If cynics are people prematurely disappointed about the future, they might now constitute something recently elusive: an American consensus. With voting well underway a month before Election Day (actually, during election autumn), gaze upon the campaign’s stricken landscape:

Kamala Harris got a modest bounce after winning what former speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) calls, with imperturbable sang-froid, “an open primary.” (You missed it? Pay attention!) Perhaps the vice president’s bouncette occurred because many voters resemble the one in 1984 who said he supported Colorado Sen. Gary Hart’s presidential candidacy because Hart was the only candidate he had not heard of a month before.

Harris is parsimonious with interviews, but who cares? They can only reveal today’s batch of her views, which tend to expire in batches. It would, however, be fun to find out if there is any question — e.g., are there enough submarines for the AUKUS partners? — she will not answer by saying, “I was raised a middle-class kid, okay?”

Former president Donald Trump still resembles the “Bleak House” character about whom Charles Dickens wrote: “When he has nothing else to do, he can always contemplate his own greatness. It is a considerable advantage to a man, to have so inexhaustible a subject.” But Trump’s ongoing choices of colorful companions raises a question: Has a ship’s hull ever become so encrusted with barnacles that the weight of them sank the vessel? The Trump campaign should wonder. He evidently enjoys the company of the dregs of America’s political culture — Holocaust deniers, 9/11 “truthers,” Tucker Carlson, who praises a “historian” who thinks Winston Churchill was beastly to Adolf Hitler.

Trump, whose churchgoing seems to be, at most, intermittent, nevertheless enjoys the support of many evangelicals. They forgive his seaminess because he is pro-life. Or was for a while, after he stopped being pro-choice, before he recently became that again.

Trump says Harris is inconstant and her running mate is risky. His own — JD (“I don’t really care what happens to Ukraine”) Vance — could at any moment (Trump is 78) take his governing experience (so far, not quite one-third of a Senate term) into the chair behind the Resolute Desk.

One way to locate candidates on the left-right spectrum is to determine how much they favor government manipulations of economic processes. It is unclear which candidate promises the furthest-left fidgets.

Harris, an artist — a Rembrandt — of vagueness, says she will “seek practical solutions to problems” based on “realistic assessments” and apply “metrics” and “facts” and stay “focused.” Clear enough? She also says: “I will engage in what Franklin D. Roosevelt called ‘bold, persistent experimentation.’” (FDR’s goal was to put Americans back to work. In mid-1938, after almost five years of bold, persistent experimenting, unemployment was 20 percent, fewer than four points better than in January 1933.)

Harris wants to increase corporate taxation, which must come at the expense of employee compensation, shareholders (which include pension funds) or consumers of products whose prices are raised to compensate for government siphoning corporate revenue. Harris thinks the rich are not paying their “fair share.” (The top 0.1 percent of earners pay 33.5 percent of federal income taxes; the top 10 percent pay 27 percent; the bottom 50 percent, 2.3 percent.) Eighty percent of those harvesting the Biden-Harris tax credits for buying electric vehicles earn more than $100,000 a year.

Her industrial policy will pick winners (and therefore, necessarily, losers), directing government subsidies to the most promising industries of the future. She has not said how her political career equipped her for such economic clairvoyance.

Trump evidently believes that the tax code is insufficiently complex, budget deficits are too small, the cost of living is too low and presidents should cudgel companies into behaving as presidents want. So far (he has time to enlarge his menu of economic micro-managements) he proposes:

Ending taxation of Social Security benefits, tips and overtime. (How many trillions this would diminish revenue and enlarge the national debt would depend on how imaginatively people fiddled their compensation packages to expand the portion from tips and overtime.) Consumers would pay Trump’s tariffs on all imports, including tariffs imposed to express presidential pique. He says that if machinery manufacturer John Deere shifts some production to Mexico, he will slap 200 percent tariffs on every Deere product imported for U.S. consumers.

So, there is your choice. Be careful, lest you pick the wrong one.

George Will writes a column for the Washington Post. His email address is georgewill@washpost.com.