Foreordained

His early interest in the law and politics competed with a call to the ministry and his budding sideline as a rock-and-roll drummer, pianist and composer. But when his demo tapes were lost and his application to divinity school was turned down, he sensed that his career in law was foreordained.

In 1989, when Vice President Dan Quayle nonsensically remarked that "I believe we are on an irreversible trend toward more freedom and democracy, but that could change," we all dutifully relished the gaffe. But he turns out to have been right. What once seemed foreordained has mysteriously slipped our grasp.

The story is both a fable of power and, as Clark explains, the beginning of the understanding of history as a foreordained "sequence of hegemonies".

[Donald] Trump's sleaziness, like everything else in this train wreck, was completely foreordained—and, again, [Chris] Licht and his producers had to know it.