Whoever wins the election, one side is going to conclude that our current political system is illegitimate. From the Zman at theburningplatform.com:
The Great War not only devastated the physical structure of Europe, it destroyed the legitimacy of the political infrastructure as well. Once the legitimacy of the ruling class was gone, their authority was gone with it. After all, the war was not a natural disaster beyond the control of the ruling class. It was a disaster created by a ruling class that could not explain why the war was necessary. When they tried, no one could believe them, because they had lied the world into war.
The people, looking around at the devastation, wanted to understand why this terrible thing happened to them. The trouble was the people they would naturally look to for answers no longer had the trust of the people. They had squandered their legitimacy waging a pointless war. Into the void of authority came the liberal democrats, the communists and the fascists, offering their own narrative to explain the past and define a future better than the present. The rest is history.
This is a useful thing to keep in mind as the current ruling class of America counts the votes in the presidential election. Every election is pitched as momentous, but that is mostly nonsense. The choices put in front of the voters are always vetted by the ruling elite, so the results are known in advance. The exception, of course, was Trump in 2016, which is why we have been subjected to close to five years of shrieking by the ruling class about how Trump is a threat to their system.
