The wisdom of Things Could Be Worse is, unfortunately, one that tends only to be learned in retrospect, when Bad shuffles off and Worse turns up at the door. Of the three election seasons I’ve witnessed since moving to the US, I look back on the last two and can’t believe what a fuss we made about Mitt Romney. Only pays 14% tax? Who cares! Puts his dog on the roof of the car? What a ditz! Ties himself in knots trying to Talk to Women Voters; oh, that guy.The epic sanity and reasonableness of a man who seemed, at the time, like a cold-hearted killer is one of the most disturbing aspects of this year’s election.  Related: Trump campaign woes grow amid questions over Melania's visa – politics live  But of course, compared with Trump, that’s how Romney now appears. Even George W Bush has started to look like a hopeless but relatively well-meaning individual when viewed through the prism of his Republican successor.  The ultimate beneficiary of this revisionism is, of course, Ronald Reagan, whose reputation has risen steadily since his death in 2004, surging after Nancy’s death earlier this year and rising to a peak at the Democratic convention last week, where he was a favourite reference for centre-left Democrats trying to woo independents and Republicans appalled by Trump.  Love for the Gipper came thick and fast, from Obama comparing Reagan’s characterisation of America, as per its founding values, as “a shining city on a hill” with Trump’s dismal “divided crime scene”, to vice-presidential hopeful Tim Kaine reminding those faithful to the “party of Lincoln” that “we’ve got a home for you”, to Doug Elmets, a former Reagan spokesman, telling the convention: “Trump, you’re no Ronald Reagan”. Spoken to a room full of Democrats, this might once have been expected to trigger a complex emotional response, but not now.  Hillary Clinton has been approvingly quoting Reagan left, right and centre. (One of her campaign posters features an angry-looking Trump overlaid with a quote from Reagan on immigration, from 1984: “I believe in the idea of amnesty for those who have put down roots … even though some time back they may have entered illegally”).  You could say that this is only politics, or that Clinton is a crypto-conservative and has finally nailed her true colours to the wall. But clearly it’s more than that. Bernie Sanders may have dragged Clinton somewhat to the left, but it’s a bad business when the entire landscape has been shunted sufficiently to the right that all these old Republican bogeymen are suddenly beacons of light.  After Clinton’s acceptance speech, the headline in the Broadway newsletters I subscribe to were not, naturally, about her repositioning as a friend to moderate Republicans, but rather her quotation from the musical Hamilton. Although, said Clinton, “We may not live to see the glory / Let us gladly join the fight,” she urged us to consider “planting seeds in a garden you never get to see”. In the show, these lines are spoken not only to evoke a generations’ long struggle, but by characters who assume they will shortly die in battle. No matter. They were stirring words, through which Clinton showed herself to be hip with the kids, but not in a frightening way. (It was, after all, still Broadway). On Twitter, Lin-Manuel Miranda, the show’s creator who reported the following day he was eating ice cream while watching the speech on TV and dropped the spoon, had the presence of mind to reply: “I’m with her.”  A friend’s new book is out, and she has been fielding compliments from everyone she knows. It used to be that, in order to convey one’s respect and admiration in these circumstances, people would say I bought a copy for my mother/husband/best friend. Not any more, apparently. Now, she said, people in her life were falling over themselves to say, “I bought it for my therapist.” We live in traumatised times.
When the Democrats can point to old-time Republicans as virtuous examples, you know that something has gone terribly wrong