I set the alarm earlier, and so was awakened Wednesday to the radio news lead item, which was, of course, political. It was not, however, about Bernie Sanders’s victory in West Virginia, the 20th state he’s won, against 22 for Hillary Clinton — buttressing a long-shot bid the establishment proclaimed he should have given up three months ago.

No, it was about Donald Trump — his vice presidential search, and his refusal to release his tax returns because, he said, “There’s nothing to learn from them.” A non-news story beats a real one. The national obsession with Trump is now official.

From now until November, there will be millions of words, and thousands of hours of video, expended on the presidential race. But it’s not too early to reflect on how we got to this dark place, where the same establishment that decided Sanders couldn’t win also assured us, over and over, it was “impossible” — surely — that Donald Trump would be the Republican nominee.

No one should have been surprised. One question is how, as the New York Times aptly put it, Trump executed a “hostile takeover” of a once-great political party. The answer is that the party brought it on itself. A party that, for a quarter century, has sought power solely for the sake of preventing government from doing anything substantive to address the nation’s needs, now controls more governorships and seats in Congress and state legislatures than at any time since the 1920s.

It has used that power to disenfranchise voters and suppress voting, make it difficult or impossible for women to exercise their constitutional right to an abortion, and expand access to guns in a nation with more gun deaths than any other — all positions justified by their appeal to today’s Republican “base.”

But the Democratic Party has not exactly distinguished itself either. One ludicrous theory about our political woes is that both parties play to their “extremes.” That’s true for Trump backers, hence his anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim positions, but Democrats have been tacking toward an imagined center ever since Bill Clinton decided to “triangulate” toward re-election in 1996, signing a harsh “welfare reform” bill and declaring “the era of big government is over.”

It’s sobering that, in 2016, the likely Democratic nominee should be financed primarily by Wall Street. Labor unions, and workers generally, finish a distant second behind business interests in both major parties.

The gulf between political sanity and our present position has widened in Maine, too. In relatively recent times, Maine produced such humane and public-spirited Republicans as Bill Cohen, John McKernan and Olympia Snowe; now, Susan Collins is the sole remaining GOP moderate in the U.S. Senate.

The change was facilitated not only by the rightward lurch of Maine Republicans, but a corresponding move by Democrats away from long-held beliefs about social justice and economic fairness. Since the current administration took office, Democrats have participated in twice lowering taxes on the wealthiest Mainers, while increasing regressive sales and property taxes. They helped substantially repeal Maine’s concealed weapons law, something no one but the NRA asked for. And they helped brand the scarlet letter on those receiving federal welfare benefits, voting for a meaningless “ban” on selected items that no state has been able to effectively enforce.

At least nationally, the gutting of the Voting Rights Act and the explosion of unregulated campaign spending came through Supreme Court decisions by five unelected justices. Maine Democrats voted for traditional far-right causes all on their own.

I don’t believe Trump can carry Maine, and not just because we haven’t voted for a Republican nominee since 1988. Most Mainers are too decent, too neighborly, and too unwilling to blame others.

But we must get a few things straight. It was always absurd to think we could continually cut taxes, and government, and still get the kind of things only government can reliably provide — access to health care, education, transportation — and a mandate for decent wages.

We will have to restore government to its natural place in the modern world, to fund it where necessary, and use it to contain the excesses that a capitalist economic system, left to its own devices, always produces.

I also don’t believe Donald Trump will be president. Society isn’t collapsing, as it appeared to many to be when 20th-century dictators came to power in the Soviet Union, Italy and Germany.

We’re not yet ready for a strongman with no coherent agenda.

But we must ponder what has brought us to this place, and what we — every one of us — must do to begin our journey back from the brink.

Douglas Rooks has covered the State House for 31 years. Comment is welcomed at: drooks@tds.net

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