I’ll be perfectly honest with you: tonight is not going to be easy for me. My usual response to Hillary Clinton speaking on television is to grab the remote. It’s a reflex. The last time I actually listened to a full speech was when she gave up in 2008.

I know my civic duty in this election: to protect the US from a madman. So don’t give me grief if I find it hard at times to sit through this evening. But here’s what I’m looking for, as someone who can’t stand Clinton but is ...prepared to vote for her. Can she break through to people like me who tend not to believe a word she says? Can she admit her mistakes, concede her limitations, own her flaws? Can she be sufficiently honest about herself to break down the enormous skepticism that will greet her speech?

It’s been a long and entirely unexpected journey with this extraordinary figure. I’ve doubted and panicked, I’ve hyper-ventilated and wept, I’ve worried and persevered. We did a lot of that together, you and me. But I have one thing to say: he never let us down. He kept his cool, he kept his eyes on the prize, he never embarrassed and almost always lifted us up. He is a living, walking example of American exceptionalism, of why this amazing country can still keep surprising t...he world.

One of the enduring questions of this campaign has been what, if anything, could Donald Trump do or say to be rebuked by his own party. Today, it seems to me, we reached peak insanity – when an actual nominee of a major party called on a foreign government to use the fruits of its espionage to help defeat his opponent.

And this was not any foreign government. It was the government of Russia, a kleptocracy sustained by permanent war. Republicans once insinuated that Democrats ...were somehow soft on Moscow. And now we have the GOP nominee openly in league with the Russian dictator, brazenly saying he might not defend NATO allies from Russian aggression, suggesting he might recognize Putin’s illegal annexation of Crimea, and bizarrely claiming that Putin had called president Obama the “n-word.”

Those of us who were relieved by the not-so-great delivery of Trump’s deftly framed acceptance speech last Thursday night are not so relieved today. Trump has a pretty normal post-convention bounce, putting him essentially neck and neck with Clinton. The Russian hack of DNC emails – timed to advance Trump’s pro-Kremlin candidacy – has exposed how deeply the Clintons have controlled this whole process from the start through their puppet, Debbie Wasserman-Schultz (and how profo...undly Putin wants Trump to win). The die-hard Bernie fans are now actually copying the deeply ugly “Lock Her Up!” chants of Cleveland. They’re even booing Sanders when he makes the case for uniting against Trump.

Like many others, I read Trump’s draft acceptance speech a couple of hours ago. It’s a remarkable piece of oratory, cannily crafted, framed by massive lies and distortions, crammed with incoherence, and yet, I’m afraid to say, scarily potent. It invents a reality – that the U.S. is in a state of chaos, lawlessness and soaring crime; that the world is careening toward catastrophe – and then makes a classic argument for a strongman to set things straight.

This is a very new dep...arture for politics in a liberal democracy. We’ve never heard an appeal from a major party platform to junk traditional democratic norms, and cede power to a new tyrant, whose magical powers will somehow cause almost every problem in the country to disappear. In this election, the very basis of liberal democracy is on the ballot. The fears I expressed last May about the popularity of tyranny in a late-democracy have, I’m afraid, only been fanned by events since.

From last night's live-blog, a reader writes: "Since Pat Buchanan’s speech at the RNC in 1992, I have awaited this election, prophesied its coming, and feel vindicated because this is the one where I think that the centripetal forces that have been putting strain on the GOP will finally tear it apart. Earlier in the year, I was gleefully saying my political Christmas present was coming and I was so looking forward to this convention.

That was then, this is now. Seeing this ha...s long since stopped being entertaining even in the “see, you lie down with dogs, you wake up with fleas” sense because the GOP did this to itself. Now it’s just uncomfortable, like watching someone who really thinks they can sing butcher the National Anthem and they have only gotten as far as ‘By the dawn’s early light…’ and you know there’s more to come because they can’t stop and everyone in the audience is antsy. It feels like that kind of awkward now."

A reader's contribution to last night's live blog: "Every time I hear 'lock her up' at the convention, I just cringe.

When I think about Paul Manafort’s effort to help elect the pro-Putin Viktor Yanukovych in 2010, and they yelled 'lock her up' in Ukraine, that’s exactly what they did. On trumped up political charges (ironically because she accepted, under duress, an unfair natural gas deal), Yanukovych threw former prime minister and his 2010 opponent, Yulia Tymoshenko, in p...rison.

"There’s one obvious stand-out from last night. I didn’t hear any specific policy proposals to tackle clearly stated public problems. It is almost as if governing, for the Republican right, is fundamentally about an attitude, rather than about experience or practicality or reasoning. The degeneracy of conservatism – its descent into literally mindless appeals to tribalism and fear and hatred – was on full display. You might also say the same about the religious right, the mem...bers of whom have eagerly embraced a racist, a nativist, a believer in war crimes, and a lover of the tyrants that conservatism once defined itself against. Their movement long lost any claim to a serious Christian conscience. But that they would so readily embrace such an unreconstructed pagan is indeed a revelation.

Dear Dishheads,

It's been a while but I'm excited/psyched/terrified to be live-blogging the two party conventions for the next fortnight. From 8 pm till closing each night, I'll be glued to the TV and channeling my thoughts instantly - as in the olden times - except this time for New York Magazine at nymag.com. Chas Danner, an old Dish colleague who now works at New York, will be helping me filter the various Internet responses to the proceedings, and I truly hope you'll come... along for the ride.