Whatever now happens to the Trump campaign, forces have been unleashed that cannot easily be laid to rest again. It does not help that he has been consistently underestimated. A year ago, I recall being told by an old friend of his that “Donald does not seriously want the presidency.” Then the mantra was that his campaign would implode. When that did not happen, the line was that even if he won the nomination, his unpopularity among key demographics meant that he stood no chance against Hillary Clinton. Now the polls show that she is even more unpopular than he is. The pollsters, the commentariat and, yes, the editors of conservative magazines are dumbfounded. One Washington insider, John Hulsman, must stand for countless others who keep getting it wrong. Mr Hulsman, who is an admirer of Lawrence of Arabia, evidently has plenty of time for charlatans, but still thinks that Trump will lose and his ideology will die with him: “So Trumpism, while rightfully smashing the feckless neoconservative elite that ran the GOP into the ground, is not the answer to what ails the Republican Party.” As a corresponding member of that feckless elite, I am struck by the way in which neocons are always blamed for whatever goes wrong on the American Right. The last time the GOP took neocons’ advice seriously, George W. Bush won — twice. Conservatives have a choice: between measured restraint and outright repudiation. Those who hope to restrain the candidate are banking on his need to make peace with the Republican establishment. Yet voters have already rejected the latter, whom they suspect of betraying and looting the republic; Trump is their champion. Repudiation is not attractive either: it risks a permanent schism that might spread from the party to the people. In the absence of a deus ex machina, the Republicans are now stuck with Donald Trump. So, quite possibly, will be America and the West. It may be time for European leaders to come to terms with this phenomenon. There is very little to be gained by treating Trump as a pariah, as David Cameron has done — a short-sighted tactic which plays into the hands of isolationist sentiment. Far better to reach out to his supporters and reassure them of Britain’s loyalty as an ally.

If the Right is struggling to appeal to voters who doubt the good faith of its conventional politicians, the Left has the opposite problem. The same electorate that doubts whether slick conservatives mean what they say, also fears that bearded socialists might indeed say what they mean. My example here comes from Britain: Jeremy Corbyn, the Che Guevara of North London, Leader of Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition pro tem. In comparison with his Brooklyn-born counterpart Bernie Sanders, Corbyn comes off emphatically second-best. Almost as badly educated and inarticulate as Trump, Corbyn lacks the natural eloquence of Sanders that has enabled the Vermont senator to run Hillary Clinton so close in this race. But Corbyn is no less popular than Sanders with a privileged and vociferous section of the young, by promoting their interests, such as free tuition, combined with much talk of inequality and injustice, at home and abroad. The basic repertoire has not changed in nearly half a century, but the old tunes have found new audiences on both sides of the Atlantic — not large enough to win elections, but quite enough to recommence the long march through the institutions that has carried the Corbyns and Sanderses further than Gramsci ever imagined. The anti-Western ideology that New Left academics such as Noam Chomsky were peddling in the 1960s is still being peddled by . . . Noam Chomsky. The Cold War may have ended more than quarter of a century ago, but a war of ideas against the West is still being waged by the Marxists and their fellow travellers with undiminished ferocity. Corbyn, whose public utterances are scripted for him by the former Guardian columnist Seumas Milne (an unrepentant Stalinist), appears to be untroubled by the genocidal role of the ideology he espouses during the last century. Like the Bourbons, he has learnt nothing and forgotten nothing; like Robespierre, the “sea-green incorruptible”, he believes that he himself is the people. Anyone who doubts that is a traitor.