Really?

In a nation of 330 million people, the overwhelming share of whom find themselves far closer to the middle of the political spectrum than to either of the extremes, we may well be headed to a presidential contest between Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders.

Is it possible for that vast swath of Americans hovering somewhere within shouting distance of the political center and with their own moral center still intact to simply stipulate that we’ll accept any of the other 329,999,998 of our fellow citizens based on some random selection?

A jury selection method never looked so good. We’ll gladly take our chances.

A couple of disclosures here: First, while this column will run the day after the South Carolina primary, it is being written a few days prior. Second, my 23-year-old son is a paid field organizer for a group affiliated with Sanders, currently in Minnesota. I am proud of his involvement and love him fully. But suffice to say, his feeling of “The Bern” is not one we share.

A Trump vs. Sanders matchup has not yet reached inevitability, but appears far more conceivable and even likely with each passing day. We will certainly know much more come Tuesday night and the tabulation of the delegate haul from that foremost day of the primary season.

The president and the Vermont senator are very different characters. Their onerousness takes vastly different forms, though both galling.

In Trump, we have a president of historic dishonor who is hard-pressed to point to a fabrication he hasn’t magnified; a division he hasn’t incited; a bankruptcy he hasn’t excused; a woman he hasn’t felt free to grab; or a norm he hasn’t broken.

It’s one thing to be a political disrupter. It’s something entirely different to be a model of bad manners and immoral behavior that we wouldn’t begin to tolerate in a child, a friend or a co-worker.

With Sanders, the faults are not ones of personal rectitude but of judgment and ideology. Indeed, his career has been one of remarkable consistency. But that is no virtue if your prescriptions have been steadily wrong.

It would be one thing if his constant advocacy had just been for a big-government, high-tax form of Scandinavian-style socialism. But that doesn’t begin to explain or justify his lifelong dalliances with some notably bad actors long since discredited.

Who chooses to honeymoon in the Soviet Union a year before the fall of the Berlin Wall? To be oratorically obsequious to Fidel Castro in Cuba and the Sandinistas in Nicaragua? To call for the outright abolition of the CIA during the height of the Cold War? To turn his back on our only democratic ally in the Middle East? And to turn a blind eye, within just the past year, to the outrages of Venezuela’s dictatorship?

His is a track record of far too often aligning with the wrong people on the world stage and giving short shrift to the right ones. Some might note the eerie comparison to Trump’s kinship with authoritarians the world over.

The comparisons don’t stop there. Our vaunted two-party system is fast becoming that of two cults, both beholden to a dear leader. With the head of one not really being a Republican of any long standing and the aspiring head of the other being the longest-serving Independent in the history of the Senate.

Before Trump ever took on Hillary Clinton in 2016, he had to engineer a hostile takeover of the Republican Party. Sanders is on the cusp of pulling off the same trick this year on the other side of the aisle.

There’s the further worrisome fact that Sanders will be 79 come Election Day, having had a recent heart attack. While Trump will be 74 with an affinity for steaks and fast-food burgers.

Hardly a promising sign for a country that once prided itself on youth, dynamism and boundless energy.

As America wakes up to this prospect and looming choice, huge numbers are left to wonder where they might find a home among these grossly unsatisfying, polarizing choices.

If you believe in fiscal solvency and responsibility, do you opt for Trump’s trillion-dollar deficits in prosperous times or Sanders’s break-the-bank answer for every social problem?

If you favor a woman’s right to choose but with reasonable limits after a fetus is fully viable, do you support Trump’s absolutism in one direction or that of Sanders in the other?

If you get that climate change is quite real, do you choose Trump’s virtual denialism or Sanders’s extreme remedies, including a crippling, all-out ban on fracking?

If you understand that neither the left nor right have a monopoly on wisdom, but yearn for a modicum of common sense, common decency, moderation and even compromise, where’s your home in such a hideous storm?

Do you head to the moral cellar or the proletarian pit?

In the increasingly plausible event that a race between Trump and Sanders will be forced upon an ungrateful nation, it will constitute proof positive and conclusive that our political system has run amok, perhaps terminally so.

Populism has its appeal and its moment. But it is usually long on noise and unrest while short on answers.

A choice between a wannabe autocrat and a confirmed socialist can’t help but leave a vast segment of the country asking, “What about us?” Whichever way the electorate turns, the only sure bet is further, heightened discord of ever-increasing volume.

Please, God, no.

Eric Sondermann is a Colorado-based independent political commentator. His column appears Sundays in ColoradoPolitics. Reach him at EWS@EricSondermann.com; follow him at @EricSondermann