fox, a media outlet which spreads more misleading information than accurate information.[1] How does anyone with a commitment to respecting consensus reality reach people who have chosen to live in comforting fantasyland rather than cope with the world as it is?
I don't see any way for the US to get out of this mess without breaking up into multiple countries.
And, to the usual 'downvote to -1' crowd: what part of this analysis is wrong?
[0] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-electio...
[1] https://www.politicususa.com/2015/02/06/fact-checker-finds-6...
