Are the two major political parties in America trading places, in demographic terms? Are Republicans becoming a populist party of the downtrodden and disenfranchised, while Democrats become the political home of the up-market urban elites? That may seem like too big a leap amid the intense divisions of 2016, when the Donald Trump distortion effect has so thoroughly warped the political landscape. But such a phase-shift has happened before, and there’s considerable evidence that it’s happening again.

Now that the aftermath of the political conventions has settled down and Trump’s campaign of self-sabotage has shifted into a new and spectacular gear, we once again confront the possibility that Trump himself will be nothing more than a bizarre footnote to the story of this extraordinary year. In his own limited and vainglorious fashion, Trump understands that: “I am your voice,” he told the GOP gathering in Cleveland. He is a ludicrous outrider of the apocalypse, not the thing itself. From here, it looks like our nation is on the verge of a political meltdown, and a political realignment, whose long-term consequences are unknowable.

I have a message for Democrats who look at Trump’s sliding poll numbers, in the wake of the Khan family feud and “Obama is the founder of ISIS” and “let’s try Americans at Gitmo,” and tell themselves that the nightmare is almost over and everything will soon return to normal. You are whistling past the graveyard. Hillary Clinton will very likely win this election, and it could end up as a blowout, although I’d be reluctant to bet the ranch on that. But what kind of “normal” are you so happy about? The paralysis and dysfunction of the entire last decade? To pretend that such an outcome — the candidate who is widely disliked and mistrusted defeating the candidate who is widely feared and despised — does anything at all to address the structural and ideological crisis that is eating away at both parties and the bipartisan system represents an epic level of denial.

You know who you are, oh nice people who feel vaguely wounded right about now! Despite the Bernie Sanders insurrection and the fact that the Democratic Party has been electorally eviscerated between the coasts and has hit a historic low point in terms of voter self-identification, you have somehow convinced yourselves that nothing fundamental has gone wrong and it will all be OK. I mean, yours is the party of good government and rational foreign policy and tolerance and diversity, right? Once you get past this unexpectedly ugly (and unexpectedly disturbing) election and park Hillary in the White House, the future is secure.

Just because the news cycle will be almost exclusively occupied with Trump and Clinton for the next 11 weeks, and one of them will apparently end up as president, it doesn’t follow that they’re the most important people on the stage. Clinton’s supposedly major economic address this week was especially awkward: She did her best to finesse her way around an entire career of supporting free trade, globalization and financial deregulation, in a year when those things have suddenly become toxic. No one should ever believe the vague economic promises made by presidential candidates, but even by those standards Clinton’s second-rate Bernie Sanders ventriloquist act was unconvincing.

The conventions I recently attended in Cleveland and Philadelphia reflected parallel institutions in different stages of internal decay and discord, but both were profoundly troubled events, dedicated to fending off certain unpleasant aspects of reality. The real protagonist of 2016 has been the American electorate, which was confronted with a set of unpalatable choices and has made a series of decisions that may have been incoherent or self-destructive but were not entirely irrational. It has expressed its widespread dissatisfaction with the status quo, at the very least, although there’s nothing even close to a collective sense of what to do about it.

From the beginning of this electoral cycle, I’ve been fascinated by two emerging and interconnected phenomena, both of which are essential to making sense of this crazy year. One is that the Republican Party has suffered an ideological implosion, despite its near-total stranglehold on Capitol Hill, and that the Democratic Party is not far behind. The other is that the Sanders and Trump movements, despite their opposing ideologies, share a perspective on the oligarchic nature of power in America and have exposed what Lenin identified a century ago as a central contradiction of “bourgeois democracy.”

Capitalist society, the Bolshevik founder observed, produces a “liberal” understanding of individual rights and tends toward legal and political equality for all its citizens — equality in the marketplace, in other words. Along with that comes the implication, and often the direct promise, that such marketplace equality will ultimately produce greater levels of social and economic equality as well. But the opposite is true; the two species of equality are in opposition, not in harmony. Unfettered market capitalism concentrates economic power in the hands of a few and dramatically worsens inequality, producing an atmosphere of political and economic crisis that Lenin would have called a “revolutionary situation.”

There’s no Leninist “vanguard party” in place to take advantage of such a situation (whatever they may claim on Fox News), nor am I advocating such an approach. What we have instead are two political parties in profound crisis. One of them has been compelled, however reluctantly, to confront the fact that its electoral coalition has collapsed and that its downscale white voters and zillionaire corporate funders have entirely different desires and goals. The other one is simultaneously in better shape and worse shape: It has won electoral pluralities in five of the last six presidential elections, which has allowed it to ignore the crisis or pretend it doesn’t exist.