THE U.S. PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGN HAS BEEN BAD. THE ANGER OVER THE OUTCOME WILL BE HARDER STILL.

and inevitably the U.S. Supremes had to play Solomon for the Dade County count. Bush, to the undying grief of legions, won, and Gore was thereby liberated to give his ample talents and heroic presence to the making of An Inconvenient Truth. A sad day, some still say, for the presidency, but a peacheroo even more intensely.

The days when people accepted an election result, confident both in the processes of democratic choice, and the oversight and monitoring of going to the polls, were over.

Elections don’t “settle” matters as once they did. In many cases, they spike and blister the very contentions they were devised to resolve. Not so long ago that was — really — not the case. Even Richard Nixon, one of the most cagey and powerseeking personalities ever to enter the White House, against the advice of many of his supporters and advisers, chose not to contest the close race of 1960 against John Kennedy. (There was and remains, as myth or mystery, that Chicago mayor Richard Daley gave a boost to the ballots for Kennedy in the tight Illinois result.) Rather than perturb the nation (“Our country cannot afford the agony of a constitutional crisis”), Nixon quietly relented on any thought of challenge.

It’s a very different movie in this year of Our Lord 2016. “Rightly to be great,” said Hamlet, “is not to stir without great argument/But greatly to find quarrel in a straw.”

A timely quotation, I think, when a presidential election is twisting on the weight of a Venezuelan beauty queen and her interesting history, or the rel- evance of immunity deals and basement servers.

If, as so seems the case, people are looking with astonishment and alarm at the 2016 campaign, just wait for the result. Unless there is a landslide victory, an astonishing and utter collapse of either Trump’s or Clinton’s campaign, what horrors have marked the process will be but an appetizer-prologue for the morning after the vote.

The factions in contest will not accept any result but their candidate winning. The Clinton camp despise Trump and their dismay even at a convincing loss will be inexplicable and against every law — as they see it — of reason. The forces behind Trump are already primed for seeing a “rigged” result. There will be no “peace in the valley” on Nov. 9. To borrow again from the Bard, “When (politics) breeds unkind division: there comes the ruin, there begins confusion.”

America is divided against itself and this election portends an explosive period of discord and discontent.