"Liberals are quite literally fighting a battle of wits with the unarmed conservatives."

That’s a worry of mine. Trump isn’t, after all, a prime mover. He’s a symptom.

I recall once speaking with an american about the way their preconceived notions about tax, education, public health differed from that of us europeans. It was very enlightening, because what he said could be summarized as:

In europe if you give a politician a hundred dollars and tell him/her to get something to eat then that politician takes that bill and orders expensive takeout from a restaurant with a fancy name and not a lot of consumer satisfaction; You get to eat but it’s not your favorite dish and the cook is barely fit to man a hot dog stand.
In the US you give a politician the same money and the same order and he drops half of it in some pork barrel project for a colleague and gives the other half to a glue-sniffing nephew in exchange for a slice of stale bread. Then he feeds that bread to a flock of pigeons. You get the warm feeling of doing the "right thing" and will have to go shoot one of those pigeons for your dinner.

Similar stories about education, where there is ample reason to mistrust state or government authority which before and during the cold war saw fit to use classrooms to push indoctrination and propaganda.

Now compound the problem – with the 180 degree switch in ideology between the republicans and the democrats following the New Deal and the Southern Strategy, and it’s suddenly the same people and ideology which abused the system the worst within the party which has the nominal principle of opposing that sort of shit. It’s a perfect shitshow of twisted morality where the foxes are now tasked to guard the henhouse they themselves plundered and are all too happy to blame all the dead chickens they bit to death yesteryear on the farmer’s mistakes and the shoddy construction of the henhouse.

Fact is the US citizenry has a long history of not exactly being able to trust their government and a myth of of the small community doing better without the feds tromping in whereas in europe we think it’s way better to have a large semi-functional government which is at least held to task on the nationally important issues than to have the sort of disorganized anarchy where your tax money might as well be distributed to campaign financiers directly because it sure as hell doesn’t end up doing much public good.

That problem US liberals are facing is that they’re naíve. They believe the system works – which it manifestly doesn’t – and believe talk and debate will solve everything. They are civilized.

Their opposition isn’t. Liberals have spent decades trying to debate screaming barbarians who believe in guns, god, glory, and that the end always sanctifies the means. That’s why the whole US has slid so far to the right that today there is NO actual political faction left of the center. Because whenever the republicans go another step to the extreme right, liberals follow just so they can talk about it. The "moderate" position has become one of not denying extremism but one of appeasing it.

It’s no wonder black people have fought for centuries to get equality and Malcolm X once stated he feared the ignorant well-intentioned liberal more than he did the naked aggression of the Klansman. US liberals aren’t the opposition to the KKK and the nazis. They’re the guys quietly not making too much of a mess. The guys who when the KKK wants to lynch uppity black folk say "Look, no lynching, but we’ll keep a blind eye to beatings and harrassment".

Trump is just that symptom of the blinders coming off. At some point "liberals" are going to find that every debate they had, every rally and feel good congregation was for nothing, because the other side will not stop. At some point US liberals will either find that they have compromised away everything, to the point where they have become like the silent bystanders of the reich – or they draw a line in sand, fucking finally saying "It Stops Here".

And that’s when the republicans storm Fort Sumter again and the second civil war kicks off.