"mostly unready to confront it even as it has become unmistakably what it is"

When it comes to the dumpster fire that our American national media has become with its instinctive "both-sides-do-it" bullshit, Joan Walsh gets it:

"But I need to come clean with a 'both sides' of my own. My party, the Democratic Party, was utterly unprepared for the carnival of racist bigotry the Republican Party was becoming, and remains mostly unready to confront it even as it has become unmistakably what it is. After Obama’s insufficient stimulus (I know, he didn’t have the votes for more, but he didn’t need votes to at least talk about what economic recovery, and more important, economic justice in the wake of the financial meltdown required), he pivoted to preaching deficit reduction and attempting a bipartisan 'Grand Bargain' that would have trimmed or gutted Social Security and Medicare. (Which makes me rejoice that at least in one case the GOP defeated my president.) We suffered through Obama’s Simpson-Bowles deficit reduction commission and endured idiotic movements like 'No Labels.'

And when a thoroughly compromised bipartisan immigration reform bill passed the Senate in 2013, only to be locked up in the Tea Party-controlled House, not enough of us realized that the GOP was on its way to becoming a nativist party. It didn’t happen when Trump descended that gilded escalator and called undocumented Mexican immigrants 'rapists' and 'criminals;' it happened when Senator Jeff Sessions and Santa Monica’s white nationalist Stephen Miller took charge of GOP immigration policy. Still, I’ve lost count of the times I’ve been told in a television debate that Democrats don’t 'want' comprehensive immigration reform, or else a bill would have passed. 'Both sides' profit politically from the immigration stalemate, we’re told.  I calmly recite the terms of that 2013 'compromise' to pundits who should know better — usually to no avail. That’s how a country that once protected young 'Dreamers' wound up putting brown kids in cages instead."

It's really quite simple -- you don't negotiate with hostage takers.  Obama thought it was possible, but seemed to wake up a bit during his second term.  Biden (groan) still thinks it is.

The Republican Party, and specifically Mitch McConnell in the Senate, have broken the system.  And come November 2020, we either get to keep a semi-functional Democracy or we get four more years of Trump, which means at least a generation of Trumpism via the Supreme Court.