The gift of Clinton

Instead, precisely because she embodies so many of the establishment’s vices and drags so much baggage in her wake, a Clinton administration is more likely to have a demystifying effect on the presidential cult than to amplify it in the style of Bush’s “Mission Accomplished” period or Obama’s 2008 Great Awakening.

Such demystification, a return to the old familiar Clintonian seediness, might be a better cure for some of the impulses behind Trumpism than the kind of landslide-cum-apotheosis that a more appealing Democratic nominee might have achieved. That’s because politics often works in an imitative cycle: Were Trump defeated by someone whose charisma, star wattage and mastery of the celebrity-politics nexus outstripped his, the impulse on the right would be to double down on those qualities next time, to enter an arms race to build a better class of demagogue.

But a more sordidly transactional sort of liberalism, a progressive president whose supporters and scribes are pre-disillusioned rather than panting for the Big Win, might be a tonic for the right — not one that cures all paranoias (just ask Drudge), but one that discourages the right’s search for a Caesar of its own.