Dating : Change is a comin’.

I’m an optimist. Cockeyed, head over heels, madly in love with the idea that better times are always just around the corner as long as we can just weather the storm. There’s something very American about this sort of innate optimism, a fire we’ve kept burning through single pane glass windows on the edges of Revolutionary War battlefields through Civil Rights marches and all the way to retina displays; we always bend but never break. This week we have bent more than we have in years, but it is important to keep in mind that this is part of the innate American experience.

The Trump Presidency — and to a larger extent, Donald Trump — has always been defined by a willingness to sell the sizzle and never the steak — regardless of whether it’s politically expedient. He’s been this way forever, and will continue to be this way for as long as his deeply pickled, mayo crusted body exists on this earth. But that’s not news to anyone — what IS news is the rapid descent from that position directly into dog whistle politics, which is perhaps the most distilled version of sizzle vs steak. Race baiting call-outs & hollow criticisms born of innate fear and spectacle. It started with Birtherism, then Charlottesville, before culminating in this week’s latest: telling Congresswomen to “go back to their countries.”

As disgraceful as it is to have to live under the umbrella of hate that Trump has opened, and as horrible as this week has been, it’s important to keep in mind that he is not unique, that this approach has been taken before, and that it is always a sign of the dying of the light. Scroll back 10 years — we lived through George W. Bush neglecting an entire city on the basis of race. Go back 30 more — Ronald Reagan singling out AIDS victims and lording over a program to incarcerate inner city blacks on the basis of race. 60 more? Joseph McCarthy. In every era in this nation we have been forced to live through the rambling, hate filled screeds of politicians using the last coals of hatred to advance their own agenda — and in every case these men — and their ideas — faded into oblivion shortly after the fires cooled.

We moved past Bush and into Obama, past Reagan and into a (somewhat) modern society of openness, past McCarthy and into the 1960’s. Take it further back — past Wilson and into the roaring 20’s, past Jefferson Davis and Northern sycophants and into The First Era of Freedom.

One could argue that perhaps the American system is flawed if men like Davis or McCarthy or Reagan or Trump are permitted to rise to the top, but I would say that in every one of these eras we have left better as a nation then before we entered; that the dog whistling is less a warning sign and more a death cry— of men and of ideas that are soon to be long gone. I, for one, think we’ll make it through the era of Trump, just as we made it through the eras of Jefferson Davis and Strom Thurmond and George Bush: because progress is the American way.