For those on the outside, like Canadians, like me, the spectacle of the U.S. election has been like watching a lush friend at a bar who drinks until she throws up on the bartender, and then apologizes and then does the same thing the next night, and the next, and the night after that. It has been like watching a buddy jump from the top of a building on a dare and hit the side and the awning and then the ground. It will be a hell of a story, if the guy lives. If.

Now that the campaign has mercifully stumbled to its haphazard conclusion, it has become painfully clear that, no matter who wins on Tuesday, something tremendously precious has been lost to the world over the course of the past twenty months: the ability to laugh at America. Everybody used to believe that the big show called "American Politics" was, ultimately, a comedy. No longer. There has always been a certain segment of the populations in Canada and Europe and elsewhere that relished America's defeats and failures, of course. Vietnam had really knocked those arrogant bastards down a peg, and the photographs of the torture at Abu Ghraib are America's true face, and like that. But on a smaller scale, everyone who is not American pretty much makes fun of America whenever they can. It's pretty easy to do—the weird gun fetish, the size of the meals, the President who couldn't pronounce "nuclear," pretty much all of Florida—and it's natural, the way geeks and nerds naturally mock the star quarterback in high school.

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And besides, the U.S. electoral system has usually been good for at least a couple of laughs. Obama was hard to make fun of, but he was the first president since Reagan who could tell a joke without looking like he was a politician telling a joke. When Key and Peele came up with Luther the anger translator, he just brought Luther up on stage during the White House Correspondents' Dinner. Bush was hilarious. Bush was so funny he could make you double over while he was invading Middle Eastern countries under false pretexts. "We've got a lot of relations with countries in our neighbourhood," he once said. "Thank you, your holiness. Awesome speech," he told the Pope. The Clintons, too, made a great routine: Bubba as Rhodes scholar, with a cigar and an intern in the Oval Office, Hillary in pantsuits unable to smile without looking like she was telling herself "smile, Hillary, smile."

2016 has ruined all that. If Trump were elected, that very moment, the entire global institutional order would have to be rebuilt. No wonder a group of Canadians set up a website to "tell America it's great." We've all had to face up to the possibility that it isn't anymore. American politics in 2016 provoked a new and terrifying and unfamiliar response in foreigners. Pity. It's been sad, and it's been scary. The system of American democracy has never been the same as it is in any other country, a system by which the people select the policies under which they consent to be governed. American democracy is a show. Mostly it's tragicomedy, struggle leading to triumph. This year has been the opposite, a new genre, the comitragedy. The whole thing is a joke that soured.

The thing is that 2016 should have been hilarious. Trump was a joke. He had always been a joke. His one redeeming feature was that he was in on the joke. The hair. The skin. The suits. "People loved him when he would come on the show," David Letterman told the New York Times. "I would make fun of his hair, I would call him a slumlord, I would make fun of his ties. And he could just take a punch like nothing. He was the perfect guest." Trump's candidacy was more or less a prank. Maybe that was the best way to describe the 2016 election: a prank gone wrong.

Despite this once-in-a-lifetime material, the 2016 election will be remembered for how badly American comedians fucked it up. Jimmy Fallon mussed Donald Trump's hair like a punk, and even his pseudo-apology was pathetic. SNL only got its act together in the final weeks, when it was obvious that Trump was a loser. John Oliver and Samantha Bee, both foreigners, figured out the way. They shouted at Americans to wake the fuck up. That sort of made people laugh.

It wasn't the fault of the comics, necessarily. You can't make fun of people when they're falling apart, obviously. It's only funny to see them stumble when they're sure they're great and they're not quite as great as they think they are. The question of American greatness filled 2016 like the smell of gas, nauseating, potentially explosive. It was many questions really. Is America still great? If it isn't great, when was it great? And if it still is great, could it stay great? To a Canadian, or any foreigner, these questions are absurd, and desperate, and needy. America is obviously great. It's just not great for the things it thinks it's great for. Its political system, from being a beacon of liberty, has devolved into a model of dysfunction. (Hint: It's not normal for political campaigns to last twenty months.) Its military hasn't won a major war since the 1940s. The trade deficit has swollen to 44.5 billion dollars. But the disjunction was only funny if the Americans still thought they were great, and it wasn't clear they did anymore.

It's only funny to see people stumble when they're sure they're great and they're not quite as great as they think they are.

The racists were the ones who controlled the comedy—that was the novelty of the year. They entered American public discourse through jokes. Take two widely discussed memes—the Harambe meme, the Pepe meme. They followed the same semantic process. They began as innocent viral figures—an ape shot at the Cincinnati zoo, a cartoon frog. Then they were taken by a small internet coterie in exaggeratedly racist ways—"Dicks out for Harambe," Pepe heiling Donald Trump. There was a reaction from the mainstream—a Title IX complaint about the Harambe meme and mainstream media analysis of the Pepe meme. Then the alt-right and Breitbart News declared it all a joke and that the Social Justice Warriors were overreacting. Internet mockery was emerging as a legitimate political technique: shitposting. Maybe the 2020 election would be all shitposting.

