I was a Marxist, but I doubt that the journey I made is possible now

Democracy should be about changing minds, but Trump and Clinton have undermined all of that

news story – but for all the wrong reasons.

OK, so it was a technical glitch. But it looked unforgivably amateurish in a country that prizes professionalism very highly. (If you can’t run a primary, how can you expect to run a country?) Even worse, it seemed somehow in keeping with the shambolic contradictions of their candidates’ positions.

Can somebody tell me – are they a socialist party now (Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren)? Or traditional Democrats with blue-collar roots (Joe Biden)? Or new centrists with a dash of identity politics (Pete Buttigieg)? Do they want to go back to the old assumptions about America being a moderate country with infinite respect for its institutions? Or spring into Left-wing radicalism with socialised healthcare and wealth redistribution that would have been unthinkable from a mainstream party not very long ago?

In truth, it is not just the advent of Trump that has brought about this existential collapse. Any Republican who had defeated Hillary Clinton and her version of what the Democratic Party stood for would have had almost as devastating an effect, because it was the decision to discard the old loyalties to what my parents’ generation used to call “the little people” that was at the heart of it. To base your message on an appeal to that tiny proportion of highly qualified, privileged women who are determined to break “glass ceilings”, when the women of the Rust Belt are worrying about putting food on the table…

But we know all this now. And the Democrats know it, too. They just don’t know what to do instead. What do you say to people whose industries have gone and whose hopes for a better future – which was once the great American birthright – have been trashed? You say what Trump says: we’ll bring the jobs home by fighting the dirtiest trade war imaginable against the countries that have stolen them. Or what? The Democrats clearly have no persuasive alternative to this or they would use it, wouldn’t they? The traditional voters who have deserted them assume that either there is no other answer, or that the party that once represented their concerns isn’t interested in them any more: that it has found a new home with metropolitan liberals who hold diversity and the rights of minorities to be more important than finding a solution to the terrifying consequences of post-industrialisation.

But even with that said, there is something uniquely impossible to grapple with in the Trump ascendancy. What he has done is nothing less than make the currency of democratic politics redundant. What was on display last Thursday in his vindictive diatribe against everybody who had ever dared to challenge him was a quintessential example of the new dispensation under which all presidential hopefuls must operate.

Democracy used to be about argument – that was the essence of it. Proponents of differing ideas and convictions competed with one another for the support of the electors who (in theory) considered the worth of the various proposals and chose between them. Lots of other stuff came into this, of course: inherited loyalties (many people who lived through the Depression would never have voted for any party other than the one that had been led by Franklin Roosevelt), specialised interests (the gun lobby),

at telegraph.co.uk/ opinion or local economic concerns (farming, mining). In spite of all that there was, at the core of the process, the idea that voters could be persuaded to change their minds through evidence and debate. As an individual, over the course of an election campaign – and even more often, over the course of a lifetime – one could reassess one’s political position.

I went on precisely such a journey myself, when life experience moved me from the Marxist Left to the free-market Right. I simply decided that the former led to authoritarianism and shared poverty, while the latter was conducive to mass prosperity and individual freedom. Shifts are not always quite so cataclysmic: you don’t have to decide that you were wrong all along before, just that this moment and these circumstances demand a different answer. This happens to electorates all the time in a healthy, mature democracy.

Between them, both Donald Trump’s personality cult and Hillary Clinton’s identity politics have undermined this. Trump has done it in the most obvious way by playing the demagogue’s game: only he personally can save the country with his inimitable gift for “making deals” and destroying rivals as he did in business. Forget about theories and principles: it’s all about how the leader handles his relationships with other leaders. Clinton’s identity pitch is less clearly sinister but it comes to the same end.

Politics isn’t about what you believe: it’s about what you are. I could decide to stop being Marxist, but I can’t decide to stop being white. Arguments and debate are out. Blind trust in the Leader, or mystical identification with a tribe are in. Either way, it’s the end of the Age of Reason.

Trump’s vindictive diatribe last Thursday was an example of the new dispensation under which all presidential hopefuls must operate