What’s at stake in the US election?

The outcome of the 2016 presidential election will show that the American political system – as we have known it – will apparently cease to exist.  Trump is nothing like those Republican pawns who, along with the puppets of the Democratic party, have spent the last 40 years erecting the facade of American democracy.  It really looks like he is ready to make good on the threat he made even prior to the Republican National Convention – to send millions of his supporters into the streets.

Today Trump represents an entirely new party made up of half of the American electorate, and they are ready for action.  And whatever the eventual political structure of this new model, this is what is shaping America’s present reality.  Moreover, this does not seem like such a unique situation.  It rather appears to be the final chapter of some ancient story, in which the convoluted plotlines finally take shape and find resolution.

The circumstances are increasingly reminiscent of 1860, when Lincoln’s election so enraged the South that those states began agitating for secession.  Trump is today symbolic of a very real American tradition that during the Civil War (1860-1865) ran headlong into American revolutionary liberalism for the first time.

Right up until World War I traditional American conservatism wore the guise of “isolationism.” Prior to WWII it was known as “non-interventionism.”  Afterward, that movement attempted to use Sen. Joseph McCarthy to…

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