The United States in 2016 was what politics looked like on Facebook. Information had become lifestyle choices. The value of anything you wrote was determined by the number of people who clicked buttons saying they liked it. Social media has returned us to an epistemology of tribes: a thing is true if your people say it is true. And in this tribal epistemology, meaning surged and collapsed in waves of outrage and comedy and irrelevance. Everyone was confused. No one seemed to know what was going on, and no one seemed to be sure of what they were saying, glutting instead an outraged contempt for the others and the sheer nonsense of it all. Maybe that was the problem: Nobody knows what's really funny on Facebook. All you can tell is what your friends find funny.

Richard Spencer was lord of the shitposters and racist jokesters. He'd blasted to fame with a prank at the Democratic convention, in which he stood in the street, with a sign that read: "Wanna talk to a 'Racist'?" It was sort of funny, at first. The hipster supremacist, an identitarian as he called himself, with various degrees from top universities, he ran the National Policy Institute and the Journal Radix, whose bland names disguised their dark and sincere loathing for the other. As a prominent figure in the alt-right movement, Spencer has been having a good election. The morning I spoke with him, he'd been profiled in Vanity Fair. The man was utterly charming, but I did not mention that my wife and children are Jewish.

The charm is the threat. He has an easy sense of humour. You know why the guy scared me? He was just like me. Some random white dude with an education and good manners. When you ask Spencer how he would envision an ethnonationalist state, he blithely mentions the Japanese Constitution and Israel's law of return. The new racism is not atavistic. It is not reactionary or stupid. Spencer believes, for instance, in reparations to African-Americans: "White people have committed historical crimes against Africans, and those crimes have been detrimental to both peoples." He wants to pay reparations—he makes clear—to people who are not his people.

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To Spencer, America itself is the joke. "I am profoundly ambivalent about the American project," he tells me. "I read Thomas Jefferson, and I admire Jefferson, he's obviously a genius, but when you read the Declaration of Independence, I just want to laugh. It's a joke. An absolute joke."

The identity in his identity politics is not American. The United States after all is African in part. American culture, in almost all of its distinctive forms, is a mixture of European and African diasporas. Demographic change is the source of the turmoil—everybody understands that. But demographic change is not something that is happening in America or happening to America. Demographic change is America, and Spencer knows it. "What's creating the Trump phenomenon is this fact that white people have assumed that they are America, and it's dawning on them that they aren't." This is one of the most accurate analyses of the American election I have heard anywhere. From an educated racist. If that isn't funny, I don't know what is.

He has another, more ominous way of putting the insight: "I think we need to overcome America." Less funny.

At one point as we chat, I joke with Spencer that he must feel weird at Trump rallies, whose spectators share none of his calm, reasoned articulacy. He must have more in common with any African-American graduate student, I suggest. But even the idea that he would share more with a black person than with a white person makes him squirm.

"They're still my people," he says about Trump's crowds. "They're still people that I have much, much more in common with than any African-American."

Up to that point, I had recognized Richard Spencer as a type I have known my whole life, the graduate student who goes off on a tangent and spins intellectually out of control, a Heideggerian who had broken bad. I was suddenly suffused with a deep sadness on Richard's behalf. He was living in a world filled with aliens, and he regarded his own alienation as a state of nature.

"Most people do want to be around their own kind. It's hard to explain because it's so deeply ingrained. You care about your own family more than you care about other people's."

Underneath the impeccable manners, under the charm, lies a profound discomfort with blackness itself, which all the manners do nothing to alleviate.

"The only thing that is different now is that these conversations are happening in public," Deray Mckesson told me. Mckesson is one of the more prominent leaders of Black Lives Matter, arrested in Baton Rouge for protesting, and a major force behind Campaign Zero, a plan for the comprehensive police reform which provides a real policy solution to the crisis between African-Americans and the police, if anyone cares about policy anymore. For Mckesson, all that has changed is the forum of the conflict. "The danger of Trump's candidacy is that there is now a party whose platform is explicitly rooted in racism." Trump's ludicrousness is beside the point: The oldest, biggest joke in American politics—All men are created equal, just kidding—has finally been spoken on stage.

Demographic change is not something that is happening in America or happening to America. Demographic change is America.

