If the next president, Trump or Clinton, is not more successful than anyone in that office since Ronald Reagan, the far right or the far left is going to take over the most powerful government in the world in four years. Then the fatuous alarms about Trump being an extremist, as opposed to just a rather coarse candidate at times, will be well founded. There will then be no distinction between woods and trees, and instead of Longfellow’s “union strong and great” we will be wandering in his “forest primeval.”

Predictions remain hazardous. No serious person would believe Clinton deliberately endangered national security with her emails, or that she was directly suborned, through the Clinton Foundation or otherwise. But her endless falsehoods to the Federal Bureau of Investigation and Congress about the emails, and the slow-drying cement of the foundation sleaze that is now up to her waist as she struggles toward the election, can only become more difficult. The Democratic convention was addressed by both Clintons, both Obamas, Joe Biden, and vice-presidential nominee Tim Kaine, who between them represented occupancy of or nomination to 48 years in the official presidential and vice-presidential residences. No previous presidential nominee except Robert Dole was at the Republican convention, and none was mentioned. The Democrats had a complacent orgy of continuity and the Republicans a celebration of complete change.

For eight straight terms, from 1981 to 2013, either a Bush or a Clinton was president, vice-president or secretary of State, and both families put up candidates for their parties’ presidential nominations this year. There has never been anything remotely like such a co-regency in U.S. history, and it is not based on spectacularly good performance in office. Change must come. Trump is not an ideal personification of political change. But anyone who doesn’t see what is happening, as Sen. Marco Rubio said when he was bombed in the Republican primary of his home state of Florida by Trump by nearly a million votes, has “failed to see the tsunami.”