Politics in a ‘post-truth’ age
Politics has always been a nasty and brutish game, but what has startled political observers about the 2016 election is how long-established standards and rules once thought to govern the way we choose a president have seemingly fallen away. Conventional wisdom appears up for grabs about who’s qualified to run, who’s likelier to win, how candidates conduct themselves, how campaigns are run, how the media remains fair, and what ideas and actions voters will embrace or reject. The unpredictable race is now down to the unorthodox but successful candidacy of Donald Trump, the brash celebrity business mogul, and Hillary Clinton, the familiar careerist politician who’s been eyeing the presidency since at least 2007. This has been an election in which no political experts have had a handle on what will happen next. Do these surprising dynamics and developments suggest that this nation is simply in a strange, outlier election cycle, or has...