A funny thing happened on the way home from the forum Tuesday night. I came to the painfully obvious conclusion that the United States of America really is a house divided, that Lincoln said more than 150 years ago cannot stand.

And I really don’t think change is on the horizon, unless we have a miracle at the polls in November.

It’s been said by many political observers that we now are more divided than at any time in history since the Civil War. I concur, and that point was driven home last Tuesday night at the Democrats’ Sixth Congressional District primary forum.

Forums such as the one at Wayland Middle School too often are dog and pony shows, in which the candidates line up like they would for beauty contests. And too often they don’t talk about issues that really matter.

I’ve covered an immense number of Republican Party primary forums in which everybody seemed to agree on all issues, and the only differences were in degree. One solid example is, “I’m more pro-life than you are.”

When Gary Newell and James Bailey sparred in a GOP forum for 87th District State Rep. in the year 2000, Newell gleefully told his opponent, “Jim, I agree. I could go over there and hug you.” To which Bailey replied, in classic homophobic style, “Handshake’ll do.”

The love fest continued last Tuesday night, when I saw virtually all candidates agree they hate Trump, Congressman Fred Upton and Gov. Rick Snyder. And they all opposed our current private health care system, want some kind of gun control, oppose privatizing education, and promote clean water and clean air.

Democrats who are tired of the same old, same old, will do well to vote for any one of the seven hopefuls who showed up for the forum. They essentially disagree on nothing. The only difference is in degree, just like Republicans. The red/blue divide is not a myth.

Some observers ask naively if there is some kind of way to compromise, somewhere to be in the middle, somewhere to reach across the aisle. Sadly, I no longer believe that place exists, and I blame the evangelical/fundamentalist takeover of the Republican Party than began in 1980, when it turned its back on perhaps the most religious president of the 20th century and cast its lot with a man who rarely attended church.

The Christian right abhors compromise and demands everyone march in lockstep. It demands loyalty — you’re either with us or against us. Now that it has overrun the GOP, it has no use for reaching across the aisle.

As a result, Democrats now have a tendency to march in lockstep, just like they did on a proposal to overturn Obamacare and on the tax plan that was approved along party lines last December. And now pundits are saying that even if a blue wave enables Dems to take over the U.S. House and Senate in November, stalemate will continue. They may have enough votes in the House to impeach Trump, but not enough for a guilty verdict in the Senate.

The awful truth is that whoever emerges among the seven to take on Upton, he or she will have a mountain to climb. Upton has dones a reasonably good job in constituent service, just like late Howard Wolpe did. He’s been able to con the shrinking center into believing he’s a moderate, though he virtually always votes with his party, such as last December on the tax plan.

Upton has never received less than 55% of the vote in the 16 elections he has won since 1986. I believe he decided not to run against Debbie Stabenow for U.S. Senate because of prospects of that blue wave. Meanwhile, he’s a safe bet in the Sixth Congressional District.

The candidate forum in Wayland was a huge success for the Wayland Dems and Allegan County Democratic Party just because they lured just under 200 people to watch. But when it comes to upending Upton, they’ve got miles to go before they sleep.