As Abraham Lincoln said a few weeks before he issued the Emancipation Proclamation,  “The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present.” The plain fact is that the future of American politics will not be marked by a return to an era of establishment rule because the establishment has failed.

Our institutions are not weak because of Trump, they are weak because our elites failed to maintain them. Our norms have not been undermined by Trump, they have been undermined by ordinary Americans who came to realize those norms were merely a cover for rank hypocrisy from our leaders. All of this has been decades in the making, and now it has come to pass.

And none of it can be wiped away by an election. The bell that sounded with Trump’s election four years ago, heralding a new populist era in American, cannot be un-rung. //

The new normal is right in front of us, right now: populist right versus populist left. Choose your fighter.