In a sane, normal and functional democracy — and even in a mildly dysfunctional one, which is a widespread condition these days — Donald Trump’s appalling performance in Tuesday night’s presidential debate would not just have ensured his electoral defeat but ended his career as a public figure. But — and you know where I’m going here — we do not live in such a democracy.

Whether we live in one at all, indeed, is up for debate. Yes, we still hold elections that are not entirely predictable in advance (although, way too much of the time, they are), and whose winners get to assume positions of authority. But the popular superstition that purportedly “free and fair” elections between rival gangs of millionaires equates to democracy is one of the most dangerous of American delusions. We went from two wildly unpopular geriatric candidates stuffed with dark money, who transparently did not reflect majority opinion on a wide range of issues, to just one of those plus a last-minute substitute, chosen in desperation with no semblance of a democratic process, who has ridden a wave of exuberance based on nothing more than novelty and sheer relief. Those emotions are highly understandable, but do we have to pretend that anything about that is healthy?

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Too many of us in the media have made jokes over the past decade about living in the “worst timeline,” or suggesting that the godlike alien authors of this simulation should simply switch it off. But the anxiety beneath such alleged witticisms is deeply troubling: Facing the fact that this is our reality, and that you and I will never get to live in any other hypothetical sliding-doors universe, is acutely painful.

There is a profound darkness within America, a widely shared sensation that something has gone wrong, even if we can’t quite identify it and don’t remotely agree about what’s causing it. That feeling of rootlessness and discontent, of society coming unstuck — the academic term is anomie — definitely isn’t unique to this country, but it gets massively amplified by our national narcissism and our physical isolation. Nearly all of us feel it, regardless of where we live or who we vote for. (If we conclude it’s worth voting for anyone at all, that is; nearly one-third of adult citizens never even bother.)

One tangible symptom of that darkness is the fact that a visibly disordered man appeared on television before a worldwide audience and delivered an angry, incoherent diatribe fueled by grotesque fantasies about baby-killing doctors and cat-eating Haitians, and that he appears, two days........

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