“I fear that Donald Trump is taking us back to the bad old days in which it was respectable to be a bigot when it comes to race, ethnicity, religion and gender,” Allan Sloan writes. (Pool photo by Saul Loeb/via AFP/Getty Images)

I fear for my children and my grandchildren. That’s my gut reaction to the fact that our president-elect is Donald Trump.

During my 47 years of covering business, some of the people and companies that I have dealt with have told tall tales and engaged in fantasy finance. But Trump was in a class by himself. He didn’t merely run outside the baseline when it came to telling the truth, as other fantasy finance types did. He was playing in a whole different ballpark, making up stuff as he went. And he wasn’t fazed at all when I told him how I knew that what he was saying wasn’t even remotely true.

This isn’t exactly what you hope for in a president, is it?

My fear for the future has nothing to do with financial markets, my usual subject. It involves something that’s more important than markets or money. To wit: that the anti-social forces that Trump has made respectable will undermine one of the things that I love about America and that helps make us great: our ability to get along with each other, our intra-American squabbles notwithstanding.

Let me explain.

Despite being a journalist whose business is being skeptical, I’ve long been a congenital optimist about this country.

We have had bad times, and occasional bad people running the show. But as a grandson of immigrants from Eastern Europe who is married to a granddaughter of immigrants from Ireland and France, I’ve felt that our country, by welcoming and assimilating people from all over the world, becomes an increasingly better place.

Look at the diverse origins and ethnicities of some of the most successful businesspeople in our country. White, brown, black, Asian, European, all of them now Americans. Watch the opening parades of the Summer Olympics, and you see that we’ve got by far the most varied population of athletes of any country in the Games. And we win a whole lot of medals.

I’m not naive, and I’m old enough to have seen plenty of discrimination, both racial (I’m a white guy who lived in North Carolina from 1968 to 1972) and religious (I’m a Jew who used to refuse to attend events at a business club that didn’t allow Jews to be members).

But I’ve seen “whites only” signs and segregated waiting rooms disappear and have seen much of the religious stereotyping in the business world either cease to exist or go so deep underground that it’s no longer visible.

Gender discrimination is way down, as well. Not gone completely, but greatly diminished. My three daughters were never told that the paths they chose—medical school, law school, getting an MBA—weren’t appropriate for a woman. A few generations earlier, it would probably have been a different story.

I fear that Trump is taking us back to the bad old days in which it was respectable to be a bigot when it comes to race, ethnicity, religion and gender. And that he’s ushering in an era when it will be considered perfectly fine to publicly bully and threaten other people.

I have no idea if Trump actually believes the stuff that he was saying during his campaign, or whether he said it because — as a showman who has very little in the way of impulse control — he thought it’s what the marks wanted to hear. It doesn’t really matter. Once you’ve unleashed hatred and resentment and made it respectable, as Trump has, it’s hard to make it go away. If Trump or his supporters even want it to go away.

I’m no fan of political correctness, or of looking at everything through a filter of race, religion and class. But civility is important. So is listening to what other people have to say, especially if they come from a different background than yours or a different part of the world.

My concern is that the forces Trump has unleashed will undermine one of our country’s biggest strengths — our ability to learn from people who are different than we are — and that this will hurt our country and our economy badly over the long run.

As a not-so-minor aside, I’m also concerned that Trump, who benefits from plenty of public programs, has made it respectable to avoid paying federal income taxes to the country that gave his family a chance to succeed. When poor people take benefits but don’t pay taxes, people call them moochers or welfare queens. In which case, Trump is a welfare king.

If Trump truly wants to lead by example to bring us together rather than to exploit our differences, he could propose something that will cost him money, such as closing some of the tax loopholes that real estate developers like him use.

But I don’t think he’ll do that. Rather, I suspect, he will continue to rail against a loophole that he doesn’t use: the “carried interest” loophole that lets some hedge fund and private equity fund managers pay low taxes on their share of their investors’ income.

I hope that President Trump proves to be a different person than Candidate Trump and has enough sense and self-control to realize that running a country is different than running an insurrection. But I wouldn’t bet on that. That’s why I’m worried about what the future holds for my kids and grandkids. And why you should be worried, too.