A consequential, divisive, troubling election about big issues
Republicans and Democrats, who disagree so virulently on so much, at least agree on two things. Both say it is the most consequential election in US history. (They might want to check on 1860.) And both believe the other side’s triumph would be catastrophic. It would have dangerous consequences for decades, they say, and might be impossible to correct. They are half right, perhaps more, and what they are right about is scary. This election is the most consequential since Franklin D. Roosevelt defeated Herbert Hoover amid the Great Depression. That election was consequential because it and the following one, in 1936, locked in the Democratic Party coalition that effectively governed the country for the next seventy-five years.
