“How will academics remember Ronald Reagan?” I inquired breathlessly. He paused for a moment and chose his words carefully.

“I believe that America is strong enough” — the answer came complete with a pained look on his face — “to even survive eight years of Ronald Reagan.”

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I was stunned. How could anyone be so dismissive of a president who had just carried 49 of 50 states and had ushered in a new era of good feelings? It was Morning in America, dammit. Didn’t anyone pass the memo along to this hippie? Apparently not. I slunk back to my apartment dazed and confused by what had just gone down at the University Club.

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That exchange at the University of Alabama taught me a valuable lesson that has stayed with me over three decades: Reasonable people who respect one another can hold wildly divergent views over public policy and the politicians who run Washington.

In the 1980s, there were Americans who shared my professor’s disdain at the thought of Reagan sitting in the Oval Office. By the 1990s, I was the one stunned that there were enough people in America who would vote for Bill Clinton to elect the man president. In the 2000s, George W. Bush brought Democrats to a level of contempt unseen in modern American politics — that is until Republicans began hyperventilating daily about the existential threat Barack Obama posed to family, freedom and the very fabric of Our Great Republic.

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“Mr. Speaker,” a congressman must have said at least one time after President Obama renamed a post office in his conservative district, “tonight freedom has died a bloody death!” If I had a dime for every time I heard that line from conservatives over the past eight years, I’d be rich enough to buy a seat at a political fundraiser next to George Clooney.

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But just as Republicans lost all sense of political perspective during the Obama presidency, Democrats did the same during the Bush years. And before that, Republicans like me sometimes lost their better judgment during Clinton’s stay in the White House.

I make this sparklingly bipartisan observation while believing that Obama’s foreign policy has been the most disastrous of my lifetime, somehow even worse than George W. Bush’s atrocious run as commander in chief. But just as my professor believed America would survive Reagan’s eight years in office, I know the United States of America is resilient enough to survive Obama’s multitude of miscues.

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Don’t do stupid “stuff”? Too late when you’re a commander in chief who ignores genocide in Syria, creates the a void in Iraq that leads to the rise of the Islamic State, dismisses that group as a JV team, appears blasé about their Paris terrorist attacks, does the “wave” with Raúl Castro while American body parts are being scraped off the walls of a Belgian airport, and tells staffers that terrorism is less of a threat to Americans than slipping in bathtubs.

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Were I that young and impetuous college student back at Alabama, I would have exploded over such gross incompetence and impatiently explained to anyone who would listen how this president posed an existential threat to our national security. But time has taught me that the “Chicken Littles” among us are always wrong. The sky never falls on America.

Maybe that’s why I am so exhausted by decades of screamers on talk radio and cable news, and the legions of angry partisans who spend their days and nights predicting America’s collapse. These nattering nabobs of negativism that pollute our not-so-new-media landscape have embarrassed themselves for 30 years by constantly predicting the collapse of a country that has to date survived two world wars, slavery, a bloody civil war, countless recessions and Spiro Agnew as vice president.

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But now, these histrionics have risen to a new, mind-numbing roar with media outlets across the political spectrum warning of a solitary man so cunningly evil that he alone possesses the ability to destroy American democracy in a single bounce. Never mind that only a few months back, these same outlets dismissed Donald Trump as a vulgarian stooge spawned from the cultural backwash that pollutes our reality-TV culture. As with most of Bush and Obama’s sworn enemies, Donald Trump’s antagonists can’t decide whether he is a bloated dunce or an all-powerful supervillain set to appear in the next “Avengers” movie.

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Robert Reich seems to see Trump as Thor’s evil twin brother, comparing the former “Apprentice” star to “lurid figures such as Benito Mussolini, Joseph Stalin, [and] Adolph Hitler.” What a subtle touch displayed by the former secretary of labor to compare the GOP front-runner to a murderer’s row of tyrants responsible for the deaths of at least 50 million human beings and much of the 20th century’s horrors. Trump is, after all, still friends with Omarosa, a woman that TV Guide called one of the 60 nastiest television villains of all time. Certainly cavorting with the likes of her compares with the horrors of Stalin’s reign of terror and the killing of up to 30 million Russians. Or perhaps it was the brutish way Trump treated Rosie O’Donnell in their bitter made-for-television rivalry that leads Reich to see something in the Manhattan developer that reminds him of Hitler’s governing style that brought about World War II, Auschwitz and the death of 6 million Jews.

Whatever Reich’s reasoning, it is comically overwrought. Comparing Trump to Hitler, Stalin and Mussolini only helps the GOP front-runner in much the same way Obama was helped by Republican leaders who had their brains scrambled and fried by his success. The 44th president has masterfully played off his political opponents’ exaggerations, as has Trump.

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The New York Times’ Ross Douthat has also concluded that “freaking out over Trump-the-fascist is a good way for the political class to ignore the legitimate reasons he’s gotten this far — the deep disaffection with the Republican Party’s economic policies among working-class conservatives, the reasonable skepticism about the bipartisan consensus favoring ever more mass low-skilled immigration, the accurate sense that the American elite has misgoverned the country at home and abroad.”

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But most political and media elites are in no mood to hear about the legitimate reasons millions of Americans are standing in long lines to vote for Trump. It’s far easier to call those voters white supremacists, drug addicts and losers. And it makes many of these elites feel morally and intellectually superior to draw the foolish conclusion that a rookie politician could single-handedly lay waste to Madison’s Constitution, Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence and Lincoln’s last best hope for a dying world.