“I’m aware that it’s early days yet. And when Trump actually takes the reins in late January, he might well begin knocking down the guidelines of presidential restraint,” writes The Gadfly columnist ROBERT MACKLIN .

Well, that wraps up the year of democracy, so how did we finish up? Oddly enough, at this point I’m tempted to make the Trump victory a plus for the good guys.

Sure, it’s early days, but just imagine what we might be doing now if a very close vote had given the electoral college 270 votes to Kamala Harris. America, I suggest, would be on the brink of serious violence powered by the evangelists, the anti-vaxx cranks and the mad conspiracy theorists. 

Instead, we have had a sober and dignified concession speech from Ms Harris, a gracious commitment from President Biden to a seamless transition of power, and a fairly restrained (for him) victory speech from a bloodied but unbowed president-elect Trump. 

And this after he made history by actually winning the popular vote for the Republican Party.

I’m aware that it’s early days yet. And when Trump actually takes the reins in late January, he might well begin knocking down the guidelines of presidential restraint. 

After all, he already controls the Supreme Court and the Senate while the House of Representatives is also very close to a Republican flip. So the Democrats are doing whatever they can in the interim to appoint judges and pass state laws to protect hard-won rights.

Their next task is to appreciate just how far they have strayed from the centre-left to the “woke” world at the margins. 

And that’s a lesson for Australian extremists who change the names of organisations such as our own literary group “‘Marion” to rudely empower one segment of an art or craft over another when the truth is we’re all in it together.

But that’s mere trivia compared to the ordeal that the Trump administration will face when testing their plans against the realities of the economy, the religious wars of the Middle East and the overwhelming consequences of climate change.

It is just possible that the conventional economic theories really are what some call the fairytales that make astrology look respectable. Certainly, economists have proliferated to the point where their messaging has become tiresome at best. 

But if they’ve got it all wrong, the Trump threats about less tax and more tariffs will provide a real time experiment. We can all view the results as they happen and Trump exercises “the art of the deal” with Xi Jinping.

It may well be that he can bring peace to Palestine with a two-state, or even a one-state solution between Israelis and their fellow Semites (but with a different god). If so, that’s a win for everyone. Maybe even the Iranians will rise up and kick out the Mullahs.

And if his cry to “drill, baby, drill” into the fossil fuels reveals the “climate change hoax” then we’ll all breathe a great sigh of relief.

My fear is that in each case the results will not be kind to Trump, or to America, or to the world itself. But they will certainly settle a few arguments.

They might even suggest to the evangelicals that they too need to swap their book of fables for a non-fiction work of history (as best we can view it).

And if all that comes to pass, what a wonderful gift democracy will have bestowed upon us.

robert@robertmacklin.com