It speaks volumes about the peril American democracy is in that a photograph of two opposing politicians displaying mutual affection can be seen as a glimpse of the reptilian conspiracy of elites.

George W Bush met Hillary Clinton at Nancy Reagan’s funeral and a clearly unposed, unfeigned picture shows them sharing a laugh like very old friends. He has his arm around her, his face almost ecstatic with delight. Her face shows the same pure hilarity and lack of control. This is no brittle encounter at a funeral. The former and would-be president are genuinely getting on very well – and one of them has just made a very good joke.

“This is the exact reason you should vote for Trump,” concludes one commenter. “Clintons, Bushes are one in [sic] the same.” The same might be said by a Bernie Sanders supporter. This is why you should vote for Sanders; because the old political elite are all in bed together and they all pay homage to the same mercenary gods of big money and oligarchy.

When Clinton became secretary of state in 2009 the continuing occupation of Iraq was the issue that Bush’s administration had left like a heap of gore in the State Department. Getting out of Iraq was President Obama’s promise and Clinton’s task. Yet in 2002 she voted in the Senate to give Bush the go-ahead for his controversial invasion. Does this picture show that she is embarrassingly close to a man widely reviled as a warmonger? Is this the kind of image that is keeping the Sanders challenge to her in the Democrat primaries very much alive and might haunt her if she does become a candidate for president?

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Get real. It’s a picture of two human beings actually being human. They do not hate each other. Why should they? Would antipathy make them better people? Would Clinton be more admirable if she had spat on Bush – or better still, refused to attend the funeral of a Republican first lady at all? She’s already been criticised for praising Nancy Reagan’s stance on Aids, as if her comments were anything but a generous attempt to speak well of a much-admired American.

What we’re seeing in this picture is bipartisanship in an intimate form. It is a touchy-feely image of the mutual respect, even secret liking, that is fundamental to all democracies. Politicians do like each other, across their dividing lines. They can joke and even be friends. When that civilised empathy does not exist – when a scene like this becomes unimaginable – that’s the time to worry.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘Donald Trump uses violent language and offered his support to a fan who lashed out.’ Photograph: Chris Keane/Reuters

That time may be coming. Democracy is failing. An American politician is inciting violence and egging on aggression. Donald Trump uses violent language and offered his support to a fan who lashed out. The violence he speaks of came to pass in clashes in Chicago and his response – cancelling a rally because of the supposed threat from protesters – had the sinister demagoguery of an accomplished bierkeller ranter. Street-fighting, rabble-rousing, hate-mongering, wall-building extremism is taking Trump ever closer to the Republican presidential candidacy.

So wait a moment. That is happening. It really takes huge restraint not to compare Trump’s rise with the way political chaos was created and exploited in early-20th-century Vienna or Munich. And you find a picture of a hug worrying?

This picture shows what politics needs. More hugs – or at least, more honesty that one’s opponents are reasonable people with perspectives you can try to understand without sharing. The alternative is a politics of pure hate and resentment. Anger can be power – if you are prepared to unleash it as irresponsibly as Trump has.

I wonder if the American electorate as a whole is really as angry as supporters of Trump and Sanders appear to be? If so, the world could be in big trouble. But on the other side of the Atlantic, the British Labour party has gambled on anger at austerity and lost. Ed Miliband banked on class resentment at Eton toffs running the country and people who felt “squeezed” by a Tory elite who cared only about the rich. At last year’s general election it turned out people were not that cross in England or Wales. So Labour has gone much further to the left and depends even more on the electorate seeing all Tories as “scum”. Except the voters don’t see the world that way. The voters – in Britain, and let’s hope America too – are ultimately with Bush and Clinton, hugging across the lines. After all it’s only politics.

America has demons of its own and so does its left. Iraq is a festering sore. I suppose that’s the real reason some people find this picture shocking. There is the man who invaded Iraq, hugging Hillary Clinton. How can she? She should be throwing her shoe at him.

Bush, however, did not threaten basic democratic values in the west in the way Trump does. In fact, perhaps the intensity of this moment has something to do with the enormity of the danger Trump poses. Is that merely a danger to the “establishment” these warm friends embody? No, it is a threat to the kind of basic decent values that mean we treat fellow humans with respect, from political opponents sharing a joke to people of all religions and races getting the same rights. In the new Weimar age we are in the last whisky bar and must hug one another or die.