Simple advice to innovators and policymakers: Don’t worry about collateral needs or they will distort your good growth and policy efforts.

If we look back, the development of the automobile had collateral effects beyond the ability of the auto pioneers to conceive. Yet there were those who would have restricted automobile development because they worried about the collateral effects, including that there wouldn’t be enough gasoline, oil would run out, cars were dangerous and the fuel stations would explode.

The lesson wasn’t that those were minor concerns, but that they were giant and reasonable concerns that didn’t take into account that there would be as much creativity in solving those problems as there was in creating the primary product in the first place.

If the Wright brothers had worried about how we would keep aircraft from colliding with each other, well, we would have more trains and passenger ships.

The message is that innovation begets innovation. Invent one thing and then invest in something else to support it.

Yet there are reactionary forces at work in the creative arena all the time.

To continue with the automobile example, there are gainsayers to the electric car everywhere. Sometimes they are driven by economics, but often they are just worried about great change.

I can hardly pass a day without reading alarmist pieces about the disposal of batteries, a possible shortage of lithium from friendly suppliers or that there won’t be enough charging points.

To all that, I say piffle.

History tells us that these seeming problems will be solved by the same inventiveness that has brought us to this time when we are seeing a switch from the internal combustion engine — faithful servant though it has been — to electricity.

The danger is rigidity.

Rigidity is the seldom-diagnosed inhibitor of good science, good engineering and good policy. Rigidity in policy, or even just in belief, restricts and distorts.

A rigid belief is that nuclear waste is a huge problem.

I would submit that it is less of a problem than many other wastes we are leaving to future generations. Rigid concerns and rigidly wrong radiation standards led the electric utilities to turn to coal, and now to wind and solar to move away from coal and its successor, natural gas.

Medicine is beset by rigidities and it always has been, from excessive use of bleeding therapy to surgeons who believed it was ungentlemanly to wash their hands.

Those who suffer from less common diseases — Myalgic Encephalomyelitis, also known as Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, is one — are impacted by medical profession rigidities. The doctors try to fit disease into what they know and treat patients with known but inappropriate therapies.

Even great innovators like Henry Ford weren’t without their crippling rigidities. Henry Ford was opposed to 6-cylinder engines and wanted all cars to be black.

Political rigidities are perhaps the most pernicious.

I would suggest that the fear of the bogeyman of socialism has prevented us from developing a sensible healthcare system; one that is less expensive and has better results. It doesn’t have to be modeled on Britain’s National Health Service, but it could borrow from Germany or Holland where the health system is universal but provided by private insurance.

Ditch the rigidity and start fixing the patient — in this case, the whole system.

Our educational system is plagued with rigidities. At the lower end, the public schools, children aren’t getting the basics they need to function in our society. At the high end, the universities, there is a new kind of aristocracy where the favored faculty are coddled, shielded and underproductive, while the cost for students is prohibitive.

Our most productive, most gifted graduates are compelled to align their careers with jobs that will pay enough to free them from the debt burden we start them in life with. This might cause a bright student to go into computer science when he or she longed to study astronomy, certainly a less well-paid future.

Rigidities kept women from seeking new roles and responsibilities, and from seeking their own personal and professional identities rather than have them defined by the outside, male-dominated society. Homemaking, yes; corporate management, no.

Rigid doctrine is always at work and is an unseen impediment to future innovation in science, social structure and, above all, in politics.

Watch for it.

It is coming to us as a diabolical enemy: malign, merciless and murderous.

The second wave of COVID-19 will be killing us today, tomorrow, and on and on until a vaccine is administered not just to the willing recipients, but to the whole population. That could take years.

We haven’t been through anything like this since the 1918 influenza pandemic. Not only is COVID-19 set to kill many more of us than it already has, but it also is likely to have huge collateral damage.

Think restaurants: 60 percent of the individually owned ones are set to fail. Think real estate: The damage is so far too great and expanding too fast to calculate — all those office buildings sitting empty, all those shopping centers being vacated. The real estate crisis is beginning, just beginning, to be felt by the banks.

