So what we're going to get instead is adversarial: horrors are called for, everybody else has to fight to minimize them, and so only some horrifying things happen. And for a lot of people, as long as those horrors don't affect them directly, they'll say that everything worked the way it was supposed to.
So, adversarial is what it's going to be, then. Onward.
(The answer, of course, is "he was a state Senator in Illinois at the time".)
Well, we know there is some autoregression, some reversion to the mean, some rich time structure.
But crucially, it's an online learning system, with a decaying memory. Voters forget populists are bad, and vote for them from time to time. Then one of two things will happen: either we're all wrong and populists are actually ok, or they really are terrible, they do their terrible stuff and eventually get ousted, with voters memory refreshed.
It's not that it's a good thing, rather it's baked into how democracy works. Same as winters are baked into the progression of seasons, and there's no point despairing about them every year.
So it's a "let it rip", not as a vindictive response, but rather that's a sad but necessary part of democracy.
For democracy to be preserved, political players have to have respect for democracy as a prerequisite. The Heritage Foundation and their oligarch friends have absolutely no interest in that, and the rest of the Republican party mostly just nods along while collecting their paychecks.
"We are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be."
When it comes to economic matters and running the federal government, I say we should let them open the door. Americans desperately want to try dumb things and democratically voted for it, I say we let it happen and fail of its own accord. At the end of the day it's just money and they won the vote - let them smoke the whole pack.
When it comes to political retribution, dismantling independent news, rewarding cronies, attacking democracy - we should personally oppose it whenever we can, but I cannot go into a room and be the only one who cares. I will not stop robbery on my own.
When it comes to real matters - our friends and family who have lives here and may be deported back to hostile warzones because of racist BS - this is the hill I am dying on and for this I will keep my powder dry.