I enjoy your books but I didn't enjoy this article. It made me sad. I felt the same disillusion with my father many years ago, and with my mother. My father died in 1999, my mother in 2017. The last time she voted, she voted UKIP (UK Independence Party, pro Brexit.) She was a political refugee from Hungary but she voted anti-immigrant.

There is a natural sclerosis that happens to many elderly people, especially successful rich comfortable elderly people. They're terrified of losing everything and having to start over, old and bent and inadequate.

They find reasons to excuse what they've become but actually that fear of losing what they've built up - with hard work and enterprise, sure - becomes all-consuming. I think this is what's behind their rage and their love for Trump. Trump promises to be their Big Daddy and make them safe, even though he is never going to keep that promise. They desperately want to believe in their Big Daddy because he makes them feel less afraid. They know deep down that he'll betray them - if they didn't, they wouldn't get so angry about denying what kind of man he is.

They'll blame everyone else they can - democrats, Biden, immigrants, Mexicans, blacks, disabled... Because they're terrified.

Look at some of the studies done all over the world about people who are right wing: they are always more fearful than left wingers. This is an actual effect; look it up for yourself. The researchers are often quite embarrassed about it.

This is why so many people move rightward as they get older; they become more fearful of losing everything, of getting sick, of getting Alzheimer's. They act like they can take their money with them when they die - yet they know they can't, and they're terrified about that as well. Who will they be without the money and the house and the cars? Just another human immigrant to heaven? Or nothing?

Your father has betrayed the decent man he was because he's afraid, he can't admit it and he's also afraid that you're not afraid.

Don't get angry with him. Pity him.

And if he does lose everything in the 2nd American Civil War which I am seeing as a possibility becoming more and more probable every day, be kind to him.

I think that's how the Stoics would behave.