Donald Trump, Mussolini with moobs, could no doubt do grave damage to America in just four years with his toxic mix of narcissism, bigotry and poor judgement. But isn’t considerable damage already done before he even enters office if the majority choose to elect a white supremacist and aspiring fascist? Haven’t we become a strange and different thing, not quite America? For all the troubling fear of foreigners, wouldn’t we have become something foreign to what we’re supposed to be? We’ll have voluntarily surrendered our principles to a sickening degree, created a landscape where the heinous could become routine, where “unthinkable” things, as the GOP nominee puts it, are possible.

From Ezra Klein’s Vox piece about the new abnormal:

What we just witnessed in Cleveland and Philadelphia defies our normal political vocabulary. We are used to speaking of American politics as split between the two major parties. It’s Democrats versus Republicans, liberals versus conservatives, left versus right.

But not this election. The conventions showed that this is something different. This campaign is not merely a choice between the Democratic and Republican parties, but between a normal political party and an abnormal one.

The Democratic Party’s convention was a normal political party’s convention. The party nominated Hillary Clinton, a longtime party member with deep experience in government. Clinton was endorsed by Bernie Sanders, the runner-up in the primary. Barack Obama, the sitting president, spoke in favor of Clinton. Various Democratic luminaries gave speeches endorsing Clinton by name. The assembled speakers criticized the other party’s nominee, arguing that he would be a bad president and should be defeated at the polls.

That isn’t to say that Democrats didn’t show divisions or expose fault lines. They did. Political parties are chaotic things. The Democratic Party’s primary was unusually bitter, and listening to the loud “boos” of Sanders’s most committed supporters, there’s real reason to wonder whether Democrats will fracture in coming years. But for now, the Democrats nominated a normal candidate, held a normal convention, and remain a normal political party.

The Republican Party’s convention was not a normal political party’s convention.•