This may be the election cycle where we watch identity politics destroy itself live on stage. It'll be the greatest show on earth.

With multiple declared candidates, the 2020 election season is now underway. And there couldn't be more hype for the forthcoming Democratic primaries, which will feature candidates with plenty of flaws trying desperately to prove their woke credentials.

Orville Redenbacher better start paying his employees overtime because our nation is about to experience an unprecedented demand for popcorn. And it’s not because Super Bowl LIII is just around the corner. Something far more entertaining and brutal than adult men crashing into each other at full-running speed during a kickoff is approaching.

I’m referring to the upcoming Democratic Party primaries that will determine who will be President Trump’s electoral opponent. The political contest promises to be the biggest television spectacle since the first season of “Survivor.” And, if Providence is pleased enough, the competition should prove to be more cutthroat than Brutus and Mark Antony fighting for control of Rome after Caesar’s death.

If the Republican primaries that gave us Trump are any indication, we shouldn’t expect a congenial discussion among Democrats on the proper marginal tax rate for those who make between $257,000 and $342,000 a year. We should expect bitter conflict, edge-of-your-seat drama, and a bottomless supply of subtle insinuations of incompetence, all driven by the liberal obsession with racial and sexual identity.

For any declared Democratic candidate, the stakes could hardly be higher. Rightly or wrongly, the left doesn’t just think Trump is beatable. They think, like Hillary Clinton before, that he’s predestined to lose, that his stars signal failure. Whoever emerges out of the primary process will assume their next stop is the White House. The incentive to win the nomination, then, is all the more enticing.

Trump brought excitement to the otherwise stale and overcrowded 2016 Republican field because he was a refreshingly gruff alternative to the blue-jacket-and-khaki, National Review-loyalist crowd. He was willing to break liberal taboos live on stage. He addressed issues voters cared about, but the Jeb Bush clones refused to acknowledge with anything other than bromidic talking points drafted two decades ago by Democrat consultants.

Trump was, in a word, unpredictable. The Democrats are entirely predictable; yet, the lack of novelty won’t count against them because we already know the trouble each candidate is going to run into.

The Democratic battlefield will be trip-wired with all types of language policing. The televised debates are going to be pile-ons with every candidate trying to boost their woke points to unimaginable heights. Every single minority, from one-legged black Polynesians to transgender Hispanic paraplegics, will be invoked in an encomium to diversity. Candidates who don’t stick straight to the progressive line will find themselves on the receiving end of the Twitter mob, or, worse, being tagged in a critical post by social-media queen Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

By the end, Miracle Whip-white Kirsten Gillibrand will be claiming Sally Hemings as a distant ancestor and fabulist Cory Booker will admit to feeling like he sometimes has ovaries and can grok female pain once a month.

The Democrats’ dramatis personae is a veritable list of timebombs ready to explode and offend the hypersensitive liberal dispensation. The list of charges: Joe Biden’s rakish hands; Beto O’Rourke’s campaign staffer’s rape accusation; Elizabeth Warren’s appropriation of a minority identity; the recently uncovered sexual harassment settlement of one of Kamala Harris’s top aides; multiple sexual harassment allegations on Bernie Sanders’s 2016 campaign; Cory Booker admitting to once groping a blotto girl; Kirsten Gillibrand railroading Al Franken out of the Senate; Julián Castro palming off delinquent mortgages to Wall Street hedge funds.

Then there’s any Democrat who did so much as accept a handshake from Bill Clinton.

No Democrats who wants to win are going to ignore the baggage strapped to their competitors, especially when the TV cameras are rolling. There will be accusations bandied about, casually at first, then more seriously as the primaries slog on.

Better still, each and every one of these vulnerabilities will be exploited by the Insulter-in-Chief in his inimical style. I’m not a certified financial advisor, but I’d buy Twitter stock now in anticipation of Trump live-tweeting the Democratic debates.

Heaven help us if the polling is correct and Vice President Biden ends up as the frontrunner. Just picture it now: a septuagenarian straight white Catholic male accepting the presidential mantle of the diversity party. America may still yet see a return of anti-papist bigotry not seen since Mark Twain’s day; history, indeed, does sometime rhyme.

With the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus now shuttered, the Democratic primaries can freely assume the title of the greatest show on earth. If the Democratic National Committee were smart, it’d charge a price of admission to watch. Then again, if the DNC were that fiscally far-sighted, they’d have invested more resources in Wisconsin last time around. And we’d all be denied the thrill of watching identity politics eat itself on a Des Moines stage.

Make sure you have extra butter on standby.