Ceding the Moral High Ground

As Americans we had a place on the world stage after WWII.  Admittedly, we entered the war late, we were largely not invaded, and the manufacturing windfall of making weapons made us richer, better positioned to compete, and with a highly trained work force.  We took that and ran with it for quite a while.
I would say the beginning of the end came around 9/11, when we started to slip back towards our Japanese internment days.  As a nation we curtailed freedoms based on creed and religion, but somehow managed to make enormous strides in the area of LGBT civil rights, so we were on precarious ground with some complicated inconsistencies milling about and then we elected a president who is a xenophobic, racist, elitist misogynist who is easily manipulated by the likes of Stephen Miller, a man whose formative trauma is still unknown but you don't get that dead inside without something bad happening to you.  And now we, as a nation, have very unfairly and inappropriately vilified those who come here to immigrate.  My family, arriving centuries ago with the Puritans, were certainly not here legally.  Native Americans wanted no part of them, I am quite certain.  Many of the rest of us came here on shaky grounds, either smuggling in, bribing to get visas, enslaved, indentured, or otherwise not completely on the up and up.  So he who is without sin should throw the first stone, I say.