Secondly, to claim that Trump is not a serious candidate imposes a bizarre and highly dubious value judgment on the campaign. I’m sure Shea and the HuffPo team were surprised and chagrined to see Trump emerge as the Republican frontrunner, but that’s not even the central point. By what standard is Trump a more specious or ridiculous presidential candidate than Ted Cruz or Mike Huckabee or Bobby Jindal, all of whom Shea is happy to cover with articles in the “politics” section, written by men with neckties? If anything, Trump reveals the true nature of the Republican electorate with none of the weasel words and artifice those guys employ, which may be the problem. (The other day I had a moment of missing Rick Santorum, a decent person who is deeply committed to his appalling, retrograde convictions. Then I realized that he’s actually running again this time, but no one cares.)

We don’t have enough time between now and the heat death of the universe to figure out all the reasons behind the media and political elite’s collective freakout of 2015. I think we can say a couple of things: Some of the reasons are obvious and some are less so, and no matter what happens in the short term, this shock to the system is a critically important moment for democracy. I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again: Donald Trump is not entirely a bad thing. Liberals who get the vapors, Danny Shea style, about what a national embarrassment Trump is are missing the point. We need a national embarrassment right now, or at least we need politics that break free of the tepid safety zone of bipartisan paralysis, dysfunction and apathy. Of course I don’t actually want Trump to be president, but he serves a number of useful purposes and the forces trying to shut him down are the same ones seeking to shut Bernie Sanders down, the forces that long to ensure a boring, safe and utterly substance-free general election between Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton.

Through a confluence of material and ideological interests, the Western world’s financial powers and political parties and media organizations, along with the interlocking permanent governments sometimes called the “deep state,” have come together around a conception of political reality they describe as the only reality. This is the “Washington consensus,” a blend of postwar American foreign policy and Reagan-Thatcher economics: Globalized free trade and venture capitalism, government austerity, widespread privatization and “developing markets,” with the money flowing upward and cheap consumer goods for the so-called middle class. All of this enforced and policed, of course, by the behemoth blundering superpower that cannot understand why nobody loves it the way they used to.

Some of the people who constantly assure us that this reality is the only reality are just being cynical bastards and small-minded ideologues. (I don’t know why this surprised me, but R.J. Cutler’s 2013 documentary “The World According to Dick Cheney” revealed the former vice president, one of the most influential Americans of our time, as deeply incapable of introspection.) But there are plenty of other intelligent and reasonably well-meaning people who have been tube-fed the Kool-Aid of neoliberal economics and the Washington consensus since infancy, who are thoroughly convinced that center-right politics are the only viable politics, and who have effectively embraced a post-9/11 update of Francis Fukuyama’s famous pronouncement that history ended with the Cold War.

It is profoundly troubling and disorienting for the media and political elite to have its core conception of political reality challenged, especially by an emerging younger generation that is more energized and more activist than anyone expected, and that is too young to have been subjected to the ideological shock therapy of the Reagan and Thatcher years. As New Statesman columnist Laurie Penny wrote this weekend, “The ultimate triumph of the political right in the 1980s was that its actions eventually forced the left to sell its soul for power – but many of today’s young voters neither remember nor care quite why it did so.” She is specifically describing the forces that drove young British leftists by the thousands to Corbyn’s campaign, but she’s well aware the same thing is happening on this side of the Atlantic.

Both in Europe and the United States, Penny continues, “professional politicians of the center left have one idea about what politics should look like and the people they claim to represent increasingly have another.” For a political class that chose power over principle “without once asking itself whether power without principles is worth having,” insurgents like Sanders or Corbyn (or Trump, after his own distorted-mirror fashion) are terrifying specters. Both the Labour centrists in Britain and the Clinton Democrats in America will soberly assure us that such dissident candidates are not “electable,” and can only doom their parties to irrelevance. One might respond by asking what is meant by “electable,” and what relevance those parties possess now. As Penny wryly puts it in the British context, the argument that Jeremy Corbyn is unelectable has been put forward by the anointed Labour moderates, “three candidates who can’t even win an election against Jeremy Corbyn.”

Long, long ago in a galaxy far, far away – by which I mean the 2004 presidential campaign – I remember a left-wing rebel saying something about electability that has stuck with me ever since. It was Dennis Kucinich, the Ohio congressman who was basically Bernie Sanders before being Bernie Sanders was cool. During a candidate debate or forum before the Iowa caucuses, someone stood up and told Kucinich that many Democratic voters were sympathetic to his proposals to push for single-payer healthcare, abolish the death penalty, end the war on drugs and cut defense spending, but didn’t think he was electable. Kucinich shrugged. “I’m electable if you’ll vote for me,” he said drily.

Kucinich was not in fact electable, in the sense that hardly anyone voted for him. He was competitive in a few outlier states like Maine, Minnesota and Oregon, but the only county in the United States he actually won in his two presidential campaigns was the island of Maui in Hawaii. That’s a joke that writes its own punchline, and since Kucinich’s candidacy served to confirm the ingrained prejudices of the political class about what was realistic and who was electable, he was tolerated as a lovable but irrelevant Democratic mascot. But his one-sentence response was almost a Zen koan of politics, self-evident on its surface but full of radical possibility. What happens when people vote for the candidate who is “unelectable”? One of these days we may find out.