Over a leg of lamb, I joined five other expat Americans for Christmas. Our topic du jour was which faction in our homeland we were most afraid of. Revisiting that boisterous conversation appeals, because in this re-enactment, I’m the only one who gets to talk.

With forbidding rapidity, one armchair assertion has gone from audacious augury to trite truism: that whichever party wins the presidency, a substantial proportion of the losers will not accept the result as legitimate.