Robert Kelley’s “The Cultural Pattern in American Politics: The First Century” isn’t an inviting title, exactly, but if you want to understand the shape of the electorate in this year’s election, this book, published in 1979, would be a great place to start.

To understand the country Donald Trump will govern, we should understand how reality television imitates reality while diverging from it in its obsessive rituals of elimination.

We Americans like to think we’re unique, and that our politics is unique, and to a certain extent that’s true. Look who we just elected. But a lot of the contest and reality shows we watch in the States originate in Europe, and so, sometimes, do our politics.

There are those who’ll tell you pretty fast that they won’t miss Barack Obama a minute when he’s gone, and others who dread the day he leaves office. Time will tell, in both cases.

You could say that this long and unprecedented presidential campaign has been book-ended by debates handled by Fox News, and that’s fitting. This has been a convulsive period for the country, and more unexpectedly, for Fox News.

These were the body postures, not of a prize fight, but of a particularly edgy divorce negotiation. It seemed fitting in a way that the contestants couldn’t bring themselves to shake hands with each other until after the 90-plus minutes were over.

It was inevitable that at some point in the nation’s history, there would be a presidential battle between a man and a woman. That it would turn out to be this particular man and this particular woman is something no one could have predicted.

Russki hackers or no Russki hackers, Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp isn’t about to give federal snoopers access to the state’s electronic voting system in an election year.