You might well think that Americans have heard more than enough by now about how the influence peddler and sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein "networked" his accomplices, victims, and apologists. But that plutocracy-serving elite's tawdry cravings for money, sex, power, and, later, conspiratorial dealings were merely symptoms, not causes, of a deeper, more dangerous craving that we need to understand.

No matter whether we characterize it as pathological or as sinful in the nature of our divided human hearts, it's been poisoning the country since long before Epstein and Trump rode it and accelerated it in an ever-widening gyre. I came to it nearly half a century ago, when I got to know, and, soon enough, condemned, a carrier of methods and 'morals' that anticipated Epstein's and Trump's.

Instead of joining the mad scramble to expose more individuals who've worked with Epstein to massage the cravings for money, sex, and political power, we'll be better off facing a fundamental challenge posed by California Congressman Ro Khanna, who has urged Americans "to ask ourselves how we have produced an elite that is so immature, reckless and arrogant."

How, indeed? How and why have "respected" leaders who knew that Epstein was criminally perverse forfeited their public credibility and even their own self-respect by dancing so tightly with him? What did Epstein himself need so desperately that he couldn't stop spinning the vast spider's web that connected and indebted these people to him?

And why did "progressive" opponents of Epstein's most noteworthy patron imagine that "No Kings" protests, impeachment trials, lawsuits, and fiery polemics would stop all the king's horses and all the king's men from putting Trumpty Dumpty back in office again? How did so much of America accept the hand-in-glove fit between Epstein's and Trump's thirst for adulation and their adulators' thirst for cheap simulacra of love, wellbeing, and social standing whose masters lord those delusions over the powerless?

The answers have a lot to do with Epstein's earlier models and predecessors, one of whom I encountered almost half a century ago as a proficient rider of the storm of injustices that's now enveloping us. Recently a veteran New York City police officer warned me that Trump Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents' "bravado, inadequate instruction, lack of transparency, and immunity from prosecution" are "a deadly cocktail being forced down Americans' throats, leaving law-abiding immigrants, asylum seekers and even full citizens fearful, helpless, or dead."

Even when brave Americans in Minneapolis and much of the rest of the country rejected that cocktail, Epstein was stirring and offering another, smoother brew to the roughly 9 percent of Americans whom Yale Law Professor Daniel Markovits has characterized aptly as a "meritocracy-trapped" class that serves the top 1 percent while exploiting (often by bedding) its victims.

The Epstein files "lay bare the once-furtive activities of an unaccountable elite, largely made up of rich and powerful men from business, politics, academia and show business," the Times' Robert Draper noted. "The pages tell a story of a heinous criminal given a free ride by the ruling class in which he dwelled, all because he had things to offer them: money, connections, sumptuous dinner parties, a private plane, a secluded island and, in some cases, sex… That story of impunity is all the more outrageous now in the midst of rising populist anger and ever-growing inequality."

Many in the Epstein elite remind me of the "panderers, procurers, and go-betweens" who were satirized in the 1962 Broadway musical "A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum," produced when Americans could joke more innocently about ancient, decadent Rome. Many such "middlemen" now perform less funnily at the podiums of Trump administration press conferences and in congressional hearings.

Some of them were drawn into Trump's and Epstein's spider's webs at first by legitimate, pressing needs and projects. But a terminally cynical, corrupt minority has orchestrated such needs without any humane sentiment or scruple, following the example set by Trump, who told New York Magazine in 2002, "I've known Jeff for 15 years. Terrific guy. He's a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side."

Only four years later, when Trump and Epstein had fallen out over unrelated business matters, he denounced Epstein to a police chief who was investigating the solicitations, telling him, 'Thank goodness you're stopping him, everyone has known he's been doing this,' according to a document recounting their conversation… Mr. Trump said it was known in New York circles that Mr. Epstein was disgusting…"

The seduction and entrapment of our plutocracy-serving elite resembles the 18th Century historian Edward Gibbon's observation that "a slow and secret poison" had spread into the vitals of the ancient Roman republic and empire until its citizens "no longer possessed that public courage which is nourished by the love of independence, the sense of national honor, the presence of danger, and the habit of command." They "received laws and governors from the will of their sovereign and trusted for their defense to a mercenary army."

Can America's republic survive the no-longer slow or secret poison that Trump is pushing, presenting himself as the republic's savior even as he's dismantling it? Algorithmically driven consumer capitalism is part of the poison, but some of Trump's and Epstein's perversity has come from their own desperate needs for others' equally desperate adulation.

