Nate Silver, editor in chief of FiveThirtyEight, the dream site for statistics nerds, crystallized the bewilderment of the analyst class in trying to process the ongoing triumph of Donald Trump.

“About 25 percent of Americans identify as Republican. Donald Trump’s getting about 25 percent of that 25 percent in the polls. Why is this impressive to people?” Silver tweeted, drawing more than 1,000 retweets and likes apiece.

The answer, of course, is twofold. First, that fourth-of-a-fourth is exactly the sort that often can wield such outsized influence in American presidential primary politics. Second, and even more to the point, is the mere existence of that particular fraction as an electorate that matters.

It matters because – in a subliminally resonant reminder of what jars us so much about ISIS – it’s a political force at once freakishly dated and remarkably of-the-moment. Analogies fail. Trump’s support cannot be reduced to another effusion of the conservative id or know-nothing nativism, however much it taps into or avails itself of those forces.

In a recent rant drawing quiet support from more than a few of the rising generation’s media types, one Gawker writer flipped the script on Trump’s fellow anti-refugee Republicans by fingering “dumb hicks” as “America’s greatest threat.” At a time when middle-age white males are dying at a stunning historic rate, it’s easy to see how Trump might become a totem for the coarsely reactionary.

But Trump also draws potent support from a certain kind of elite: one with a visceral contempt for political ideology as such. Silicon Valley has helped spread the idea that what makes people “dumb” is seeing the world through political lenses, but among many of the rich and successful, it is taking on the cast of dogma.

As author and television journalist Jeff Greenfield said in August – when he floated the question “What if Trump wins?” – Trump’s fellow billionaire reality TV star Mark Cuban shined the brightest light on the Trump phenomenon. “I don’t care what his actual positions are,” Cuban gushed. “I don’t care if he says the wrong thing. He says what’s on his mind. He gives honest answers rather than prepared answers. This is more important than anything any candidate has done in years.” Partisan ideologies lock people into ready-made scripts, turning officialdom into the kind of stagnant and futureless realm that top entrepreneurs love to disrupt.

Yet if the enterprising elite prefers worshiping performance in a practical sense and not a theatrical one, they make a real gamble in betting on Trump, whose ability to break our sclerotic national logjam remains very much in question. And that, above all, is why we ought to think with a bit more patience and equanimity about what could happen if he wins.

Doubtless, there’s a chance a President Trump would usher in a vast realignment of national politics, scrambling the programmatic messaging of Republicans and Democrats alike – making good on the fever dreams of Reform Party voters from Ross Perot’s era to Jesse Ventura’s. Or, in a more elite key, he could be the kind of leader that Michael Bloomberg dreams of being: so big, so independent and so famous that if he transcends party ID to demand what’s right, that people – enough of them anyway – will resolutely follow.

Conversely, Trump could drive the country off a cliff. We’ve been teetering on the brink, off and on, at least since 9/11. Now is not necessarily the moment to slip a rookie stunt driver behind the wheel.

If you picture The Donald as something a bit more insidious, you’ll draw a grimmer version of the same conclusion. Under “normal” circumstances, a bungling or divisive Trump might be little more than a fresh variation on our lengthy historical periods of luxurious inefficiency and democratic drift. In today’s “crippled America” (as Trump’s campaign-time book is titled), another shambolic and alienating presidency would probably prove disastrous.

Yet still a third outcome seems strangely most plausible of all. Rather than wrecking the country or weakening movement ideologies, a Trump administration could have the paradoxical effect of strengthening us by inspiring better, more serious opposition from both his left and his right.

Assume that Trump, being at most a mere president, not a king or an emperor, will not, whatever happens, singlehandedly bring us to ruin. The federal government is now too big and too “path dependent,” as the social scientists say, to be shaken apart by one transient occupant of the White House.

As conspiracists love to reflect, when confronted with Jimmy Carter – still the least “establishment” president since Harry Truman – the establishment managed to fill his administration with enough inside hands to ensure some measure of consistent continuity. Critics of this so-called “Deep State” are kidding themselves if they imagine Trump could break its back, even without pursuing a broader agenda.

But – here’s where the paradox comes in – old-line conservatives and liberals, for whom Trump grotesquely unites the worst instincts of demagogic elites in both parties, would likely find new and principled life if he actually rose to power. The Left in Bobby Kennedy’s mold and the Right in Bill Buckley’s, would probably get great traction comparing Trump unfavorably with Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon. Rather than fighting Trump for the rights to restoring national greatness, America’s principled partisans would likely re-energize and expand their constituencies with more truly inclusive claims to restoring national goodness.

By the numbers, it’s still a bad bet that we’ll wake up on Inauguration Day to watch That Hair take flight in a chilly Washington breeze. Regardless, however, it’s important for all of us to bear in mind that the spectacle, if it happens, won’t ring in apocalypse. The vigor of our nation – and, for good and for ill, of our federal government – won’t easily be trumped.