“Darkness at Noon” Arrives

Back in August, when the media were touting Hillary as an inevitability because of Trump’s horrific gaffes and battleground state polls, I joined the chorus. Yet in my gut I knew, and even hinted, that this might be wrong, and that come September what economists call an unpredictable, disastrous “black swan” event was very possible.

Now, the black swan is circling, although still far enough in the distance to appear gray, as people debate whether Hillary’s pneumonia scare, and her botched coverup of the diagnosis, is just a passing malady or politically fatal. In my view, all that Trump needs do at this point is to appear semi-rational in the upcoming debates to claim to have vanquished a “low energy” Hillary Clinton put under the merciless hypochondriacal microscope by a misogynistic pop culture, and then coast in to a November victory.

Who is to blame for this turn of events? Overly smug political analysts? Sensational media like Dr. Oz that have “normalized” Trump’s grotesqueries? I would tentatively place the blame instead in two possible areas.

First, is what Brooks Adams, brother of the more famous historian Henry Adams, called “the degradation of the democratic dogma.” The notion that most voters are wise enough to cast an informed ballot is certainly a demonstrated myth. I’m still a small “d” democratic, but only because I believe that individuals should have the right to vote their interests as they see them—whether or not they intelligently do so.

Second, is what has become a perhaps irredeemable American political system. In one sense, the American presidential nominating system worked as it should have this year in both parties. The Democrats nominated Hillary over Bernie Sanders, a back bench unreconstructed Marxist about as fit to govern as a geriatric Castro brother. Less obviously, at least from the perspective of professional GOP pols, doing nothing to prevent a Trump candidacy proved a better strategy than doing something to nominate their perceived poison pill of the party’s logical rightwing ideological extreme: Ted Cruz.

The problem is that our ossified system, precariously keeping the lid on crazies in both parties, has now produced a nonideological but truly zany candidate in Trump and in Hillary a passable but profoundly flawed candidate, accused of corruption, in my view wrongfully—but, politically, probably fatally in this cynical, unforgiving year.

Donald Trump very likely could not distinguish the biblical Book of Revelation from his newspaper horoscope. Nevertheless, that Book may be telling Americans something: “the light of a lamp shall not shine in you anymore, and the voice of bridegroom and bride shall not be heard in you anymore.”

Darkness at noon, indeed.