CONRAD BLACK ON OUR LAME ELECTION: This Is How Democracy Is Supposed To Work.

What has happened is both less alarming and less surprising than this conventional wisdom implies. The United States has rarely been the Tocquevillian idyll of Norman Rockwell families in Grandma Moses communities that is the collective self-image that Walt Disney and others have generally portrayed and that even millions of Americans who know better assume is how scores of millions of their fellow citizens live. The United States survived a civil war that killed almost 10 per cent of its adult free males, the world wars, Great Depression, the upheavals of McCarthyism and the Red Scare in the Fifties, the race riots and Vietnam war strains of the Sixties, the Watergate debacle in the Seventies. . . .

This is a uniquely tawdry presidential race because one candidate is culturally offensive to half the people, but is the only alternative to a person who has serious problems with probity and is a continuation of a sleazy and broken-down system that a majority wants changed drastically. The price of change is Donald and the cost of avoiding Donald is Hillary. So it is not surprising that the campaign has plumbed the depths it has, and that the match is so negative. Nor is it, in the long term, alarming.

A colleague who’s been following InstaPundit since the beginning asked why I don’t seem super-energized about the election. I replied that Trump, and even Hillary, would be better than Obama, so . . .