WEIMAR, VIRGINIA.

I go on a road trip, in part to visit some Civil War sites (more of which anon), and the cold civil war (and that's what it is) heats up.  Latest stops, Charlottesville, which, like Weimar, is a central place for intellectual and cultural thought, and then Boston, once the Hub of the Universe.

Adam Garfinkle sees the spectre of Weimar.

Trump won the GOP nomination and then the election. The strain of irrationality has not abated but grown, sparking a dialectic of Right-Left valence that is tending ineluctably to push modest, humble, centrist, thoughtful social peacemaking energies to the margins. This is what always happens in a civil war, and America’s latest rendition seems clearly to be moving rapidly from a “cold” civil war, which we have witnessed worsening for years under the label “culture wars,” toward a “hot” civil war. This time, unless real leadership can avert it, civil war will come with no obvious spatial borders.

Michael Barone smells it.  It's the particularism, stupid.

Americans have grown increasingly accustomed to the view that your politics are determined by your racial, ethnic or gender identity. Politics is seen as a zero-sum battle for government favor. College and corporate leaders join in.

But your table's waiting in the cabaret.

Meanwhile, Our President's unwillingness to say the "presidential" things his detractors in the main press keep calling for isn't as damaging to him as those detractors would like.  Rod Dreher: "If Democrats and liberals only pay attention to the media and to each other on the statue debate, they are going to alienate a lot of people. The hostile media environment has made it very difficult for anybody to speak up for keeping the statues, even though that is a majority opinion in America. So people will keep that opinion to themselves."

And it's being stupid about being smart to marinate in the smug. "In turn, they may very well stew on it, angry at the liberal gatekeepers of respectable opinion either not caring about their opinion, or shutting them down as racists."

There's more, much more, at that column, but most of it tangential to my post.

The main point, dear reader, is that discontent with Our President's handling of the Charlottesville protests is not the same thing as a groundswell of support for impeaching him, or implementing single payer health insurance, or raising marginal tax rates, or banning football.

John Kass, in simple language.

Why did nearly half the electorate and 30 states make Donald Trump president of the United States?

Because he wasn't Hillary Clinton and her pack of cultural and media establishment elitists, who reveled in reminding forgotten Americans that they were deplorables for wanting to reclaim lost jobs and keep control of their nation's borders.

Because he wasn't part of the establishment war party endlessly seeking to spend American blood and treasure in constant and disastrous military intervention around the world.

Because he offered economic hope for a country that had been fed Barack Obama's weak platitudes, even as hope and opportunity fled, and to some extent, Trump has delivered on that.

Even so, you can't get away from Weimar.

Trump voters who cast ballots for him for other reasons -- from wanting conservatives on the Supreme Court to better trade deals -- are forced to defend themselves from the paralyzing charge of bigotry.

This is not a prescription for unifying the country, but it's been expected. It is what happens when an empire's establishment decays, infected by the cynicism of leaders over decade after decade.

The left and right become more violent and strident. Their loud declarations and counter declarations give little refuge to those in the middle. And the president's moral failure over Charlottesville helps feed it.

It is what happens with amoral men who think only in terms of themselves.

Perhaps the error is in thinking of the president as some sort of national counselor or father confessor, rather than as the chief executive of a federal government. (When you have tried everything else?)

The Democrats?  Hopeless, offers Salena Zito.

The Democratic Party brand has suffered broadly in the middle of the country in the past few years, largely on the backs of its pull left under the presidency of Barack Obama. While progressivism fit well for Democrats in urban areas, it fell flat and was widely rejected in places like Madison County.

It is not that voters liked or loved Republicans or found them more virtuous; it is that they found Democrats less aligned with their values, more likely to look down their nose at them and not at all interested in listening to their plights.

Republicans at least made it OK to be in a church pew every Sunday, own a gun for protection and hunting, and not share all of their money with everyone else.

And now things may not be looking so good for the urban areas.