so i can't fathom how long it will take to recover from the unprecedented malevolence, ignorance, and incompetence of tRumps and his horde of vulgarians.

Backlash

And they are going back further than that!

the past does not predict the future. A political scientist once told me it usually takes about 17 years or so to pass a big advance after it has been defeated (he was pointing out the way the gap between the defeat of healthcare reform in the 1990s and the passage of the ACA followed this pattern).

That said, this era will involve major shakeups. Some bad, but some may lead to quicker return to something even better. It's not as if we'd be doing it for the first time, and hopefully some opportunity can come from this disaster, not just years of regression.

I do believe we can accomplish everything we want to see, and rebuild better, IF enough of us come together to reject those who would drag us back into an anti-liberal, conservative dark era.

... is what they can do to the USSC. A stacked court with mostly Scalia-types could really make it easy to overturn so many of the progressive steps we've made. And it would make it very difficult to successfully challenge things. They can continue to abuse power and a hyper-conservative would go along.

has consequences, though, and no one is in control of where those will take us these days. No one would have guessed that the greed and ignored poverty and desperation of the Gilded Age, and then the Great Depression, would give birth to the enormous New Deal changes, but they did.

And if we redeal the cards again, we won't be breaking new ground. I feel it's critically important, though, to remember that the New Deal changes within our good governmental structure were created by a centrist alliance of both liberal and conservative progressives. Extremists on both sides fought them, and the New Deal and Fair Deal could never have happened if reasonable people on both sides didn't come together to make it happen.

What "optimism" I need is that people on both sides will ultimately come together again to say no to the right-wing extremists using their power to tear apart the really good thing we have. There are some 160 million voters, after all. My fears are entirely that our own silly spite and resentments will keep a critical mass from reuniting.