Although I’m a pessimist by nature, deep down I think I always believed that the Republic would survive Donald Trump.

The majority of Americans have never accepted him, and his ascendancy fueled a nationwide civic awakening, starting with the Women’s March and proceeding through airport protests, health care town halls and finally the midterms. It’s been devastating to see how quickly so many American institutions have been corrupted — the Department of Justice turned into an engine of Trump’s paranoid vendettas, the State Department purged of nonpartisan professionals, evidence of Trump’s Ukraine extortion scheme buried by his Senate lackeys. It’s outrageous that the country’s being forced to endure four full years of lawless kakistocracy, but surely, I thought, the majority would put an end to it in the next election.

But now that election is approaching, and the debacle of the Iowa caucuses only highlights how the Democratic Party is threatening to fracture. In its aftermath, we’re left with a national race led by two very old and extraordinarily risky general election candidates whose weaknesses were underscored by Iowa’s results, muddled as they were.

Bernie Sanders’s supporters have argued that he can expand the electorate to make up for the suburban moderates he’s likely to lose, moderates who were, incidentally, responsible for many of the gains Democrats made in 2018. But while Sanders claimed a popular vote victory in Iowa, there was no surge in voter turnout since the last election, and an NBC News entrance poll showed that the number of first-time caucusers actually went down.