Think education: A year has been lost in education.

Our cultural institutions, from small sports teams to all the performing arts, are on death watch. How long can you hold a theater production company together? How do you save those very fragile temples of high culture, including ballet, opera and symphony music? What of the buildings which house them?

Now looming are the malevolent threats to Thanksgiving and Christmas. These festivals, so cherished, so looked forward to, such milestones of every year and our lives, are set to kill many of us, gathered in love and joy.

Families will assemble in happiness, but that diabolical guest COVID-19 will be taking its monstrous, lethal place at our tables — at the very events that in normal times bind us together. Death will share our feasts.

These are words of alarm, and they are meant to be.

Nearly a quarter of a million of us have died, choked to death by the virus. Projected deaths are 110,000 more by the new year. Yet our leaders have spurned the modest defenses available to us: face masks and isolation. There is little usefulness in assigning blame — but there is blame — and it points upward.

But there is localized blame, too.

Blame for what I see on the streets, where young people stroll without protecting themselves and others from the deadly virus. Blame for what I see at the shops, where customers gain entry without the modest consideration of wearing a face mask for a few minutes.

There is blame for pastors who have insisted on holding services that have spread COVID-19 to their parishioners. And there is blame for those who have rallied or taken to street demonstrations. The virus has no political affiliation, but politics has befriended it in awful ways.

The mother lode of blame must be put upon that increasingly bizarre figure Donald J. Trump, president of the United States, elected to lead and defend us.

Trump couldn’t have vanquished the pandemic, but he could have limited its spread. He could have guided the people, set an example, told the truth, unleashed consideration not invective.

He could have done his job.

When we needed information, we got lies; when we needed guidance, we were encouraged to take risks by myth and bad example. A high number of his own staff has been felled.

On Jan. 20, 2021, President-elect Joe Biden will step into this gigantic crisis. Even if the first doses of a vaccine are being administered, the crisis will still be in full flame, taking lives, destroying businesses, subtracting jobs and changing the trajectory of the future.

There will be good, but it will take time to arrive. It will be in innovation in everything, from more medical research to start-ups and lessons learned about survival in crisis.

It will impact immigration. Only the willfully unobservant won’t note that a preponderance of the health authorities featured nightly on television weren’t born here, and their talent is a bonus for the country.

It should be noted that Pfizer’s landmark COVID-19 vaccine wasn’t developed in that U.S. pharmaceutical behemoth, but by a husband-and-wife team in a small company in Germany. Both are children of Turkish immigrants to that country.

In all countries, immigrants have had the adventurous spirit that is the soul of creativity. Let them in.

Damn, damn, damn the polls.

My irritation has nothing to do with the way they botched this election; or how they botched the last two British elections or the Brexit vote.

It is not a matter, to my mind, of whether the polls get it wrong. It is a matter simply that they are taken at all. I have been railing against them for years.

I have found pollsters on the whole — I have interviewed quite a few — to be decent, honest people who believe they are taking the voters’ temperature scientifically; that their work is helpful, contributing to the national or regional understanding.

But polls are far from the benign things they purport to be. They are a setup shot that becomes the movie; a snapshot that changes the course of events, a contrived intrusion into the public discourse that then monopolizes it.

Polls sideline good people, bring into favor the known over the unknown, and promote a kind of national continuation. They begin to write the narrative, not to reveal it. They terrify timid leaders and office aspirants.

These same arguments can be made against a lot of market research. Ask people what they like, and they will tell you they like what they know.

Imagine if Harold Ross, the genius who created The New Yorker, had polled the public about the magazine he was about to start in 1925, and had asked, “Do you want a magazine in which the articles are long, the bylines are at the end of the articles, the headlines are in squiggly type, and there is no table of contents?”

Do you think there would be The New Yorker (it still has long articles, but the bylines are at the beginning, and it has a table of contents) today?

The most blame in the plague of polls that now distorts our elections belongs with the news media.

They commission polls relentlessly and then publicize the results, as though they have been allowed to see the face of God. This synthetic news.

