Christopher Nolan’s 2015 blockbuster Interstellar did something either fiendishly clever or aesthetically unfair, depending on your tolerance for suspending disbelief: He set the key to the story inside a black hole. As all-purpose plot devices go, the inside of a black hole is a pretty good one, because no one knows what happens when you cross a black hole’s “event horizon,” the point of no return — the boundary beyond which no light or other radiation can escape.

Perhaps, as most scientists speculate, you get “spaghettified,” the force of the hole’s gravity turning you into a real-life Mister Fantastic (the sensation: almost certainly not fantastic). Or perhaps Winston Churchill is on the other side, sipping Pol Roger champagne and playing lawn darts. One seems more plausible than the other, but no one knows.

November 8, 2016, has become a sort of political event horizon. Something will happen on the other side, but no one knows exactly what.

Normally, that is not the case. Take 2000. When he ran for the White House, George W. Bush had worked in the oil industry in Texas, run (unsuccessfully) for a House seat, advised his father’s presidential campaign (twice), and served as governor of Texas for nearly five years. Meanwhile, Al Gore had served for eight years as a House member from Tennessee, eight years as one of its senators, and nearly eight years as the country’s vice president. Neither candidate was a blank slate. Reasonable predictions about their presidential tenures could be extrapolated from their records.

Obviously, that cannot be said of Donald Trump. The Republican nominee has no political record to speak of. He has changed his political affiliation five times, spending stints in both the Democratic and Republican parties. He has supported candidates from both parties (including his current opponent). He has many opinions, including several that are mutually exclusive.

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But, as it happens, that may be a virtue this year — at least, electorally. Hillary Clinton, for her part, is no mystery. She has been publicly flaunting her White House ambitions for nearly 30 years, and she has promised to be Barack Obama’s “third term,” entrenching the political victories of the last eight years. There’s no reason to believe she will not be that, or worse. So over the November 8 event horizon have gone all sorts of predictions about Donald Trump: He’ll appoint better Supreme Court justices! He’ll sign an Obamacare repeal! He’ll enforce our immigration laws! In other words, while Hillary is All Bad, Trump might just be Mostly Bad. Or even Occasionally Good. As an anonymous contributor to the Claremont Review of Books’ website wrote recently: “A Hillary Clinton presidency is Russian Roulette with a semi-auto. With Trump, at least you can spin the cylinder and take your chances.”

But the problem with the political event horizon, like the real event horizon, is that no one actually knows. Hillary Clinton might be the bitch-goddess who crushes the life out of what is left of the American republic. She could also be a widely disliked president, hampered by a fracturing left-wing coalition, who ends up being little more than a placeholder between the Obama years and whatever comes next. Likewise, Donald Trump might hold back, Moses-like, the wave of progressivism that has been building for eight years. He could also be a stunted man-child who blithely accommodates whichever legislators and lobbyists most ably stroke his considerable ego.

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Any of these scenarios is possible. The question is which is more probable — and to that, there’s no good answer, because Trump has no record on which to judge. Every person will come to a different conclusion, relying on data that are largely, and by necessity, private: private frustrations, judgments about decay in various institutions (the media, the church, the university), a reading of Clinton’s and Trump’s psychopathologies, etc. There’s no public argument to be made.

Which means that, in a word, Ted Cruz was right: It’s a matter of conscience. Hugh Hewitt’s conscience says yes. Glenn Beck’s conscience says no. And neither can persuade the other.

#related#That is not how a healthy politics operates. Public life requires public discourse, grounded in public reason. But the rise of Trump has made political judgments on the right private, incommunicable phenomena. That being the case, a bit of humility would seem to be in order. This crisis of conscience was not one that the majority of people wanted. Trump was thrust upon the party by a minority of primary voters — that is to say, a minority’s minority. Those now demanding that anti-Trump Republicans “fall in line” might be good enough to recognize that fact and extend a bit of charity.

Unfortunately, the same conditions that make that charity necessary — a public life reduced to private, incommunicable judgments — also make it nearly impossible to come by.