One definition of a nightmare is that you watch something taking place while telling yourself that that the event is not actually happening; the horrible thing happens anyway, regardless of the disbelief thorning into you, and when you wake up the next morning and the morning after that it's still there, un-rewindable and un-deletable. We were warned that this could happen. A few of us did the warning business ourselves, tried to say "please don't do this" or "please don't vote for this man" or "if we let this man and his gang in, we will regret it for a long, long time", but democracy is a perverse and fickle monarch and, while not completely imaginary, both 'first past the post' and America's electoral college are flawed and tattered garments that emperors wear.

So, it happens time and again. A mere 33 per cent of a massive voting public allows a petty despot to carry the licence of 'legally elected'; a tiny majority of older people who get themselves to the voting booths can counter the wish and will of a whole nation, undo decades of difficult but fruitful participation in a union of countries; a know-nothing dynastic idiot can bully his way through hanging chads and past the winning line in spite of losing an election; and 16 years later, a racist, woman-hating, opportunistic, cynical fat cat can also find himself heading for the White House on a frothy wave of white male anger. It can happen, it happens, it's happened before and will happen again - what to do?

A little over a decade ago, I had predicted in this column that the United States of America would be in meltdown by 2020. A few years after writing that, when Barack Obama took oath, I felt foolish - foolish for having written what I did, but also somewhat relieved, for I am not among those who pray for a day that America collapses. But history can dribble around you and through you and back again, and after Donald Trump's victory this week, I'm beginning to think that perhaps my 2020 prediction wasn't so off the target after all.

That the United States is a divided nation is not a new fact; what makes for grim fascination is that the division continues to grow and metastasize almost in slow motion. What is crazy - in the most serious sense of the word - is that the envelope of divisiveness continues to be pushed; that the place that has the best scientific knowledge about the universe is also a pocket of huge, parochial ignorance; that a society that has created historic generosities within itself can also be the most small-minded and tight-fisted in terms of spirit, to the point where it reminds us of the worst dark days of medieval Europe; that a society that makes such a fetish of youth and the business of being young allows its older generations to continually swallow the hopes and aspirations of its young people.

Before Narendra Modi won the election in 2014, sycophantic apologists were at pains to reassure us that the sky would not fall on our heads were Modi to win. "It will all be fine," they purred, "you will almost notice no difference, except the government in Delhi will be un-corrupt and a tad more pro-business." Boris Johnson, then London's mayor, was cited as an example. "Look at the lefty alarmists and their warning wails about Boris, look how nothing has come of it, how London continues to chug along. Modi will be the same, robust, straightforward, both pro-poor and pro-business, both more simple and more stylish than Manmohan Singh, more of everything except what the jholawallas are telling you to fear."

Well, let's take Boris Johnson first. Johnson's rule over London was not a happy thing, at least not for the city's many have-nots. Then Johnson leveraged his mayorship into making himself a contender for the prime ministership of Britain. As a contender, Johnson cynically worked to destroy Britain's place in the European Union. It was not something he believed should be done for the good of the country; it was something he believed would help him into 10 Downing Street. Johnson achieved the Brexit victory before being stabbed in the back by his fellow gang member, Michael Gove. This left Britain damaged but no matter, the man with the plastic hair survived.

Our Mr Modi may have less hair on his head but inside him grows a thickly forested cynicism that equals any of the worst leaders in history. There is no fear of any afterlife, of any accounting before god for crimes committed, there is no tempering pull of ethics or morality. What Dr Mo wants is the thrill of power, the thrill of world domination and the aggrandisement of his name and person. There is no particular morality or ideology involved, except that, till now, the Hindutva agenda is the most convenient for furthering his ambition. In people like Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump our beloved PM may have found his soulmates, fellow Dementors who will stagger along with him, locating and devouring all that is good and human in the world. For, like Putin and Modi, Donald Trump has no shackling of any ethics or morals. Differently from the Russian and the Indian, from a young age Trump has gorged himself on all that gross wealth can procure, but ultimately life has brought him to the same place as the other two, into a position of power where he can and will send millions of people into a gyre of misery.

It's tragic, of course, but it's also farcical, ludicrous, side-splittingly funny. In America, the turkeys have voted for Christmas just as in India we goats have voted for bali. And, if you look around, Putin, Modi and Trump are hardly alone. There is Erdogan, there is Netanyahu and there is Duterte, and there behind them comes the next batch of European fascists.

What do we do in the face of this cynicism and brutal power-hunger? Well, there are always bits of silver lining to the darkest cloud. America may not quite disintegrate, but under the Trump cosh, large sections of Americans who can't stand 'the Donald' will be obliged to engage with the rest of the world in some meaningful way, in a way where it's not 'America first' but America as part of the world, no more or less equal than any other country or society. Likewise, the fact that Modi is sitting in Race Course Road is terrible, but it does mean that Rahul Gandhi is not occupying the PM's bungalow and that other people are in contention to challenge Dr Mo in the next elections.

Here in India we will all have to keep looking at our choices, at how we vote in elections, obviously, but also how we conduct our lives every day. Do we want to be Trumped, be Modified even more? Do we want to keep dancing to the cynical tunes being played to us by our politicians? Or can we find some new leaders who will serve us better? Do we want to freeze and let our human rights, our freedom of speech and our civil liberties be groped by anti-democratic molesters, or will we push back in some concerted way? The one other silver lining I can see is that while the ghastly Hillary Clinton winning may have lulled us into continuing the status quo, the arrival of His Malevolence into the White House will force people all over the world to make some hard choices and take some decisive action, create some kind of effective non-violent resistance to all the cynical fascists, whether local or global.