If this grim period in our history ends too soon, then nothing will be learned from it, and it will only happen again, over and over. Look at the nostalgia you see in Europe now for the Soviet Empire, or Nazi Germany, or the fascist dictatorships of Spain and Italy. Look at the fond memories parts of America still have for the antebellum South, for the good old days of Jim Crow, even for the "victories" and patriotism and exceptionalism of the Cold War, MacCarthyism, and the Glorious 1950s. The only reason we haven't suffered a second Civil War is because the horror of the first one still haunts our collective memory.

There will always be a misguided nostalgia for the past, or at least our idealized memory of it. We were young, we were strong, we were on the ascendant, so we tend to project our feeling of past vigor and dynamism onto everything and everybody. Make America Great Again, as if it ever was, or as if it isn't now. Do we run the risk of it all "ending in disaster". Yes we do, but that is the price we have to pay, and there are no guarantees. To be of value, to be remembered, experience has to be painful. Like freedom, the price of truth is blood and tears.

No, we need to learn our lesson, we need to hurt, to lose something, or we will not remember this time and this aberration and betrayal of everything that is good and decent about this country. Our memories of Stalin and Hitler, of Franco and Mussolini will always come back to haunt some of us, those who can't find happiness in a more tolerant and decent world, but most of us will learn the lessons of history provided they are applied sternly and forcefully enough. In our Skinnerian world, negative reinforcement works, even if only for a generation.

Trump will cause damage and grief, true, but if we magically sweep him away, if some accident of history removes him, he will only come back in some even more horrid form tomorrow. Remember, his followers claim he "speaks to them". After he goes they will remain. They must learn, the hard way, that he is speaking only lies.