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A black man was elected president, and white people lost their minds.

Not all of them, no. Not even most of them. But not a piddling few, either.

That, in a nutshell, is the story of America’s hateful and obstructionist politics over the last eight years — and of the nasty, arduous excuse for a presidential campaign that finally ends on Tuesday. Granted, many pundits have chosen to explain those things in terms of “economic anxiety,” the fiscal insecurity of the undereducated white working class. But here on election eve, can we, for once, be honest with ourselves about ourselves?

So as much as or more than it is a referendum on the economy — or foreign policy, or terrorism — this election is a referendum on demographic change. A nation that elected a black guy president and enshrined the right of same-sex marriage into law, a nation where Muslims, transgender people and Spanish speakers are more visible and rising higher than ever before, will now tell us how it feels about all that, whether it is ready to plunge ahead into the unknowable future or whether it will seek refuge in a sepia-toned past that never was.

The Republican Party’s preference is no mystery. To succeed the first black president, it put forth a racist enthusiastically supported by the Ku Klux Klan. To oppose the first woman to be a major-party candidate, it offered a misogynist trailing accusations of sexual assault. “Make America great again,” indeed.

Every four years, pundits solemnly intone the same cliché: “This is an important election.” Fact is, they’re all important elections. Choosing a leader for the economic and military giant of the planet is, by definition, consequential.

That said, this country finds itself facing an electoral decision starker and more portentous than any in modern memory. We don’t just choose new policies on Tuesday, nor even a new vision. No, we choose identity. We decide who and what we are.

Are we a backward-looking nation defined by those who lost their minds because a black guy was elected president? Or are we a forward-facing people, challenged by change but never shying from it, never so terrified by it as to betray our fundamental selves?

The thing is, change doesn’t care what we decide. It comes regardless and you can no more question it than you can gravity. The toothpaste won’t go back into the tube, the gay people back into the closet, the women back into the kitchen nor the African Americans back to the rear of the bus.

The past will not be restored. So the only question here is how we will respond to the future. With fear or faith? With cowardice or courage? It’s time for us all to take a deep breath.