Between Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton, it’s chaos or control

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The 1920 election in the United States, the first after the First World War and just following the American rejection of the League of Nations, was a choice between global engagement and quiet normalcy. The country's 1932 election, in the depths of the Great Depression, was about the New Deal or the old austerity. The 1980 election, which brought Ronald Reagan and his new conservatism to power, was about broad governmental powers or spare federal influence. These were clear choices, and none of these elections was particularly close.

So what might the 2016 election be about? There are many possible answers: relatively open borders versus a wall across the Mexican line might be one; or perhaps support for the Iran nuclear deal or opposition to it. But the overarching answer is clear. This election pits control against chaos.

There is great appeal to both of them, and great danger, too. The world's single superpower – possessed of an unrivalled nuclear arsenal, considerable moral authority, and bases and commitments across the globe – must, above all, exercise restraint and control. Indeed, the stability of the United States is the indispensable element of world order.

But there also is enormous appeal to chaos, particularly in a world where order is regarded as a stultifying force and where the status quo is regarded as unacceptable.

In recent years there has been the development of a legitimate "chaos theory," summarized by the mathematician and meteorologist Edward Lorenz this way: When the present determines the future, but the approximate present does not approximately determine the future.

That might be the most succinct and most accurate précis of the philosophy of the presidential nominee of the Republican Party in the United States.

In this year's political struggle between chaos and control, there is no mystery about the representative of each force.

Former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton is the personification of control, so much so that she has rendered an asset into a disadvantage. She is the candidate best prepared in the traditional way to be president – many of her rivals, considering her years as an activist, as First Lady, as senator from a large and complicated state, and as the country's chief diplomat for four years, acknowledge this – but she also is the candidate who prepares the best.

She is the master of the briefing book and of the obscure, important detail. One telling example: She knew to refer to the denizens of the southeastern Europe nation of Kosovo as Kosovars before most Americans even knew there was a Kosovo. There is hardly a health or welfare program in the vast Washington bureaucracy that she has not explored and understood. Her failed 1993 health-care initiative was vulnerable to many criticisms, but not to the critique that she overlooked some of the contingencies in a major overhaul of one-sixth of the nation's economy.

Then there is Donald J. Trump, for whom details matter far less and who has sowed and lived chaos – driving the Republican Party, once an orderly fraternal lodge with well-understood bylaws and a distinct ladder of command and succession, into a chaos the likes of which its customary heroes, such as Dwight D. Eisenhower and his 1952 rival Robert Taft, could never have imagined, nor tolerated.

There is irony in both positions, and in the profile of the presidential candidates who possess them.

Ms. Clinton wrote her undergraduate thesis on the community organizer Saul Alinsky, who was no friend of the traditional order, and indeed the Hillary Rodham who graduated from Wellesley College was prepared to assail the order that she and her activist campus allies found so confining. Her views on the role of women, then later on the rights of children, were, in a word, disruptive.

But while Ms. Clinton remains a sentinel of change she is, at age 68, less a transformative figure than one prepared for the transfer of power. She believes in the tenets of the culture that elevated her and her husband to power. She believes in what congressional leaders often call the "regular order." She may want to create change, but she plots change within that regular order. Although it may be unfair, or sexist, to tie her husband's views to hers, she invited the connection when she said Bill Clinton would head an economic-growth initiative in her administration. So, it is illuminating that when her husband wrote the chief of the University of Arkansas ROTC program to explain his views on the draft in 1969 he cited his desire "to maintain my political viability within the system." Like her husband, Ms. Clinton is no defender of the status quo, but the two always have worked within the system, often trying to reshape the box of contemporary American life but rarely thinking outside the box.

Mr. Trump, who doesn't even recognize there is a box, is just as unlikely a revolutionary as Ms. Clinton is an accommodationist. A graduate of Ivy League Penn, heir to a real-estate fortune, possessor of a sharp eye for the business angle and the tax loophole, he is not only the product of but also the protector of the status quo.

That may be so in business, but it is not so on the campaign trail. The principal example: The man who has used every rule in commerce has broken every rule in campaigning. He has disparaged his rivals in a language that is completely alien to the comity of American campaigns. (There are few if any antecedents to his characterizing of the junior senator of Florida as "Little Marco," except perhaps Richard M. Nixon's description of Helen Gahagan Douglas in the bitter 1950 California senate race as being "pink right down to her underwear.")

The stylistic elements of Mr. Trump have won him adherents, particularly from those who admire the rawness of his rhetoric or find appeal, as his supporters invariably say, in someone who dares to say what others will not. But it is his willingness to propose radical change that is his calling card, and, according to the latest Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll, two-thirds of those who want major changes in the government support the Manhattan businessman. By contrast, Ms. Clinton wins about the same amount of support from those who favour a "steady approach."

If all this seems familiar, perhaps it is because you remember a television spy comedy that ran from 1965 to 1970 – from the Lyndon Johnson years to the Nixon years. Opposing each other were forces that bore the names CONTROL and KAOS. The show, starring Don Adams and Barbara Felton, was called, in a phrase that might be appropriate to our own time and election, Get Smart.