My adopted US homeland should be wary of making the same mistakes.

Though the electorate at this moment is sensibly focused on achieving a victory that will grant some reprieve and solace, such an urgency should not postpone the need for an overdue reckoning with the dark imperfections in our history and national character that generated the conditions for the republic to be in such dire peril.

Those conditions, enabled by those who enabled Trump and ignored his danger, his nastiness, his serial mendacity, will probably endure well beyond the day (if it comes) when he leaves the White House. We will be left to contend with the worst traits of the US’s past that he exalted and exacerbated: the imperial arrogance, the nativism and misogyny, the ecological degradation, the assault on minority and workers’ rights, the myth of exceptionalism.

That is the somber lesson that Chile yesterday and today whispers to us from afar. Only a profound and painful self-examination of our identity, what the splendid guardians of this experiment that started 250 years ago are demanding, can help to stave off the ominous possibility that years from now the country will be facing a repetition of the current terrifying crisis.