Polls are not the revealed truth. They are an imperfect peek into the national thought portfolio. But once they become part of that portfolio, they corrupt the momentum of events.

Worse, polls sway the politicians. They turn the Pied Piper into one of the rats, getting in line with the rest.

In his Sept. 30, 1941 review of the war to the House of Commons, Prime Minister Winston Churchill chose to address the subject opinion and leadership.

He said, “Nothing is more dangerous in wartime than to live in the temperamental atmosphere of a Gallup Poll, always feeling one’s pulse and taking one’s temperature. I see that a speaker at the weekend said that this was a time when leaders should keep their ears to the ground. All I can say is that the British nation will find it very hard to look up to leaders who are detected in that somewhat ungainly posture.”

Quite right.

The damage is that polls have proliferated in recent years, and they perform various functions for various people. Universities and colleges have found, as in the case of the Quinnipiac University Poll, that polls are a branding asset.

The Quinnipiac poll is run by a small college in the rolling hills of Connecticut with great professionalism and objectivity, which has given it considerable standing in the world of polling. It also has enhanced the standing of the college which runs it.

My quarrel with the polls will be partly assuaged if they continue to get it wrong.

That way they will take their place in the background clutter, not the breathtaking political snapshots that undermine elections.

“Can’t Anybody Here Play This Game?” was the title of a 1963 book by Jimmy Breslin about the disastrous first year of the New York Mets, an expansion team. It’s attributed to the team’s manager Casey Stengel.

As I’ve watched this picaresque presidential election year unfold, I’ve had the same thought.

The game is governance; the campaign, the run-up. And nobody seems to know how to play this game. The questions that should’ve been raised and answered were neither raised nor answered.

Some unheard and unanswered questions:

—  How will you rebuild our stature abroad, restore America to global leadership and moral authority?

—  What will you do if the pandemic hangs on for years? How will you place the millions whose jobs were lost through the pandemic in work?

—  How will you fix our ailing school system with its disastrous weaknesses exposed by COVID-19?

—  The healthcare system is stretched to breaking under the pandemic with or without Obamacare. What is your plan?

—  If the climate change-induced sea level rise accelerates, how will you deal with cities that appear in danger, including New York, Boston, New Orleans and San Francisco?

—  One of the rationales for the U.S.-Mexico border wall was to reduce the influx of drugs. Now, with the advent of drones, we may have a new drug smuggling crisis. What is your plan to combat it?

—  States depend on gasoline and cigarette taxes, but electric vehicles are pushing out gasoline taxes and cigarette smoking is in steep decline. How do you see these tax streams being replaced?

—  What will you do if China invades Taiwan?

—  What will you do if China bars U.S. shipping from traversing the South China Sea?

—   The population of Africa is set to double every quarter century. Already there is almost universal unemployment, what should the United States do to help?

—   Jobs are being eaten up by AI and other technologies. While those enthralled with these job-subtracting technologies point to the history of the Industrial Revolution, this may be different. What should be done?

Just think of anything to do with the future and a gusher of questions erupts, but no answers have been heard, or few at best.

President Trump, it seems, will offer us more government as demolition derby, but wilder than in the first four years. We’ve gotten a shower of hopes, fanciful and improbable.

When it comes to the overhanging crisis of today, the pandemic, he is like King Canute commanding the waves to retreat.

From his opponent, former Vice President Joe Biden, we are to get what?

Decency, character? Like all candidates, he’s told us he’ll fix everything. But how remains obscured from us, and quite possibly from himself.

On the evening of April 7, 1775, Samuel Johnson, the sage and lexicographer, told us that patriotism was the last refuge of the scoundrel.

That is a truth that Trump — who probably doesn’t know who Johnson was — has exploited as his own. He would undo the things we should be proud of in the world, like human rights, and get away with it because he wraps himself in the flag like Linus in his blanket.

Those who’ll vote for Biden will vote for a man who is old in years and old in ideas. If he wins, his supporters can trade fear for apprehension.

As we face the most momentous challenges the world has ever borne — international upheaval, a lingering pandemic and climate change — we’ve gone through a presidential campaign where the issues were shelved for repetitive nothingness.

