Some key events seem to occur twice, Marx warned us long ago, “the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce”. For American children of the radical 1960s like me, Reagan was the tragedy and Trump is the farce. (This takes nothing away from the double travesty that was Bush I and II.) The question now is: what comes after farce?

Tragedy followed by farce is at least a narrative, however bathetic. But maybe even that bit of coherence was an illusion. Certainly nothing necessarily comes after farce; nothing is guaranteed. Today the old-time religion of “the moral arc of the universe bending toward justice” (King), believing in “a place called Hope” (Clinton), or striving “toward a