At the end of George W. Bush’s second term in 2009, few Americans were denying that the Iraq War had become a fiasco and that the federal government had failed both in its response to Hurricane Katrina and the financial crash. Even then, though, much of the public avoided facing the political and economic causes of those failures and grasped instead at vague, easy hopes that then Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama offered, but that his presidency proved unwilling or unable to fulfill.
The ongoing flight from reality only accelerated with Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign, when millions of voters sought scapegoats to blame for rising dangers and craved simplistic directions to safety and salvation. Much of that acceleration can be blamed on Rupert Murdoch’s TV channel, Fox News, and his newspapers, The Wall Street Journal and the New York Post, as well other right-wing media, sundry impresarios and invaders of social media.
But democracy can be undone by a much older danger, inherent in human nature: millions of people’s incapacity or disinclination to pit reason against fantasy in the conduct of their own lives and public affairs. That disturbing tendency has been reinforced by Trump, as much as by destructive media, since well before 2016, intensifying public distempers that won't abate even if Joe Biden wins.
