The day before the election, on social media, I posted this year's I VOTED image along with a 20-year-old quote from Norman Mailer—back when he was on Charlie Rose's show during the runup to the Iraq War:

“Democracy has a fundamental assumption: that if you allow the mass of people to express their will, more good will come out of that than bad. That means that democracy can always fail. And the best of democracies can fail. We have probably the greatest democracy that ever existed: We can go down the tubes; we can turn into a totalitarian country, too.”

And here we are.

So was democracy a good idea in its day and America too stupid/greedy/spoiled/awful for it now? Let me quote another postwar Jewish-American writer, E.L. Doctorow, from his essay “The Character of Presidents,” which is in that book to the right. He's writing about the unlikely return of the thoroughly unlikeable Richard Nixon in 1968. Nixon was down, and humiliated, and then he was back in the Oval Office, the most powerful man in the world, and Doctorow gives us this long, beautiful sentence about what that may mean. Please read it in full. See if it reminds you of someone:

“That someone so rigid and lacking in honor or moral distinction of any kind, someone so stiff with crippling hatreds, so spirtually dysfunctional, out of touch with everything in life that is joyful and fervently beautiful and blessed, with no discernible reverence in him for human life, and certainly never a hope of wisdom, but living only by pure politics as if were some colorless blood substitute in his veins—that this being could lurchingly stumble up from his own wretched career and use history and the two-party system to elect himself president is, I suppose, a gloriously perverse justification of our democratic form of government.”

You'd need to lose “...living only by pure politics” because that's Nixon not Trump—with Trump, it's money money money, and power—but otherwise much of the quote actually fits Trump better. Certainly “lurchingly stumbling up from his own wretched career...”

But then there's “a gloriously perverse justification of our democratic form of government.” Doctorow wrote that in the 1990s when Nixon was history. So maybe when Trump is history (and c'mon, history!), I may feel the same way about him. But right now? He's remains the greatest threat to American democracy and American rule of law in my lifetime.