I was doing some reading for my Political Theory class this week when I came across a passage that I felt perfectly encapsulated much of the sentiment expressed by many in our current election cycle. The quote from Rousseau’s Discourse on the Origin of Inequality reads, "Citizens allow themselves to be oppressed only insofar as they are driven by blind ambition; and looking more below than above them, domination becomes more dear to them than independence, and they consent to wear chains in order to be able to give them in turn to others."

As I write this - recognizing the potential of a last minute second shoe to drop for either candidate or an inexplicable sudden swing in the polls, Donald Trump has chipped away at what many assumed to be Hillary Clinton’s unbeatable lead to the point of 538’s predictive model giving her barely over a 60% chance to win. Whiz-kid Harry Enten published an article today detailing how Trump’s current deficit is well within the margin of a potential polling error and of course even that is going by the standard set in years which lacked anywhere near the volatility of our current cycle.

When the United States’ quadrennial national election finally comes to a close after beginning well over a year ago, our national consciousness will face a serious reckoning unlike any in modern history. No matter who we elect, the other side will be faced with what they have built up to be nothing short of an apocalyptic vision of their opponent’s administration. Trump seems to have blown up the tenuous ideological coalition that made up the Republican party since Nixon regardless of his fate (I laid this out quite in-depth in a previous article), while the potential damage done to the Democratic brand by a scandal-ridden Clinton administration is limited only by the imagination of her future Republican adversaries on Capitol Hill.

I remember sitting in a booth across from my grandfather at Coco’s Bakery on a Tuesday morning before school two years ago in May, one of the few remaining times we would get to uphold our tradition of weekly walks or drives to school and breakfasts that dated back to my elementary school days. I was in the home stretch, only a few weeks away from graduating and as we talked, our conversation inevitably turned to politics. As usual, we discussed Bill Maher’s latest episode – the one show we both still watch religiously (irony intended, also props to Obama for finally giving him an interview this week) and I brought up a low-key announcement that independent Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders had made on Capitol Hill announcing his candidacy for President. My grandpa laughed and empathized with my idealistic support for the old Democratic-Socialist from Brooklyn, ultimately coming to the conclusion that Clinton would still be the nominee and Bernie was at best a fringe candidate. I argued that he could at least make some noise, maybe even have a real shot if he was lucky, but in the end we settled on musing about what seemed the most likely outcome at the time – a Clinton v. Bush dynasty rematch of the ’92 election. At the time I was only a few weeks away from turning 18 and graduating high school.

Now I’m halfway through my sophomore year in college, and this absurd marathon of an election season is finally grinding to a dramatic close. In a way the politics of the past seventeen months have defined so much of how I spend my time that I’m actually a little terrified for it to finally end. I’ve become so engrossed in reading, listening, and watching any and all coverage of the election that I feel more personally invested in it than I have any major event I can recall in my life thus far. Of course that’s also largely due to the countless hours I’ve put in since February working on the campaign of a local candidate for state senate (who was endorsed by Senator Sanders this May), a race much closer both in margins and personal importance to me than the Presidential one. In a way I think that getting involved in state-level politics has allowed me a breath of fresh air when I need it most, allowing me a distraction from our national political dialogue’s transition into a bitter reality show. If Trump wins on Tuesday, I’ll be genuinely disheartened and not nearly in the same way I would have been if we were about to begin a second Bush administration. While it might seem naïve to some that I would make such an assertion at the end of my very first election cycle as an adult, I still contend that time will ultimately show at least the near future of our national politics becoming largely defined by the shockwave effects of Donald Trump’s candidacy.

This campaign went beyond any battle of left-right ideologies or debates over nanny states and trickle-down economics. It left conventional wedge issues like abortion, gay rights, and transgender bathroom access in the dust. Trump made a concerted effort and succeeded in reviving some of our nation’s ugliest demons while adamantly working to undermine the credibility of any and all media that doesn't support him unconditionally, as well as the public's faith in our government to ensure a free and fair electoral process. He has brought a dangerous cult of personality fueled by overt authoritarian themes and uncompromisingly sensational rhetoric into American political discourse which will not simply disappear into thin air once all the ballots are counted. Whether it’s Trump T.V. or President Trump to come, I see the unprecedented nature of his candidacy as having a substantive effect on the way I will view our politics from now on. My passion is still there, albeit maybe now a bit jaded now by a greater awareness of how effective blatant demagoguery can be on our populous.

National politics may not be the idealistic vehicle for change that Bernie Sanders got so many young people to fall in love with, but regardless of the reckoning that may be to come I still hold out hope for the long term. Perhaps sometimes things have to get worse before they get better, that’s not to say that our country must necessarily hit rock bottom before coalescing behind a unifying leader with a substantial vision for change – just that it’s not an impossible scenario. Franklin Delano Roosevelt tackled what should have been two of our nation’s most insurmountable threats, both existential and internal. When he took office a quarter of our workforce was unemployed, over two million were homeless, and almost three-quarters of states had closed their banks. The state of the union was all out crisis. Thanks to his new-deal, fireside chats, and the steady hand with which Roosevelt guided us through WWII by the time he won a third term almost every working class American had a framed portrait of the President in their home. He was a god among men, a true unifying force for a country that desperately needed to be pulled out of its most dire straights to date.

Granted, I’ll concede that I've digressed a bit and it's probably a bit much to ask for another F.D.R. to rescue us from the scary forces of globalization and polarization (maybe that's just the eternal optimist in me). At the same time though I don’t know if it really is, because in a way maybe that could be what the presidency has always been for when it came down to it. Historian David McCullough made the point in a Ken Burns documentary that “The presidency is like a soft leather glove, and it takes the shape of the hand that’s put into it,” he says. “And when a very big hand is put into it and stretches the glove — stretches the office — the glove never quite shrinks back to what it was. So we are all living today with an office enlarged permanently by Franklin Roosevelt.” Regardless of whether Clinton or Trump inherits that glove, Roosevelt was the last to truly enlarge it and I think we're due for a true leader - a wearer who will stretch the glove carefully and use it to bring the country together, finally tackling head-on the issues that seem doomed only to fester and further divide us over the next four years.