Tonight, one final entry, from Sewell Chan, editorial page editor of the Los Angeles Times. He emails Nightly:

Trump has not changed my assessment of American democracy; he has affirmed it. Our great experiment is in peril.

Trump was not the author of these woes; he was a gifted opportunist, exploiting forces that were set in motion decades ago, in particular the ’70s: soaring inequality; the rise of a winner-take-all economy; deregulation; eroding middle-class incomes; prioritization of global finance and capital over local economies, especially manufacturing; white racial backlash; and a loss of confidence in government, in leaders and in institutions.

Although the polarization has not been symmetric — I consider Republicans more blameworthy — the truth is that our democracy won’t be stable if we don’t have a stable center-right party, and that’s a vulnerability that anyone who loves our democracy needs to reckon with, regardless of ideology. I give us a nearly failing grade right now — D.

To avoid an F — which could mean a world-threatening collapse of our state and society — we urgently need a more fair economy. We need a Democratic government that delivers results (getting the pandemic under control, shoring up wages and employment, addressing the climate crisis), but also a principled center-right party that encourages entrepreneurship, innovation, communities and stability (i.e. actual conservatism) instead of exploiting far-right anxieties and hatreds. We will also need an information ecosystem incentivized to support facts instead of lies, and that means regulation of social media (something both left and right can agree on). If we don’t have a shared basis of facts, we are unable to have reasoned debate about values. -Politico