In 350 BCE, Aristotle, a truly veteran scribe, was feeling a bit dyspeptic on the subject of political upheaval.

"Such then is the nature of political revolutions," he wrote. "They are produced either by violence or by fraud, or by the union of both; for, sometimes, what is begun by fraud is ended by force."

This is a truth that has become obscured during this, The Summer Of Trump, as the travelling Hogarth print that is the presidential campaign of The Libidinous Visitor lurched its way across the country, scaring the horses, alarming the burghers, and giving amplification to every dark and ignorant impulse that democracy tries to suppress, including democracy's remarkable history down through history of being one of the easiest marks there is. It doesn't matter now whether he self-destructs tomorrow, or rides this thing all the way to the election and beyond. He has redefined the parameters of the debate in a way not easily remedied. He has freed up a deeper part of the political Id than even the previous campaigns mustered by the prion-addled modern Republican Party have unleashed. Some people are gleeful. Some people are terrified. But nobody has any illusions about what has been given permission to breathe free again.

Still, others said they had plenty of advice for the man they regularly identified in conversation as "Mr. Trump." "Hopefully, he's going to sit there and say, 'When I become elected president, what we're going to do is we're going to make the border a vacation spot, it's going to cost you $25 for a permit, and then you get $50 for every confirmed kill,' " said Jim Sherota, 53, who works for a landscaping company. "That'd be one nice thing."

Up until this summer, rampant nasty xenophobia was about the only thing that marked the first Gilded Age that was largely missing from this, the second one, and it happens to be the one essential element that intensifies in its virulence – then and now – when the economy looks as though it might tank, and have you noticed the stock market passing your window today on its way to the sidewalk below? This is what happens when the country decides that the irrational is the only rational response. And, I would argue, this is what differentiates what is going on with Bernie Sanders from the phenomenon of The Libidinous Visitor. The equivalence being drawn between the two campaigns by much of the elite political press is the biggest incidence of journalistic malpractice of the 2016 campaign so far – an even greater one than the ongoing shadow play over Hillary Rodham Clinton's e-mails.

Both men are calling for a political revolution, Sanders even more directly than Trump. But there are different kinds of political revolutions and they are fueled by different kinds of momentum. There are political revolutions of the considered spirit and political revolutions of the raw appetites. There was the Second Continental Congress in Philadelphia and there was the Committee of Public Safety in Paris. If the people caught up in the revolution are very lucky, the second form of revolution does nothing except add urgency to the first form. If they're not lucky, the appetites overwhelm the spirit, and heads of all kinds begin to fill all kinds of baskets.

It is not enough to claim that both men are "populists" or that they are both appealing to some amorphous general dissatisfaction with "government." First of all, the only problem Sanders has with government is that it hasn't done enough to fix a rigged financial system and to stop the erosion of a viable middle class. The problem Trump has with government is that he's not running it. One is asking for a revival of grassroots democratic activism. The other is appealing for applause. One campaign's vision is a guy knocking on doors. The second campaign's vision is a strongman on a balcony. One is LaFollette. The other is Peron or, at best, Berlusconi. The first is the way democracy is supposed to work. The second is how democracy always manages to con itself.

There is not going to be much point in trying to understand this campaign unless you understand the difference between these two visions, and how they could come to pass, and there's not going to be much point in trying to understand this campaign unless you understand the difference between a political revolution of the considered spirit and a political revolution of the raw appetites. In a perilous world, that makes all the difference.

Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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