Quite right, alas. Some opinions even in good friends are unacceptable. I shouldn’t want a racist for a friend, or an anti-Semite, or a misogynist. On the other hand, neither would I want a friend with a perfectly aligned set of politically correct opinions. Nor could he or she bear me. Yet opinion just now is riding high in the saddle, and fire-breathing political opinions most of all.
The effect of such endemic—better perhaps to say epidemic—opinionation is on view in the current presidential campaign. A figure as deliberately divisive as Donald Trump could arise only in an atmosphere that is itself soaked in political derision. At a time of international crisis and domestic turmoil, where cool heads are called for, Mr. Trump brings a hot head and a loose lip and a level of coarseness hitherto unseen in a presidential campaign. That so many people appear to be not merely amused but enthralled by his crude views is no cause for celebration.
I wonder what my long-gone father would make of Donald Trump. One of my father’s favorite apothegms was that “you can’t argue with success.” I suspect that Mr. Trump would cause him to rethink this. My father held strong views but was also a reasonable man—though, as he would admit, not always.
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