Thanks for the compliment (and for reading). And I agree that mainstream liberal ideas aren’t that different from mainstream conservative ideas, though, of course, they have different views about how much of a role government should play in interfering in the market and equalizing opportunities (I tend to drift more in the “liberal” direction there myself), but both true liberals and true conservatives are against the kinds of corporate cronyism we’re living with (it’s only corrupt politicians in the pocket of corporations or big banks, like Hillary Clinton or the Bush family, who support the status quo).

Part of the problem with establishing more of a dialogue is that, as another reader of my article (Bill Anderson) pointed out in his response to it, the mainstream Democratic Party and the media have been taken over by the alt-left. The irony of this is that if they weren’t so blinded by their own race-and-other-identity-group-obsession, they’d realize that they have a lot of common ground with Trump because he’s not a conventional corporatist country club Republican. (This is why he and the traditional leftist Bernie Sanders were both called “populists.”) Trump, for instance, has the traditional Democratic position on America’s role in the world, which had always been less militaristic and aggressive than the traditional Republican position. The Republicans had always been the big Cold Warriors, the big interventionists in foreign conflicts in the Middle East and beyond, the big advocates of nation-building to export democracy, etc. But now, it’s as if in response to Trump, the Democrats have completely switched positions and are now these big Russia hawks and supporters of worldwide American intervention. On healthcare as well, Trump’s natural position (that he had toyed with repeatedly) is in favor of single-payer universal health coverage. There is widespread public sentiment in the country in favor of such a system at this point. If the Democrats had reached out to Trump to work with him on healthcare, he could’ve actually fixed the falling-apart Obamacare system, but instead, they were so dug-in in opposing anything and everything he did and said on other issues (mostly identity-type issues) that he was forced to work solely with Congressional Republicans, and that meant supporting all these half-baked privatization-type ideas, so that they couldn’t even put a coherent plan together (ironically, I thought Rand Paul’s proposal, which was the furthest in the direction of being libertarian, was the best one out there (other than single-payer), because at least it was coherent and made sense). In any event, the extreme, aggressive identity wing of the Democratic Party (i.e., the alt-left) has completely taken over to such an extent that Democrats can’t work with Republicans anymore on anything, and Republicans, in response to the rise of leftist identity politics, have seen this rise of the white supremacists and white nationalists and neo-Nazis that they’re uncomfortable with but who now form a more substantial part of their constituencies, so that they have this white identity politics they now have to deal with. It’s all a recipe for a race war, as I’ve been saying for years.