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So here goes. Trump’s success doesn’t, on the face of it, fit my understanding of the world. And it seems to fit many other people’s, particularly those who consider Americans, especially right-wing ones, flat-Earth hillbilly idiots with summer teeth (you know, some are yellow, some are brown, some are missing). It’s no good denying it.

I’m not running up the mental white flag here. I still believe the rambunctious spirit of liberty that produced professional wrestling, the KFC Double Down and Jerry Falwell also accounts for statesmen like Abraham Lincoln and George Washington (and, if you’re on the left, Franklin Roosevelt) and a stream of astounding innovations from the Model T to the iPad. More generally, it has created a nation that appeared to be caroming into vulgar disaster for over 200 years yet somehow consistently left envious rivals eating its technicolour dust.

Need I remind you that the U.S. is the epicentre of modern feminism, environmentalism and the Occupy movement, as well as evangelical Protestantism and the obesity epidemic? But perhaps I do have to remind you that the Democratic contest between scaly unprincipled Hillary Clinton and angry socialist Bernie Sanders would command appalled attention were it not for Trump’s bloated shadow. And not only because either of them might well contrive to lose to him in November.

What if Donald Trump is the logical outcome of a disintegration of American cultural capital that unravels civil society and leaves individuals isolated, angry and impulsive?

So let me put forward a disturbing hypothesis about why America may no longer be the place it long was, including on both sides of the political aisle. What if Trump is the logical outcome of a disintegration of American cultural capital that unravels civil society and leaves individuals isolated, angry and impulsive? (For that matter, what if Justin Trudeau, far sunnier but equally conceited and vacant, also reflects citizens no longer embarrassed to vote without thinking, obsessed with their feelings, who would scorn the concept of civic duty if they even knew what it was?)