Thread by @nytopinion

What have we lost? What is at stake?

In a special section ahead of next week’s election, all 15 of our columnists write about President Trump and what has happened to America in the past four years. nyti.ms/34DPxmm

“Trump has been a corrosive acid on America’s social capital,” writes @NickKristof. “He has cost us trust. He has dissolved our connectivity.” nyti.ms/3jIhyh4

How has Trump caused a loss of faith? He “snuffed out my confidence, flickering but real, that we could go only so low and forgive only so much. With him we went lower — or at least a damningly large percentage of us did,” writes @FrankBruni. nyti.ms/3eb9cxg

“As a nation, we’ve lost our sense of altruistic and moral purpose,” writes @JenSeniorNY. “Joe Biden has staked his entire campaign on his decency, his moral vision, his old-fashioned belief that one should love thy neighbor as thyself.” nyti.ms/2TFaVS5

“Joe Biden is the personification of decency, and if he wins he’ll do his best to restore our standards of behavior,” writes @nytdavidbrooks. “But a lot of people on the hard left and the hard right now consider politics a war of all against all.” nyti.ms/34Fauxc

“We, America, let our guard down for a campaign cycle, believing, surely, that the most qualified woman to ever run would defeat the least qualified man to do so,” writes @CharlesMBlow. “We didn’t vote with the intensity the emergency required.” nyti.ms/34DTJm8

There’s an upside to the Trump presidency, @gailcollins says. “In this terrible time of pandemic, confusion, economic crisis and useless presidential leadership, women all around the country are picking up the proverbial gauntlet.” nyti.ms/35PEJAT

Whenever the Trump era ends, writes @jbouie, “we’ll no longer have the luxury to indulge our illusions about the character of this nation and its government” nyti.ms/35L3Apz

Republicans “will have spent the past four years squandering their reputation, forsaking their principles, and trashing the kind of political culture they once claimed to hold dear,” Bret Stephens writes nyti.ms/3kIXXOW

President Trump has subverted American culture itself, @michelleinbklyn writes. “Every moment spent thinking about Trump is a moment that could have been spent contemplating, creating or appreciating something else.” nyti.ms/3oHYt23

“Tuesday’s election will be seen globally as a referendum on the durability of democracy,” writes @NYTimesCohen. “If American democracy, long a beacon, cannot self-correct, then all democracies are at risk.” nyti.ms/35Qnb7M

“If Trump is defeated, a Biden administration will probably do its best to restore America’s traditional role in the world,” writes @paulkrugman. But “everyone will remember that we’re a country that elected someone like Donald Trump.” nyti.ms/3oB7I4l

“Four more years of a president without shame, backed by a party without spine, amplified by a TV network without integrity, and the cancer will be in the bones of every institution that has made America America,” writes @tomfriedman nyti.ms/3kIdMpc

“Trump — aided by a soulless, rapacious Silicon Valley that keeps torquing up the algorithm for conflict and conspiracy — has relentlessly tried to obscure our ability to tell the true from the false,” writes @maureendowd nyti.ms/3jLxfDX

2016 “was a moment when all kinds of uncomfortable truths about American life were suddenly exposed,” @DouthatNYT writes, “when the failures in both parties and every faction were laid bare” nyti.ms/3eaehpp

Despite everything, the Trump years “weren’t for naught,” writes @fmanjoo. “One day, inshallah, we will look back on this time as the beginning of the great American awakening.” nyti.ms/380w0yR