Donald Trump at a campaign rally in Waco, Texas.

Let us for a moment set aside all political realities. Let us view the 2024 American presidential contest not as a clash between parties or even individuals. Let us instead frame it as one might a human growth chart, one that begins with infancy, courses through childhood and adolescence to eventually achieve the maturity that is called adulthood. Let us come to the clash as parents, or would-be parents, eager perhaps to create borders between the stages of life, so that childhood choices cannot be compared with those of an adult.

In this brush-stroke paradigm, the incumbent president is the fully formed adult. He is polite, patient, not prone to exaggeration, and in most respects balanced: everything an adult is supposed to be, or at least this was what was required of an adult in the long-ago decades when he himself was a youth.

Under normal circumstances — and by normal I refer to the standards of his Boy Scout youth, and mine — the values of this achieved adulthood would be challenged by another figure equally at home in a similarly straightforward and balanced adulthood. Thus the presidential race could be seen as a tussle between two adult men schooled in similar patterns of maturity.

What happens when congenital derision and mockery, staples of hormonally charged pubescence, become the accepted way of humiliating or embarrassing an adult “adversary”?

But as most know, the circumstances are no longer normal and have not been for some time.

That is because the nature of old-school maturity and adulthood has been irreversibly toppled.

What this means is that the presidential race, if it is not between two traditionally shaped adults but between an old-schooler who is in fact elderly and a second elderly figure who — if traditional models are applied — is, in tone and temperament, more like an adolescent who appreciates and flaunts his own self-centeredness and invites those who would support him to also dwell in, or revive, their inner adolescence.

All this might be amusing in its way if adolescence did not also reflect a time in the growing process when nothing is cast in stone, authority is at times dismissed, and recklessness can seem to some like a badge of honor.

My paradigm would seem immediately designed to discredit the adolescent, but there’s a problem.

What happens when part of a nation, far from exalting its postwar adult side, in quite large numbers seeks solace in the pleasures of adolescence? What happens when the adults of my paradigm are considered pompous, self-righteous, and morally superior by an irrationally vindictive figure who scoffs at “classroom” restraint while cherishing and exalting me-first adolescent recalcitrance? What happens when congenital derision and mockery, staples of hormonally charged pubescence, become the accepted way of humiliating or embarrassing an adult “adversary”? The plausible result might very well witness the adult leader speaking high-mindedly of the immutable values of democracy while the juvenile delinquent seen to threaten those values makes predictable fun of his stuffy, stupid elders, ramping up their do-the-inmates-run-the-asylum? dismay.

Suddenly, the political battlefield is warped from a struggle between honest-Abe democrats and a larger-than-life demagogue into a more primitive contest between a traditionally mature, book-smart adult, and a principal-hating, mercurial schoolyard bully whose coterie of friends like him because he’s willing to burn down the school, an arousing prospect for anyone who refuses to kowtow to established moral and legal authority. And lo and behold if in this rude and primal tussle, a surprising number of card-carrying adults remain as attracted as ever to their upheaval-friendly adolescent side, as keen as ever to oust book-smart principals.

To further suggestions that the anti-mature candidate is a dictator, a Nazi in disguise, they say, “Boys will be boys.”

What then to make of delinquency’s return engagement?

On an intellectual level it begs welcome to what is and always has been an anti-intellectual nation, wary of Washington bureaucrats and New York know-it-alls.

On a gut level it suggests a nation more than ever disposed to the demagoguery that once animated the likes of Joe McCarthy, he of the Communist witch hunts.

At the same time, immaturity is on the loose in part because maturity and its adult spokes-folk seem too tame for an increasingly raw and ill-disciplined world, which as a result is less interested in history lessons about George Washington and democracy. To adult remonstrations that the immature candidate appreciates dictators, they say, “So what?” To further suggestions that the anti-mature candidate is a dictator, a Nazi in disguise, they say, “Boys will be boys” or, “He ran the place for four years and, aside from meddling by adults, managed just fine.” As for stolen elections and January insurrections, they shout, “Everyone’s entitled to make a point, and, if necessary, toss gum at the teacher” — or, these days, perhaps shoot him.

Which is to say, get ready: 2024’s detention hall is now in session.