i hope that it is obvious i am not saying that...

my point was that a couple generations is usually enough to heal most animosity, assuming the offending events cease

certainly in a thousand years, ~no one will remember.

Japan and Germany made it illegal to put the evil assholes in power. The US will do no such thing, we're going to keep voting for the evil assholes and every attempt we make at progress will simply be undermined and undone.

I don't see a way out of this without a fundamental transformation of the US. At the very least that looks like a Constitutional convention, repeal of FPTP and the electoral college, maybe even changing to a parliamentary system without a powerful executive. At worst it looks like civil war. Nothing on a lesser scale than than that is going to suffice. Expecting to simply return to normal with a vote for blue and pretend this never happened isn't going to work.

> There may be an end to the damage done to their global reputation, but it's not here yet 80 years down

Let's not forget that in the early part of the 20th century, Germany was the powerhouse of mathematics and sciences such as physics and chemistry, to the extent that top scientists basically had to learn German (1) and/or study in Germany (2).

How long did it take Germany to recover that preeminent position?

Its a trick question: they did not recover it.

1) https://hsm.stackexchange.com/questions/162/how-did-german-b...

2) e.g.

> In 1926, Oppenheimer left Cambridge for the University of Göttingen to study under Max Born; Göttingen was one of the world's leading centers for theoretical physics. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Robert_Oppenheimer#Early_ca...