One consequence of cataclysm is that our perception of time alters dramatically; a machete slices through it and for a while there's only before and after. Maybe by the time you read this piece, which I started writing late last week, people will have started to acclimatise to the surreal. I might as well get it over with and type the words, "President-elect Donald Trump", as the new normal.
Logic and coherence being so November 7, I'm going to start with an anecdote from Halloween, an American cultural export that Australians have embraced with fervour. The weekend before last I attended Halloween festivities at the St Kilda town hall, which included a "haunted manor" tour in the neo-classical town hall.
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'Whitelash!' Black fears over Trump victory
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While we queued for the tour, the staff handed out glow sticks. "If it gets too much and you want the scary business to stop, just wave the stick," a young woman instructed my dubious eight-year-old. We tiptoed inside. Shadowy passages. Creepy noises. Ghoulish characters leaping from hidden corners. A cobwebbed bookshelf. A dining room table with skeletons sitting around it in perverse mockery of a family meal – on one plate, human brains. I was staring, mesmerised, at the served-up brains when my eight-year-old began shrieking and whipping the air with her glow stick.
The staff escorted us out of the building, bringing the ordeal to an abrupt end.
The night prior to the US election I stayed up late reading about nonagenarian and centenarian women born before August 18 1920, when the final state ratified the 19th Amendment to the US constitution giving women the right to vote. These elderly women were casting their ballots for the candidate they hoped would be their first female president, a woman who had fought for decades to improve the lot of women and children, a feminist. I shed tears of joyful anticipation.
The journey itself from before to after does not bear dwelling on. An ominous loss for the Democratic Party in Florida. The map of the US awash in red as if someone had opened a vein. In the cosy echo chamber of social media, a collective meltdown where only a few hours earlier people had posted upbeat music videos and photos of beaming women dressed in pantsuits to mark the momentous day. "This. Isn't Happening." And similar sentiments, over and over, in large font.
My ears ring with the sound of shattering glass; the splintering of so many assumptions. About meritocracy, the sanctity of law, the power of reason, the value of decency, even a residual faith in the idea of progress, that there are dark places we'll never go back to. The CNN commentator Van Jones gave voice to this on election night when he said: "You tell your kids, 'Don't be a bully.' You tell your kids, 'Don't be a bigot.' You tell your kids, 'Do your homework and be prepared.' Then you have this outcome, and you have people putting children to bed tonight and they're afraid of breakfast."
One feature of the anti-Trump echo chamber is loud pontificating from people of varying expertise who think they're not really in it or can hear the voices from outside where others cannot. Within hours of the result op-ed writers were diagnosing the Democratic Party as out-of-touch with the concerns of working-class whites. How could the party have chosen Hillary Clinton, the consummate insider, as its presidential candidate in this era of anti-elitist backlash?
In The Guardian, Thomas Frank insisted each of Bernie Sanders, "an inspiring and largely scandal-free figure", and plain-speaking Joe Biden "would probably have beaten Trump". A not unreasonable claim to make, but also (conveniently) impossible to prove. Trump closed his campaign with an ad that drew on anti-Semitic tropes from The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
The idea that Sanders, a Jewish socialist, would have cut through in the American rust-belt is contestable, to put it mildly. It is not over-simplifying or demonising the "forgotten" whites to point out that the economic populism of the Trump and Brexit campaigns were only appealing when wrapped in anti-immigration rhetoric and open contempt for political correctness and identity politics.
In a recent piece in The New Yorker, George Packer reported how some "downscale whites" have embraced the slur "redneck" as a badge of honour. And they have done so in reaction to identity politics with its emphasis on "otherness" and victimhood.
So the conversation about what progressives, loosely defined, are doing wrong globally has to be tough and brutal and it must go beyond economic policy.
And it needs time to marinate beyond the first five minutes of a historic upset.
The outraged call for good people to act. Immediately. Get angry and get organised. Join your local refugee support group. Seek out your nearest "deplorable" and give them an understanding ear.
"Get out of your echo chamber," people shout to others in the echo chamber.
Maybe next week or next month I'll be ready for all of the above. But today my one consistent thought, and who knows if it's accurate, is the horror show has invaded the White House and no matter how furiously I wave a glow-stick no one's coming to the rescue.
Julie Szego is a Fairfax Media columnist.
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