Of course, some lying politicians and lazy citizens will always be with us. But by and large, it’s only the paranoids or haters of the West who believe its democracies are so rotten they must be torn down. The FBI has fallen into the trap of thinking that these subversive forces can be tamed by reasonableness and integrity. In fact, institutional recognition of paranoias achieves the opposite. It proves to the conspiracy theorist that he was right all along. The FBI was lying, and now they’ve had to admit it!

This doesn’t just harm Mrs Clinton. It hurts the institutions that make democracy work. The ugliness of the debate on both sides will make it a nightmare to govern the US, whoever wins. Moderate Republicans understandably want to place limits on what Mrs Clinton can achieve if she wins the presidency. This latest scandal could persuade more of them to turn out and vote for Republican congressional candidates to that end, all of which is perfectly reasonable. But the botched handling of this scandal by the FBI further undermines the common ground on which useful politics, a process of compromise and reform, happens.

It takes away politicians’ incentive to understand one another and get things done. It says that if you scream loud enough, established norms will buckle under the pressure. And while those norms might be annoying and flawed, we’ll all miss them if they go.