We haven’t been lifted by high rhetoric nor inspired by blinding vision.

The global upheaval triggered by disease, nation realignment and technology will have to await the judgment of those who whisper into the ears of presidents, when they, the candidates, have none, as now.

NEW YORK — Alistair Cooke, the great British journalist who wrote his weekly “Letter from America” — a paean to the United States — for 58 years, reserved some of his most lavish praise for Manhattan.

When Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviet leader, visited America and wanted to see Disney World, Cooke told him he’d never see anything as extraordinary as the Manhattan skyline.

I was reminded of this long-ago admonishment recently, when I had the opportunity to see Manhattan from the water, cruising around the island on a friend’s yacht, looking at that skyline, those fingers of buildings, thrusting toward heaven in a forest of architectural and engineering creativity that has no equal on earth. Dubai may aspire but it doesn’t compete.

Manhattan is awe on steroids.

I’ve savored and, at times, detested it for decades.

I suffered its awfulness at the bottom when many newspapers closed and I, an immigrant with no resources, found work as a busboy at the Horn & Hardart on 42nd Street — one of the food service automats which were once a feature of New York City.

They were where the hapless could sit unbothered for long hours without buying anything beyond coffee; where they could stay warm and sheltered in the winter.

I’ve also savored Manhattan in good times, staying at the Carlyle Hotel, one of the best hotels in the world, up there with the Ritz in Paris and Brown’s in London.

It was said when I lived there in the 1960s that New York was a city for the extraordinarily rich and the extremely poor. I found work in Washington and stayed south; New York became a place to visit.

If it was a hard place to be poor in 1965, the extremes of poverty and wealth only increased with time.

More great buildings, enabled by engineering that allowed them to be planted in smaller plots of land, sprouted in Manhattan. Spindle apartment buildings and sprawling waterfront office developments were built with money that flowed in from hedge funds, tech companies, Russian oligarchs, Chinese billionaires and Middle Eastern oil-garchs.

On Sept. 11, 2001, the Big Apple felt its vulnerability to a hostile, premeditated attack. Now it is facing its greatest crisis, one that will wound it mortally if not fatally: COVID-19.

New York City has an uncertain future. People are moving out, selling their expensive co-ops at a loss, and buying in less-crowded places on Long Island, in the Hudson Valley, Connecticut and even farther afield.

As I looked in wonder at the city of striving people, epitomized by its buildings which themselves seem to strive to go ever higher, I wondered whether New York is over, destined to a slow death; its apartments in the clouds likely to be abandoned, and its trove of office space to sit empty as a new generation grows into the idea that working from home — home far away — is the norm, the new way to think about work.

The New York Times has looked at the problem and its writers can’t, it seems, bring themselves to answer the question: Is it over?

The city’s impending tragedy will be played out in other cities, but it is in New York that it will be most visible, most painful; the dream most shattered.

Sure, you might say, it was built on greed and now it must pay the price. But it was also built on much else: immigration, diversity, financial acumen, theater, fine art, sweat and toil  — and that most human of emotions: aspiration.

I hope the new normal will allow cities to recover and New York to swagger forward as it has in the past: difficult to live in and difficult to live without. It’s a miracle of a city, a big shiny apple.

It’s not a trial. But the hearings before the Senate Judiciary Committee into the nomination of Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court seemed like one.

This juror’s verdict: Guilty as charged in one liberal indictment and a toss-up in the other. Judge Barrett seems destined to vote to overturn Roe v. Wade. But on the Affordable Care Act, which is of more immediate concern to more Americans, she may parse her judgment and endorse the doctrine of selectivity.

Two big things about Barrett: Her opposition to abortion is, one concludes, founded in her devout Catholicism and in her experience among lawyers of the right, led by Justice Antonin Scalia, for whom she clerked.

The other thing about Barrett is that she has seven children, two adopted from Haiti. She used this before the committee as a shield, a defense, and a statement, which said by implication: “See, I’m human, empathetic, caring and maternal.”

