Your response might be better accepted if you were equally critical of both sides, but you don't appear to be.
Well, I really can’t help that. It is, I admit, not only because I think Trump and Trumpism are now genuine threats to our democratic culture, our republic and the rule of law.
I am a “social democrat” and an “internationalist,” yet an American born patriot. I try to think how men like Thomas Paine or George Orwell would react if they lived in our our day, and act accordingly.
I was in my younger years an idealist “revolutionary,” a socialist, an anti-imperialist who opposed the Vietnam War and the Hubert Humphreys and LBJs who supported it and many similar U.S. foreign policy blunders. I even earned a fat COINTELPRO file from the FBI for my activism.
I became a blue collar worker active in a thoroughly integrated union. I worked with people of many backgrounds, and after retirement made an effort to travel widely abroad. I’m nevertheless traditional and conservative about many things, and am still open to change.
So I
was in a broad sense “a man of the left.” Voting for Conservative Republicans in my youth never really appealed to me because back then they seemed to be a party of the wealthy and the worst warmongers too. I’ve changed quite a bit since then. Today I certainly respect honest Republicans who show personal integrity, and have a few friends, good guys, who almost always vote Republican and voted twice for Trump too. One has had it with Trump, or so he says.
I find much of American “identity politics” wrongheaded, though racial and ethnic forms of it have
always been present and powerful in our country. Some of the new faddish gender-bending politics I find ridiculous. But I am for integration and tolerance, and I despise crude racists and bigots.
I don’t feel it necessary to apologize for Democrats because I’m not one of them. I used to criticize them severely, and very rarely voted for their national candidates. For example, I didn’t vote for Hillary even in then-contested Florida, even though I already knew all about (and despised) Trump, since I grew up in NYC and am close to him in age. Locally I now just look for qualified candidates of either party, and would support a Republican if they seemed the most competent … and were not “Trump Party” assholes.