The social psychologist Harry Stack Sullivan studied what he called a "malevolent transformation" of yearnings for love in which would-be mentors, teachers, professional healers, and self-styled social and political saviors feed off the insecurities of desperate people and questing youths, harnessing their talents to fill an emptiness in themselves. They distort loving relationships by intensifying their dependents' or clients' attentions and debts to themselves, as Epstein and Trump have done. Somewhere beneath their busy, dramatic "leading" and "caring" lurks a fatal indifference to their targets' thwarted needs and love.

Sullivan warned that economic and cultural pressures toward malevolent transformations proliferate in a society whose pathways to opportunity and emotional support have become twisted or blocked. Predators like Epstein and Trump play upon that blockage and its victims' desperation by staging illusory breakthroughs (as in Trump's repetitive "You've never seen anything like it!").

Trump's malevolent transformation has turned some of his female loyalists into cruel parodies of the "Me Too" movement who "lean in" to force their patron's deadly cocktail down Americans' throats. I'll name them: Attorney General Pam Bondi, former Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, National Intelligence director Tulsi Gabbard and presidential spokesperson Karoline Leavitt. (Among men, there are Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, Budget Director Russell Vought, Border Czar Tom Homan, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, and others, some of them now out of office, who've bound themselves to a man who has made himself a walking, steaming, stinking tower of malevolence.)

The only effective antidote will have to come, indispensably if not wholly, from a civil society whose faith passes the understanding of these lost souls and their puppet masters. For them signs of others' suffering and anguished yearnings become mere "data points" to masters of corporate affairs and public relations who, like some of my former Yale students, are charming, astutely discerning, but hollow to the core.

_____

Forty-five years ago I was invited to help a predator use "data points" to guide something like "the Epstein treatment" as he offered me good money and powerful "connections." Epstein himself was only 29 at the time, just getting started as a consultant. I was similarly young, an editor of a small weekly newspaper whose struggle to survive in Brooklyn, NY drove me into delicate negotiations with the "Epstein" of that time and place, a wealthy businessman-turned congressman, Fred Richmond.

Richmond wanted me on his staff as soon as possible. I wanted an advance on the nice salary that he was offering so that I could give my newspaper colleagues just enough funding to keep the publication alive by attracting new ads through wider distribution. Although Richmond and I professed similar values and interests in our first meetings, his interests and mine soon pivoted on irreconcilable political premises, social preferences, and moral boundaries. Therein lies my tale that anticipated Epstein's modus.

I told it all in "What's Really Wrong With Fred Richmond?," an essay that The Village Voice published at the time, on March 30, 1982, and that it has just now re-published, with an editorial note explaining that that old essay lights up the analogy between my long-ago dalliances with Richmond and others' more-recent dalliances with Epstein. Although the latter's crimes and cruelties were more devastating than Richmond's, the same corrupt and corrupting dynamics have been in play.

Anyone who has indulged, sought, or embraced Epstein's loaded "generosity" and networking will be struck by my account of what I experienced and condemned in 1982. Although Epstein, unlike Richmond, never sought public office to "elevate" his private misdeeds, many of Richmond's actions and relationships do jump off the page now as if they were Epstein's own tactics. I hope that my account will prompt one or two of Epstein's former collaborators and victims to give us their own testaments.

Donald Trump’s destruction of America’s 249-year-old constitutional republic and civic culture follows a historically familiar pattern that includes two especially striking precedents — one ancient, one modern. In both of these, an aspiring dictator overthrows a tottering republic while promising its frightened, gullible and/or opportunistic citizens that he is rescuing it even as he drains it of its remaining legitimacy and power.

The precedents I have in mind rose and fell on elements of “human nature” that also drive what’s befalling us now. We Americans often consider ourselves transcendent of such dark elements, triumphant over them and even innocent of them. But the precedents I’m going to sketch suggest that every time Trump tells us that one of his accomplishments is so great that "you've never seen anything like it," he’s marching people who believe him one step closer to the same abyss that swallowed Augustus Caesar’s ancient Roman Empire and Adolf Hitler's modern German Reich. This time is no different. Yale law professor Bruce Ackerman was right to warn Guardian writer Robert Tait that this is "dictatorship … a shattering assault on the foundations of the Constitution."

In Rome during the 1st century B.C., Julius Caesar’s grand-nephew Octavian provoked and won a chaotic, decade-long power struggle in the republic, emerging victorious and intimidating the shaken senate into naming him Augustus Caesar and granting him the title of Imperator as he established an empire that would outlast him, in one way or another, for roughly a thousand years.

Twenty centuries later, Hitler and his “National Socialist” or Nazi movement of angry, desperate Germans — who had been defeated in World War I, humiliated in its settlement at Versailles and brought even lower by the Great Depression — destroyed their Weimar Republic and established his dictatorship as the culmination of a "Thousand-Year Reich" that had supposedly followed the coronation of Charlemagne in 800 A.D., the Holy Roman Empire and, more recently, the 19th-century German Empire.