This is important. As Barrett, who almost certainly will be confirmed, matures on the court, her family may be a moderating force, softening her otherwise rigid conservative views. As her children grow and experience the vicissitudes of life, she is likely to trade some of her harsh doctrines for a more humane ambiguity.

Take former Vice President Dick Cheney and his wife, Lynne. Their conservatism, devotion to the right, was never in question. But when their daughter Mary came out as gay, their view of that part of the social-political landscape softened.

It has been declared throughout the struggle to confirm Barrett that somehow it is not meek to bring in her religion.

This juror avers: It is.

When the religion of a public servant affects political decisions, it has ceased to be a private matter.

We’ve come a long way from the days when President John F. Kennedy’s Catholicism was cited in his election. Anti-Catholicism was then alive and well in parts of the political spectrum. Kennedy remained a committed Catholic, but he didn’t bring it into his governance of the country. That was as it should be.

Going forward, as the United States gets more diverse and when we can contemplate a time when Hindus, Buddhists, Muslims and other believers will take their place in national life, it is more, not less, necessary to ensure that separation of church and state is adhered to in everything, especially the Supreme Court.

Ergo, it can be argued that Barrett should recuse herself from Roe v. Wade. How much stature she would gain if she did! But most unlikely.

If the Democrats romp home with the White House and both houses of Congress, they would be in a position to legislate at least a quick repair to the Affordable Care Act and to start the process of legalizing abortion by federal law, not constitutional interpretation. But it will continue to fuel the culture wars.

It is not certain how much the Democrats will gain in the election and, as a longtime observer of Washington, I don’t believe long term a Democratic sweep would be good. A bit of tension in Congress is a net benefit. So, the Barrett nomination and confirmation weighed heavy as we watched her parry the Democratic questioners.

Extenuating fact: The judge is much smarter, more personable, and more in charge of her facts than expected.

She charmed. She is a power to be reckoned with. Many observers expected to get a candidate who would simply channel Scalia, her old mentor, and that we could know her mind from his writing — the way we can predict the attitudes of Justice Clarence Thomas.

That, it became clear, is not to be the case.

The verdict of this juror then is: After a rocky start on two difficult issues, Barrett will grow to be a serious, thoughtful justice.

Possibly, with time, even a humane one.

A winter of discontent looms.

Unlike Shakespeare’s Richard III, it won’t be made glorious by anything now in sight. Instead, it promises a tsunami of misery for many and the ugliest election in U.S. history.

At a time which calls for new energy, new thinking and a recasting of the social contract, two old men — who more rightly should be eyeing the sunny side of the veranda at their retirement homes — are in contentious dispute for the presidency.

Whoever wins, President Donald Trump or former Vice President Joe Biden, the winter will be the harshest in memory for many Americans, particularly those on the lower rungs of the economic ladder.

The COVID-19 pandemic has evaporated millions of jobs and the small companies that provided them. Most obvious in this slaughter are the restaurants. Yelp, the restaurant reporting service, estimates that 53 percent of the restaurants now closed will never reopen.

Restaurants are among the most fragile and perishable of small businesses. At the best of times, most inhabit an inhospitable space between the restaurant chains and their landlords.

Restaurants are quick to hire and quick to fire. It is where the unskilled (dishwashing and prep) to the low-skilled (line cooks and front staff) find work most easily.

Restaurants tell the temperature of the economy ahead of the official soundings. When business turns down, they stumble.

They also are places of hope: The chefs and waiters of today are the restaurant entrepreneurs or stage and screen stars of tomorrow. They’ve put untold thousands through college. When restaurants jobs go, hopes and dreams go, and often the life’s work of the owners go.

The individually owned restaurant epitomizes entrepreneurism, determination, the capitalist spirit and the joy of self-employment for the owner. All the virtues of small business, routinely drooled over by the politicians, are present even at the humblest greasy spoon. Free enterprise is always on the menu.

And restaurants are part of the fabric of our lives, where we celebrate, occasionally mourn and frequently refresh.

Much of what is true for restaurants is as true for the whole hospitality industry. Those who do the housekeeping in hotels, the porters and, of course, the restaurant staff are all semi-skilled and in need of work to survive.

