Weakest link
There was a nascent cult of personality that tried to keep George Washington in office, back in the day. He refused to be the tail the dog wagged, and our government was strengthened by this. Now we have an incandescent cult leader, with all the heat and light that implies: lots and lots of heat, people getting burned, some light. Eventually Trump will burn out. I'm more worried about the holes in our political landscape that he's digging out or exposing--the rot of confusing fiction with fact, papering over corruption, spreading grass seed while the mine below is burning. I think we're due for a reset, a political reset on the scale of revolution, civil war, world war; the sort of complete refocusing that only happens when the underlying structures have been patched and torn up and rebuilt too many times to repair.
Defining loyalty as to a person or a party or a current platform, ties one to a raft that will fall apart or become completely irrelevant as conditions change. I don't see what true principles Trump is connected to; I see other political parties also floundering, unsure what, if anything, is a real core principle to cling to. Family? Redefined. Citizen? Not if you weren't born here--and sometimes even if you were. Gender? What do you identify as today... Which in-group are you claiming to be part of, and do they also claim you? It's a never-ending game of The Weakest Link, kicking out anyone who doesn't agree with you in lockstep.
This game will kill us, if we let it. What we need to do instead is work together, help and support each other, accept that we all have different points of view and learn from it instead of tear it down. As a child I was proud to live in the United States of America, the best place in the world to live. As a middle-aged adult, I no longer have unquestioned loyalty to the government structures over me. I see too clearly how the broken pieces are cutting people. In many cases we agree about what problems exist; we disagree over what to do about them, including how to frame the problems in the first place. When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Other tools exist, but denying their validity because they're not ideologically pure, prevents us from solving problems.
