“This sounds a little extreme to say, but it’s like an evolutionary development, right?” Clinton told me. Your communities should begin small, she said, in terms that precisely echoed those set out in her 1996 book, “It Takes a Village.” You form identities in your family, she said, and then in your neighborhood and in wider communities. “It was all person to person, and you learned to deal with people, for better or worse,” she said. She contrasted this with modern social-media cultures. People use the terms “friends” and “followers” to describe people they have never met, whose identities they think they know but may not even be real. “And you are having emotional and intellectual experiences,” Clinton said, “that are unlike anything that’s ever happened in the entirety of human history.”

Like the culture it is playing out in, this presidential campaign has existed in a racing progression of flash images and snap judgments. Personal narratives get lost, while a candidate’s can become warped through the vertigo. We might be as interconnected as ever but starved for connections, Clinton says. Trump, perhaps tellingly, is not much for hearing voters’ stories. He rarely does retail stops and hates shaking hands. He tweets at all hours and constantly watches himself on television. He is in so many ways the anti-Hillary.

At the end of our conversation in Toledo, I asked Clinton if she thought the resentment sowed and fissures exposed in the course of this campaign would make the United States an even harder country to govern. “No, we face some hard choices,” she began, and I immediately smirked — “Hard Choices” was the title of her 2014 memoir on her years as secretary of state, and I figured she was clicking into huckster and sound-bite mode. But then she veered in a direction that surprised me.

“There are some difficult trends, which are not primarily political,” Clinton told me. “They are more cultural, psychological, and we just have to deal with them.” Earlier she had mentioned the 1985 book “Amusing Ourselves to Death,” by Neil Postman, about how television has oriented politics more and more toward entertainment. She also cited the historian Christopher Lasch, the author of “The Culture of Narcissism.” The authors, she said, “were trying to come to grips, before the internet, trying to understand what was happening in our society, that we are experiencing a level of alienation, disconnectedness.”

She told me that her primary objective as president would be to encourage connectedness, to have actual conversations. Clinton has always preferred to build narratives from a granular level: start with details and allow a message to emerge more slowly. In college in the late 1960s, she resisted revolutionary change in favor of grinding out incremental progress inside the system. She has no patience for messianic rhetoric and hyperbolic slogans and grandiose speeches. It can make her an awkward fit in this campaign environment, harder to break through and determinedly not dazzling.

But Clinton said that the key to building connectedness lies in a leader’s ability to knit together a sense of common destiny from the ground up. “It requires real storytelling,” she said. “And I think as president, I can tell that story. It’s harder as a candidate.” I had often heard the exact opposite. In Obama’s first term, his aides lamented that it was much easier to tell stories and drive a message in a campaign context than from the White House. As president, they said, you are constantly reacting to things and largely at the mercy of events — “governing in prose,” as opposed to “campaigning in poetry,” to adapt the old line from Mario Cuomo.

Clinton envisions a model more suited to her skills and comforts. It also could portend a very different style of president — without the sweeping themes of Barack Obama, the moral certainty of George W. Bush or the explanatory clarity of Bill Clinton. Can Hillary Clinton do a better job inspiring people from the White House than she has from the campaign stage? Would it become easier or harder to do without Trump around to embody everything she has ever opposed and scare the daylights out of her base? “Don’t blow this” is what Clinton hears most often these days, she told me, or variations thereof. As it has turned out, Clinton, who began her campaign intent on breaking the last barrier — the glass ceiling — has found her most compelling rationale in her own role as a barrier, a bulwark against the impossible alternative. As I was leaving our interview, she smiled, looked me in the eyes and left me with a casual reminder. “As I’ve told people,” she said, “I’m the last thing standing between you and the apocalypse.”