They are, I submit, not easily re-trained: You don’t go from making beds to computer programming in a short time.

Only Congress can assuage the immediate suffering at the bottom of the employment pyramid. But a new relief package has been tied up in party strife.

Trump said Tuesday that he had withdrawn from negotiations with the Democrats over the package. Now he says he will sign a simplified measure, guaranteeing a payment of $1,200. That came after the stock market — the only index Trump follows — faltered.

Dark as things may be for the workers at the bottom, they also are bleak for all.

Trump won’t say that he’ll accept the results of the election if he doesn’t win. He’s laid the groundwork for this potential coup by criticizing mail-in voting. Without evidence, he’s sought ahead of the election to invalidate mail-in voting and has even trashed the post office, maybe to facilitate this election subterfuge.

If Biden wins, he may be presented with his greatest crisis before he is sworn in: leading the movement for accepting the vote. He’ll be required to lead the millions who may flood the streets, prompting violence between themselves and Trump hardliners.

Shiver, people, shiver. There is much to fear as winter unfolds even if you have a paycheck.

If Trump loses and accepts the result, there will be the time from certification of the election to Biden’s swearing in when an unfettered Trump can indulge his passion for executive orders, abrogating treaties and sowing wanton havoc.

The only sunshine may come from science in the form of a viable vaccine for COVID-19. This won’t occasion us to immediately strip our masks, as it will take a year to inoculate the whole population. But its prospect will put warmth into a cold Christmas.

As the nation returns to health, a hard look at the predicament of those at the bottom will be needed — an amendment to the social contract, if you will.

Top of my list: fix healthcare and repair education.

The closest President Trump came to laying a glove on former Vice President Joe Biden in their first debate was on the environment.

Biden’s published clean energy plan — which is more a gushing hydrant of wishes — is somewhat incoherent, certainly expensive at $2 trillion, and looks counterproductive.

It is built on the left-wing assumption that all commerce, and the electric power industry particularly, is managed by people who would trade away the future for a few pieces of silver; that humanity stops at the corporate door.

This was true once. I’ve been in meetings where circumventing restrictions on coal were discussed and where global warming was regarded as a communist conspiracy.

But now environmentalism is as active in corporate boardrooms as it is in the inner sanctums of Democratic thinking. Younger workers in corporations and shareholders have been demanding this activity. Biden needs to smell the roses, be less woke more awake.

Particularly disturbing are the list of executive orders Biden says he’ll sign on his first day in office. One would hope after the flood of executive orders signed by Trump, many of them sowing more confusion than direction, that Biden would abide by more acceptable norms of governance. Substantial environmental law needs Congress.

If, as his published policy says, Biden signs these orders on day one of his presidency, on day two the courts will be flooded with lawsuits seeking to uphold the laws already in place, not to have them modified by extra-legal action.

The fact is that business today is not the business of yesterday. It is leading an environmental revolution and is, arguably, in the forefront of a new business dawn. This is especially true in the three places where the difference in greenhouse gas releases count: electricity production, transportation, and manufacturing processes which use a lot of heat.

A wind of change is sweeping through the United States on environmental issues, and it should be allowed to blow free and strong. It is more complete, more encompassing and, in the end, will be more effective than if a possible Biden administration tries to control or direct it.

Consider these indicators of the low-carbon wave that is sweeping across the country:

—  Five of the nation’s largest utilities are aiming to be carbon- free by 2050: Southern Company, Xcel Energy, Duke Energy, Dominion Energy, and Public Service Enterprise Group. Others are also on board with the same objective.

—  Amazon is buying 100,000 electric delivery vehicles. Uber and others with delivery fleets are doing the same. Companies with large roof areas, like Walmart, are installing solar to become self-generators of clean electricity.

—  The oil and gas industry, which has most to lose after the rapidly declining coal industry, is pouring resources into carbon capture, utilization and storage.

