jbr..probably because people are often slow to change their opinions to reflect new realities…they don’t understand that an institution (say, the Democratic Party) that was once perhaps a good thing is now something very different. To take an extreme case: many German Jews had a hard time understanding that their civilized, humanistic Germany had become a monster. (I have also read that in a remote village in Russia, the local Jews actually *looked forward* to the arrival of the German troops–they remembered the polite, “correct” officers of the previous war, who they preferred to the home-bred anti-Semites. Of course, things were different this time.) It can be very dangerous to assume that yesterday’s friend is a friend forever.