On both sides of the Atlantic, politics has come to be dominated by vitriolic name-calling and pervasive dishonesty.
My allegiance to the GOP was cemented during the 1980s, when I was in high school and college and Ronald Reagan was in the White House. For me, Reagan was what John F. Kennedy had been to an earlier generation: an inspirational figure who shaped my worldview.
Before Donald Trump, the Republican Party was a majority conservative party with a white nationalist fringe. Now it's a white nationalist party with a conservative fringe.
I am white. I am Jewish. I am an immigrant. I am a Russian American. But until recently I haven't focused so much on those parts of my identity. I've always thought of myself simply as a normal, unhyphenated American.
As a Jewish refugee from the Soviet Union, I felt it was ridiculous to expect me to atone for the sins of slavery and segregation, to say nothing of the household drudgery and workplace discrimination suffered by women.
Upon closer examination, it's obvious that the history of modern conservative is permeated with racism, extremism, conspiracy-mongering, isolationism and know-nothingism.
Protests, such as those in favor of labor rights, women's suffrage, civil rights and gay rights, helped to make America as great as it is.
Hillary Clinton is a centrist Democrat who is more hawkish than President Obama and far more principled and knowledgeable about foreign affairs than Trump, who is too unstable and erratic to be entrusted with the nuclear triad he has never heard of.
Every four years since 1988, I have voted for the Republican presidential candidate.
I am by no means suggesting that everyone who uses the neocon label is doing so as an anti-Semitic smear, but the word has been used often enough in that ugly context that it should make any person of goodwill think twice before employing it.
For years, as a seller of real estate and star of reality TV, Donald Trump made a living wooing customers and viewers. His selling skills were good enough that he even convinced voters to elect him as president in spite of his near-total lack of qualifications.
Olga E. Kagan was the strongest woman I knew - and probably the reason I've spent my life with other strong women.
Yet another reason to be angry at President Trump: He is forcing me - and every other American who is not a racist - to defend the most left-wing members of Congress.
You can debate when the conservative movement became a racket - I nominate 1996, the year Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes created Fox News Channel to monetize right-wing outrage - but there is no doubt it has long since passed that point.
Air superiority, which the United States has taken for granted since World War II, is no longer assured. And, without control of the skies, U.S. ships and soldiers would be vulnerable in ways that are difficult to imagine.
I don't know if I can ever change the world, but at least I can change the oil in my car.
I have not given up my faith in democracy - it remains the worst form of government except for all the others - but I have given up my youthful expectation that it would inevitably triumph.
The case for democracy is that voters in the aggregate will make better decisions than a lone monarch or dictator would.
Silence is complicity. All Republicans who stand mute in the face of Trump's latest racism are telling you who they really are.
Once upon a time - in the days of Margaret Thatcher and John Major - I would have rejoiced in a Conservative Party landslide in Britain. But now, Prime Minister Boris Johnson's victory fills me with fear and foreboding.