—  More than 70 of the world’s largest financial institutions — including Bank of America, Citibank, Morgan Stanley, and BlackRock — have banded together to account for the carbon emissions content in their lending and investing. The group is known as the Partnership for Carbon Accounting Financials and is administered by the global consultancy Guidehouse. It is huge in its implication.

—  A plethora of electric vehicles is about to hit the market, some from new startup companies, others from famous marques from Europe and Detroit. This bounty’s effect will be that there will be more people, who can’t afford a Tesla, going electric. Commercial charging stations will follow. No need for Biden’s plans to build stations. Government is best kept clear when the market is working.

—  New inventions are coming to solar, wind and storage. CPS Energy, the city-owned electric and gas utility serving San Antonio, recently announced it wanted ideas for 500 megawatts of innovative generation and storage and has had over 200 creative suggestions. It also is seeking 900 megawatts of solar from existing technology and 50 megawatts of storage. That is green creativity at work.

What the Biden administration, if it is to be, must do is, as often as not, get out of the way. It should take action where action is clearly needed. Don’t try to speed up a rushing stream with dams.

One such place where it might strike a blow for clean air is to find a mechanism to save the 12 or so operating nuclear power plants that are to close in the next five years. Their zero-carbon output equals thousands of new windmills.

Their loss will be a carbon-reduction catastrophe. Biden should be told.

If Mitch McConnell’s toadying Senate has its way, we are to have a more conservative Supreme Court come the elections in November, even though it looks like the current concept of harsh conservatism will be roundly rejected in them.

One branch of government, if President Donald Trump and McConnell have their way, will be handed over to an extreme vision of conservatism that has no deep-seated philosophy behind it.

It is a corruption of a noble stream of political thought and its consequence is a political class that adheres to narrow, divisive issues that have an oppressive social effect. Taken together these have the result of seeming to be heartless and causing pain to the poor and under-educated.

That isn’t the conservatism we have known for decades: the conservatism of Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan and the two George Bushes. It is a political virus that threatens the Grand Old Party with years of loss of elective office.

If these aberrant Republicans use their form of judicial activism to keep Trumpism alive, they will be ensuring today’s ugly discord for a long time.

The issues which divide us aren’t the solid Republican values of yesteryear of limited government, free trade, market solutions, open opportunity, strong defense, active scientific inquiry, educational excellence, personal freedom and privacy, and universal prosperity.

Not the cramped and spleen-imbued issues that are about to dominate the Senate GOP’s foraging for like-mindedness in the coming hearings.

They are out to burden conservatism with narrow views on a few issues which aren’t intrinsically conservative, including:

• Abortion
• The death penalty
• Healthcare
• Sexual preference

Rigidity on these matters — except for sexual preference — has the effect of laying a disproportionate burden on the poor and, therefore, stimulating the far left of the Democratic Party, empowering the followers of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.).

Take just two matters. Abortion falls heavily on the poor. Nobody suggests that it is a good means of contraception, but unwanted pregnancies do occur. They can break up families, cause economic burdens, and bring children into untenable poverty, social dysfunction and other misery.

What women do in private shouldn’t be governed by the Senate or the court.

End Roe v. Wade and rich women will still be able to go to another country or in other ways pay for a safe end to a pregnancy. Appointing a staunch religious anti-abortionist to the Supreme Court is to put a thumb on the scales of justice and to blur the line between church and state for a transient political purpose: reelecting Trump.

The death penalty, which has failed spectacularly as a proven deterrent to murder, likewise falls mainly on the poor — often the poor and mentally challenged. The record shows that rich people aren’t taken to the death chamber at dawn. Superior lawyering from the moment of arrest keeps them from later capital punishment.

What is the ultra-conservative value proposition then?

The same imbalance extends throughout our remarkably punitive legal system that punishes those on society’s bottom rungs more aggressively than those at the top.

Families were destroyed and social mayhem resulted in the mortgage excesses of the last financial crisis. I saw it devastate one of my employees of that time: a struggling Black man of impeccable character but limited education who was talked into unwise refinancing by rapacious mortgage lenders.

He lost his home, his good name, everything. No one across the length and breadth of the scandal went to prison for the damage their greed inflected.

