Mankind has, throughout the moral advancement of his societies, advanced greatly in the past several hundred years. It was only 400 years ago that the common man would gather about in a public place to watch the agonies of a person being burned alive or torn apart by teams of horses, each pulling on a limb, or to watch the gory sight of a man's head being severed, and seeing blood spurt from his headless torso. They'd then joyfully, march around their town, with his severed head carried about on a long pole. This behavior, today, would be repulsive to anyone in a modern society. But society, in those times, needed to be led by forward-thinking moralists urging their society to evolve to occupy a higher, moral, plain.

During this evolution of society, however, each of these old societies had conservative forces opposed to any change in the evolution of their society's sensitivities. These conservative forces had to be dragged into the future, but, in spite of their victories at times, they have always lost the battle eventually. What we saw the other day an election which was a temporary victory of these forces, dominated by individuals who can be dragged into the future only with great effort, but these conservative elements in society have never, throughout history, triumphed. Thus the result of the US election was only a temporary setback and will not, if history is any guide, prevail. Conservatives of today are much more morally evolved than their ancestors, and don't condone as brutal a set of practices as their distant forefathers relished, they insist upon practices today, like a death penalty or an individual bearing firearms in public, that will be regarded as equally "uncivilized" by the conservatives 400 years in the future as "burning at the stake" is by conservatives, today.