Listening to the talking heads in the news media is painful because of how shallow it is, from Nancy Pelosi to Bill Maher on down.

For me the issue is that the lower middle class and working class revolted against the establishment, as, by the way, they did in 2016. They decided to give Biden a try to correct this. He did to some degree but no where near to the degree needed. So they revolted again. They did not have a third choice to vent their hurt and anger. Their only choice was to find a rationalization to vote against Biden.

The Covid-19 pandemic revealed the rich and upper middle class were able to remain safe in their main homes or second homes while the lower middle class and working class had to work and risk getting covid and dying which happened to many of them. Where is the outrage at this injustice? It is nowhere. The Democrats are now the party of the establishment and Trump clearly is not part of any establishment of any kind. If I was one of those abandoned people, I would have voted for him as well.

We are suffering from immature capitalism — everyone is on their own. More than half the people in the U.S. live month to month and have nowhere enough for retirement and may have to work during retirement at low wages. This is fundamentally immoral! Our greatest diseases is loneliness and the abandonment of the few wealthy and powerful of the many.

All empires implode from within. Trump is the imploding of this empire. Just watch what happens. His team are anti-community and fanatical individualists not willing to follow any agreements including the Constitution and our agreed upon laws … or they will gleefully work around them. Who goes 65 miles an hour on the freeways? No one. It is a religion in our society to think of yourself so fully few in any class see the need to follow the agreements we have made if they can get around them. This is extreme individualism, the opposite of community which is choosing to live with people inside some agreements. Community is dead. Paternalism, thank God, is also dead. But this extreme individualism and sadly, with it, anti-community orientation, is self-destructive, and we have naively killed community as part of rebelling against all forms of paternalism. It has taken down any sense of community with its ending. Our empire is imploding! We should not be naive about this. That is what is now happening.

We need to recreate community, joyfully living democratically within some agreements with each other, and build from there. We need to take humanity to this next layer of maturity if we are to have everyone joyfully joining us, not only one class or another. That is building the next more mature empire, and empire where each person learns to keep their power always within their skin and freely choose to reach agreements with some others and joyfully live inside them as their second priority. That day will now come. Trump provides a clear opposite. That will have many see the wisdom of now maturing to doing this.

Terry Mollner is a retired co-founder of the first family of socially responsible mutual funds, the Calvert Funds, and lives in Shutesbury.