CLEVELAND -- John Adams saw this coming. He understood better than most democracy's fragility.

"Remember, democracy never lasts long," the former president wrote to a friend in 1814, as noted by David Remnick in an April New Yorker column. "It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy that did not commit suicide."

If Adams was right, and if suicide is the instrument of choice, then we're in the process of writing the note.

A hostile and vanishing middle class; robots wreaking havoc with wages and the workforce; and an autocratic president who outwardly embraces violence, hatred and anti-Semitism: This is exactly how democracy takes its own life.

Edward Luce is an Oxford-educated, Washington-based columnist for the Financial Times.

In his terrific and widely praised new book, "The Retreat of Western Liberalism," Luce convincingly makes the case deep thinkers on the right and left have been promulgating for months:

"If the next few years resemble the last, it is questionable whether Western democracy can take the strain .... As winter follows autumn, it is not Trump we fear most - though he is scary enough. It is whoever might follow him."

Indeed, President Donald Trump is not the cause of all this.

The president is merely the symptom of an American divisiveness - a political unrest rooted in the failure of both parties to meaningfully address the nation's vast economic inequities.

Nevertheless, Trump's contempt for American values is almost unimaginable.

It's a contempt that manifests itself in disrespect for the rule of law, lying about election-rigging in an attempt to undermine confidence in the Constitution, openly encouraging violence by his supporters.

But Trump's lack of a moral compass is most evident is in his betrayal of the desperate, angry and often decent people who elected him.

Imagine a president so lacking in character that he explains away an event tarred by violence and murder with a false equivalency breathtaking in its depravity.

Not once, but twice, the president of the United States said both sides were to blame for the deadly violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, on Aug. 12.

All the Republican spin notwithstanding, the meaning of Trump's words was unmistakable.

They declared without equivocation that the people who gathered in Charlottesville to protest bigotry, hatred and anti-Semitism were not one iota better than the bigots, haters and anti-Semites who drew them there.

With that, Trump forever surrendered any right to be taken seriously as a president. Or a human being.

For the Republicans who run Congress, soon comes the ultimate test of their character, the test that will define their legacies.

Do they stand with this man, whom they can't help but see as unfit for the presidency, or do they summon the character and conscience to rescue their country and party.

The people they represent have already decided.

In an ABC News-Washington Post poll of 1,014 adults taken Aug. 16-20, 56 percent disapproved of Trump's reaction to the Charlottesville violence, while 28 percent approved.

The poll found 83 percent think it's unacceptable for people to hold neo-Nazi views, while 9 percent think it's just fine. Among Republicans, it rises to 13 percent.

Still, millions of voters continue to worship their soulless leader. The vast majority of Republicans in Congress stand by their man. And a frightening number of phony religious leaders still act as if Trump is God's messenger.

The exact solution of how to rescue the country is above my pay grade. But I have a two-year-old grandson capable of understanding it isn't a health care bill that offers massive tax cuts to the rich and strips more than 20 million poor people of their health care.

Time is of the essence. After Trump's latest unhinged performance, at a Hitler-style rally Tuesday night in Arizona, former National Intelligence Director James Clapper questioned his fitness for office and described Trump's access to the country's nuclear arsenal as "pretty damn scary."

It will only get worse. The divisions and despair grow deeper each day.

Luce's book offers a mountain of evidence on the disruptive influence of shrinking wages and disappearing jobs.

In 1950, a worker living in big-city America worked an average of 45 hours a month to pay the rent or mortgage. Today it takes 101 hours. And a third of Americans with a degree in science, technology, engineering or math (STEM) work in jobs that require none of those skills. Of the non-STEM jobs, nearly half are vulnerable to being replaced by robots.

Just as dangerous are the lies promulgated by the right that lazy Americans addicted to government handouts are responsible for the nation's decline.

"Judged by aptitude, almost half those in America's top two-fifths income bracket are there because of the luck of family background," wrote Luce, adding, "A big share of those in the bottom-fifth would be in the top if they had the same life chances....

"By far the biggest determinant is the bed in which you were born. Why wouldn't the losers be angry?"

Many deserve to be.

When Trump fails them, as he surely will, anger will turn to rage, the sense of betrayal only deepen.

Then comes the real trouble.

Brent Larkin was The Plain Dealer's editorial director from 1991 until his retirement in 2009.

To reach Brent Larkin: blarkin@cleveland.com

Have something to say about this topic? Use the comments to share your thoughts, and stay informed when readers reply to your comments by using the Notification Settings (in blue) just below.