America looks at itself and is disgusted by its reflection, its inverse, its strangeness and familiarity.

America’s reflection, as Americans see it, occupies a space in the uncanny valley, close enough to what it should be that the minor differences become revolting.

This has been the case before, but during the Civil War you could point to the antithetical notions on a map. If the poles of America occupied two distinct geographical spaces we would likely be at war.

Instead, we are siblings who blame each other, and ourselves, for their parents’ divorce.

Trump is the deep horror which comes from the seething hatred towards progress, which comes from seeing the manner of men who sexually assaulted you held up as a hero to millions of your countrymen, which comes from the rejection of your humanity and value as a being.

He is chaos, hubris, a weapon of mass destruction.

He is George W. Bush crossed with Herbert Hoover. He is George Wallace and William Jennings Bryan. He is a used car salesman and a cartoon supervillain.

Clinton is the middle finger of the urban sophisticates who think you are an ignorant peasant, unable to control your baser impulses and approach things rationally.

She is the contempt that the aristocracy masquerading as a meritocracy holds for anyone who fails their test, those who weren’t born into well off and stable families, who didn’t forsake social lives to study every waking hour, who didn’t go to an Ivy League establishment university, who didn’t get a plum internship or entry-level job.

She is a manifestation of the arrogance of an entire social-economic-political system who are assured with absolute certainty that they are entitled to what they have been given.

She is the dismissal of your complaints in the holy name of stability.

This is what we see, at least.

This is what we look at when we look across.

We have no doubt that we are the sanity the other is lacking, the antidote to their position. But we have no desire or inclination to heal each other, no patience for each other’s moral failings. If we were given the choice, we would probably choose to muzzle the other and get on with our lives.

This is not a feel-good exercise is reconciliatory moralizing. This is a notice that unless trend lines stretching decades back change course in the immediate future, this self-loathing will only get worse.

Things will not get better if we simply hope, and we’re finally cluing into the fact.

When a human being feels trapped in a situation that is toxic enough to crush their soul and no one comes to help them, when escape is an unreal abstraction that seems impossible, when the future holds the same standard horrors that they become imprisoning physical laws of the universe, destruction is inevitable.

Race riots, self-harm, violence, collapse.

Of course, not all Americans feel this way. Perhaps not even a majority do. But enough of the population feels like a hostage to the other that we have to acknowledge that there might not be a way to heal.

We are surely doomed to that fate if there are no valiant men and women willing to build bridges between these poles.

But if we are relying on existential martyrs, we are running a terrible risk.

This is a postmortem of polarization, a tome to the turbulence of our national course; a dissertation on the degradation still suffered by far too many Americans.

This is not an ode to a nostalgic memory of times past. There was no perfect utopian era and there never will be.

This is not a plea. I have a political agenda, and I have confidence that one side of America is closer to the good and righteous notions we hold as American values than the other, which clings to values that have stained the name and history of America.

But I remain unsure as to which side is America, and which side is the reflection.