This is going to be an awful, awful election.

That is not exactly a surprise. It was clear as early as April, when a tag-team effort from the corporate sector and Democratic Party elites finally snuffed out the closest thing to a movement for social democracy that’s existed in the United States for a long time. But the back-to-back hits of the Democratic and now Republican conventions should make anyone with even a passing interest in some kind of normal future queasy.

If you like your Republican conventions glassy-eyed, cultish, and untethered from reality, then unlike most people, you may be in for a treat this week. Judging by its first night, this year’s RNC promises to be as darkly surreal as one would have expected from a GOP now fully taken over by Donald Trump, complete with plum speaking spots for Trump family members, viral right-wing weirdos like the McCloskeys, and at least one reference to “human sex drug traffickers” — a nod to the violent QAnon conspiracy theory slightly more subtle than Barry Goldwater’s wink to the Birchers fifty-six years ago. Then there was the man himself, who at one point sat in a room of freed hostages and praised one of their former captors.