Is this is how democracy is supposed to work?

Beginning shortly after the greatest and most bloodless victory in the history of the nation state — the triumph of the West, under the leadership of the United States in the Cold War — the United States gives every appearance of having become a nation of idiots incapable, as Trump points out with endearing zest, of doing anything right. He has the weakness of his strengths and the fault of his qualities. And the Democrats cannot run on their record, as two thirds of the American people think the country has been going in the wrong direction for years, so the only path to re-election is through attacking Trump personally.

 The American election has now become so absurd and outrageous that we are fully into the season of unctuous hand-wringing that the presidency has been mortally wounded as a place of moral and political leadership and that the country is inexorably politically dysfunctional and debased. Is not either candidate better than the previous