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It has been so tainted by profound skepticism about both major candidates from the start that it began as an orgy of bad taste and carpet-bombing smears and has accelerated toward an almost unheard of climax of threats and accusations. But, with a bit of context, what has happened is not so surprising. For its first 75 years, the United States was growing quickly but walking on eggshells as a “house divided” (Lincoln) between free and slave states. After the noble and terrible resolution of that problem, for 50 years mainly rather passive administrations let America be America. It tripled in population between the Civil War and First World War, and came to operate on a scale of economic activity and social fermentation that the world had never imagined to be possible.

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After Theodore Roosevelt constructed the Panama Canal, built up the navy, mediated foreign quarrels and declared the U.S. to be a world power, and Woodrow Wilson provided the margin of victory in the First World War and briefly inspired the masses of the world with a vision of enduring peace, the country lapsed back into the absurd frivolity of the Roaring Twenties. There followed what Franklin D. Roosevelt called “nine mad years of mirage, followed by three long years of the breadlines.”

Prohibition, which delivered the alcoholic drinks industry to the underworld (as has more recently been done with the drugs industry), and isolation, the closing of European immigration (with tragic results in the following decades), and the equity bubble that produced the Crash, Great Depression and horrifying international political repercussions, brought in FDR. The ensuing 30 years were the golden age of American presidential government: FDR, Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy. Victory over the Depression, enabling British and Canadian continuation in the war against Hitler, victory in that war while retrieving France, Germany, Italy and Japan for the democratic West while the U.S.S.R. took more than 90 per cent of the casualties and physical devastation in subduing Nazi Germany, were followed by the institutions and policies that won the Cold War: NATO, the Marshall Plan, the strategy of containment, and the defence of West Berlin and South Korea.