A couple of years before the Berlin Wall fell a writer, gazing into his crystal ball, predicted communism was done for because ‘even the people who believed in it didn’t believe in it anymore’ – then, by way of explanation, he added that a dead ideology lives on awhile in a semi-comatose state but, after that, exists only on parchment and in history books.

Last week a friend in Charlotte, recalling that writer’s moment of clairvoyance decades ago, sent me a note saying while watching Karl Rove and other assorted Washington Republican commentators on Fox News, the night Trump won the Nevada Caucus, he felt like he was watching zombies – who don’t know their time has passed.