A terrible silence haunts the 2016 election, the silence of dead black men. The stories have been constant and unremittingly alike, the videos all the same: Black man, confronted by the police, shows no resistance, is murdered. Police walk free. It has been the kind of thing where you say to your friend, "Did you hear about that nightmare in Tulsa?" and he would say "You mean Charlotte, right?" and there wasn't time to talk about the first police killing because the second police killing had followed so soon after. The general breakdown in political speech occurred in the context of this constant failure: The state, which exists to deflect violence into speech, expressed itself through bullets.

So, as far as I could see from the outside, the basic conflict in the election of 2016 was between those who thought American politics was a joke and those who believed it was in deadly earnest, those who thought, like Trump in the second debate, that "it's just words, folks," and those whose children were being shot in the streets.

I believe that Donald Trump doesn't want to be taken seriously. America insists on taking him seriously nonetheless. The rhetorical form that defines the Trump movement is the bumper sticker: an angry epigram supposed to make you laugh. "Monica's Ex-Boyfriend's Wife for President" or "Obama, You're Fired!" or "Trump that Bitch." Sometimes they write their slogans on t-shirts, too. A significant portion of his supporters understands that he will not do what he says he is going to do. They just think it's funny to hear him say the shit he says. Trump is political comedy at the end of satire: If nobody expects a political figure to say what he or she means, then a man who says things that make no sense sounds authentic. The right nonsense is more real than the dirty truth. His misogyny and his racism are not ferocious hatreds; he doesn't want them to be taken as if he means them.

But then people are starting to say some things that have consequences even if they don't mean them. "Whose blood will be shed?" Kentucky Governor Matt Bevin asked the Values Voter Summit in September. "It may be that of those in this room. It might be that of our children and grandchildren. I have nine children. It breaks my heart to think that it might be their blood that is needed to redeem something, to reclaim something, that we through our apathy and our indifference have given away." He was crying as he said these words, like he really meant them.

When 2016 is over, when one side has won, would this elected official, a man voted in not by the angry eggs on Twitter but by the people of Kentucky, will this man want bloodshed in his own country? Or was it just bullshit for the crowd? Is it the beginning of a Civil War? Or is it just talk? In 2014 a Reuters/Ipsos poll found that 23.9 percent of Americans supported the idea of "their state breaking away from the Union." Were they kidding?

Henri Bergson, the great French theorist, described the source of all comedy as witnessing a human being act like a machine. That's why it's tragedy when I cut my finger, as Mel Brooks, that other great theorist of comedy declared, but it's comedy when you fall into an open sewer and die.

American government has come to resemble a berserk machine that was once a person and has fallen into an open sewer. The approval rating of Congress stands at thirteen percent. They can't even nominate a judge to the Supreme Court anymore. Ruth Bader Ginsburg, beloved among the progressives as the notorious RBG, told an audience in Cairo in 2012: "I would not look to the U.S. Constitution, if I were drafting a constitution." That's what you call comic understatement. The process of legislation is giving way to a series of executive orders because obstruction is near total.

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But in classic American fashion, the year of the breakdown of their system, the worship of the founding fathers has been ubiquitous. The year of total disgust in the political system, the biggest show on Broadway is Hamilton. The father of the gold star family, Khizr Khan, dominated the Democratic Convention by waving his pocket Constitution. "Donald Trump, you're asking Americans to trust you with their future. Let me ask you, have you even read the United States Constitution? I will gladly lend you my copy." Pocket Constitutions rocketed up the bestseller lists.

Out of curiosity, I read the American Constitution. Has anyone who waves the Constitution read it? It says that black people are two thirds of a person. It says that right there on the first page. Most of the rest of it is just a description of how to prevent a king from rising in an eighteenth century agrarian economy. This is their talisman to ward off evil? If Alexander Hamilton came back to life for a day in 2016, he would say "you don't need an election, you need a Constitutional Convention."

They were talking so much because they couldn't talk about what was really wrong, because what was really wrong was too big. With all due respect to Mel Brooks it wasn't all that funny, watching the American political system fall into an open sewer and die. It was just too painful to be funny.

Unlike Richard Spencer, I don't think America is a joke. But I admit I would love to be able to laugh at it again. I would love for the stakes not to be so fucking high. All the sheer grotesquerie of 2016 brought out a strange kind of tenderness towards America in the rest of what we'll have to call, for now, the free world. To the Canadian, listening, rapt, as always, the great beast of America was talking in its sleep, saying unbelievably crude and revealing things. In its restless slumber, it murmured its fear and its hatred and its love and its lust and its ancient wounds and its latest crimes, and it mouthed sweet nothings and stupid nonsense and blather and more blather. The rest of us were all up, listening, wondering when they would wake the fuck up.

When would they wake up? Would they wake up?

The punch line at the end of a twenty-month routine is coming on Tuesday. I would love to be able to say we'll look back on this and laugh. But if we were going to laugh about it, I think we already would have.