THE REVOLT OF THE PUBLIC, AND THE RISE OF DONALD TRUMP:

If, as I suspect, Trump is a blunt objet trouvé, an accidental instrument wielded by the public against the political institutions of the industrial age, then two additional propositions are likely to be true. First, the public’s temper has moved much closer to nihilism than anyone not wholly deranged by conspiracy theories could have imagined. Second, the disintegration of the institutions of American democracy has proceeded much faster than I, at least, would have thought possible.

The trouble with such assertions, of course, is that we’re dealing with a fast-evolving, vastly complex set of human relations, caught in the fever heat of political conflict, amid the muddle of events. Analysis is hardly likely to be conclusive. What follows, then, is not finished analysis, and is only indirectly another attempt to classify Trump as if he were an exotic new species of insect blown in from the rain forest.

My subject is the sickness of democracy in our country, which appears to have taken a dangerous turn for the worse since I wrote the last pages of The Revolt of the Public.

I’ve been saying for years that we have the worst political class in our history. Why should the electorate be better?