All the other right-wing issues of the day have the same characteristics: They defend the upper reaches of society, those with money, and are harsh and inconsiderate of the rest.

Healthcare glares in this. A patchy and capricious system will become worse for tens of millions of Americans if the legal attack on the Affordable Care Act by the Trump administration goes against the sick in the Supreme Court — a court weighted against ordinary people in pursuit of a suspect interpretation of conservatism.

Radical conservatism is also out to extinguish the labor movement, or what is left of it. A robust labor movement is a bulwark against the pitiless downgrading of the worker from dignity to subservience, living in fear and rewarded inadequately.

The rush to the bottom is becoming a national sinkhole. We can all fall into it eventually.

Four years ago, Democrats slouched to the polls and voted, holding their noses figuratively. Somehow the party had come up with a presidential candidate whom no one liked very much: Hillary Clinton.

Pitted against a risible president, Donald Trump, who is a climate change-doubting, class-dividing, race-baiting, immigrant-bashing, law-bending, treaty-tearing, dictator-loving, truth-challenged, dissembling incompetent, this time it should be an easy White House win for the Democrats.

This time, there should be white-hot passion for Democratic challenger Joe Biden, the candidate who would restore our moral base, our international standing, salve our wounds, and give us a sense that the nation is moving forward to a sunlit future.

But there is no surge of feeling, zero passion.

Biden is the candidate who would deal with the COVID-19 pandemic and the environmental catastrophe that is unfolding with pestilences of a biblical scale: serial hurricanes striking the Gulf Coast and wildfires from hell in the West. He is the man who should give us confidence in our systems, from healthcare to voting, to the rule of law at the Justice Department.

But there is no surge, no passion.

Instead, the closest thing to enthusiasm I find among voters is resigned, faint praise. “He’s a decent man,” I’ve been told over and again. I’ll have a struggle in not offering the next Democrat who tells me in a woeful voice that Biden’s “a decent man” a physical rebuke.

One may discount the great man or woman view of history, but there is no great argument for the “decent man” view of history. You can have decent men who were great, Truman and Reagan, but you can’t move the needle of history with flaccid decency.

Poor old Joe Biden — yes, he is old for the job at 78 — is defined mostly by having been there, like the TV-watching gardener played by Peter Sellers in the movie “Being There.” He was in the Senate for a long time, he was vice president to Barack Obama for two terms. He clears the being-there bar — but it is a low bar, very low.

No one is passionately against Biden. Trump’s attempts to paint him as a socialist ogre about to take us to Stalinism have fallen flat. Flat because they are unbelievable, and they are unbelievable because that isn’t Biden.

Biden has always been the quintessential man of the center of the situation. The pressure on his left wing, coming from Sens. Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Edward Markey of Massachusetts, and the group around Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, is going to be a problem and a discomfort for Biden. He must also wonder where in that world his vice-presidential pick, Kamala Harris, so far defined more by her ethnicity than her philosophy, will fit.

If, as still expected but not guaranteed, Biden makes it across the threshold in this election, his greatest strength will be his address book. His best strategy will be to use surrogates to fight his political wars. That means a strong Cabinet and a great White House staff.

Given Biden’s limitations, his chief of staff will be a critical player. He needs to give his Cabinet secretaries their heads. One of the many weaknesses of the Trump administration has been the pusillanimous nature of the Cabinet: Men and women who see the role only as pleasing the capricious and solipsistic president — a chorus of lickspittle people singing hymns of praise to the chief.

Biden doesn’t need to point up Trump’s weaknesses: They are manifest. He needs to point up his own strengths beyond his affability and, yes, beyond his decency.

I’ve been watching Biden for years, nodding “hello” to him, and sometimes talking with him, the way it goes for reporters and politicians in Washington. I get the distinct feeling Biden isn’t the man he was eight years ago, when he would’ve been a more appealing candidate within his limitations. He seems diminished, his fire reduced to an ember.

As it is, Democrats and renegade Republicans will slouch to the polls to vote against Trump. Few in their hearts will be voting for Biden. There is a passion deficit.