Trump’s promise to “Make America Great Again” under a dictatorship carries more than a few echoes and remnants of Augustus’ and Hitler’s projects. Different though those precedents were from one another and from our situation now, a sober look at them yields insights into what we’re dealing with and where we’re heading, even though we can’t know where we’ll land.

When in Ancient Rome …

Augustus’ record should matter especially to Americans because18th-century historian Edward Gibbon’s magisterial six-volume "Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire" was read intently by our republic’s founders as it was coming off the presses in the 1770s. Gibbon, no democrat, spent much of his time reading voraciously and carried some English biases and feuds into his writing, but he illuminated Augustus’ strategies in ways that America’s framers found sobering, cautionary and salutary.

Julius Caesar had become Rome’s first dictator after 49 B.C., when the republic was faltering, after leading soldiers who’d become loyal to Caesar while abroad, returned to Italy by crossing the Rubicon River, thus prompting a civil war by defying the republic’s ban on posting Roman troops domestically. Upon winning the ensuing conflict, he took control of the republic.

Caesar’s republican opponents considered him a tyrant and assassinated him in 44 B.C., whereupon his grand-nephew Gaius Octavius, or Octavian (the future Augustus), whom he’d designated as his adoptive son and heir, joined with Mark Antony, the guardian of Caesar’s papers and prerogatives, to avenge Caesar by killing his assassins. But Antony considered himself Caesar’s principal heir, and he and Octavian fought each other politically and militarily for more than a decade until Octavian defeated him in the Battle of Actium in 31 B.C., winning the loyalty of more Roman legions.

Although Octavian’s power was now supreme, he exercised it shrewdly by dispensing selective doses of bribery, coercion and worse, turning Rome’s senators into sycophants who granted him the title of princeps, or "first citizen," of Rome in 27 B.C. and gave him the honorific name Augustus Caesar.

Like their new emperor, Elon Musk and the other tech moguls see democratic politics as little more than a lubricant for their power and wealth.

The republic’s consuls and other officers became Augustus’ lapdogs, but he preserved their venerable offices and titles “with anxious care,” seeming to consult them and massaging their vanity. Augustus established a regime on their backs whose stability and benefits lasted for centuries in what Gibbon characterized as "an absolute monarchy disguised by the forms of a commonwealth” whose ruler exploited his subjects in ways that reflected his perverse character:

A cool head, an unfeeling heart, and a cowardly disposition prompted him, at the age of nineteen, to assume the mask of hypocrisy, which he never afterwards laid aside…. His virtues, and even his vices, were artificial …. He wished to deceive the people by an image of civil liberty, and the armies by an image of civil government.

Human nature hasn’t changed enough since then to shield masses of people from being seduced and intimidated into servility and herd-like stampedes. It certainly hadn’t changed by the 1770s, when Gibbon described the spread of what he called “a slow and secret poison” into the vitals of the Roman Empire, whose residually republican citizens "no longer possessed that public courage which is nourished by the love of independence, the sense of national honor, the presence of danger, and the habit of command” and so “received laws and governors from the will of their sovereign and trusted for their defense to a mercenary army.”

Trump has been counting on such weaknesses, as Augustus did, but he's doing it even more recklessly and at warp speed. Gibbon’s “slow and secret” poison has always spread much faster and more blatantly in America than it did in Augustus’ Rome or even in Gibbon's England. John Adams may have been channeling Gibbon in his warning to Americans:

When the people give way, their deceivers, betrayers, and destroyers press upon them so fast, that there is no resisting afterwards. The nature of the encroachment upon the American Constitution is such as to grow every day more and more encroaching. The people grow less steady, spirited, and virtuous, the seekers more numerous and more corrupt, and every day increases the circles of their dependents and expectants, until virtue, integrity, public spirit, simplicity, and frugality become the objects of ridicule and scorn, and vanity, luxury, foppery ... and downright venality swallow up the whole society.

A thousand-year Reich — that lasted 12 years.

Rome’s decadence may indeed be outdone by our own, owing to 20th-century developments that would supplement Gibbon’s account of Augustus with an even-darker analogy between Trump’s plot against America and Hitler’s plot against the Weimar Republic.

In an Atlantic article, “How Hitler Dismantled a Democracy in 53 Days," historian Timothy W. Ryback references Hitler’s failed Beer Hall putsch of 1923, triggering memories of Trump’s failed coup attempt of 2021. Ryback also notes that Hitler “campaigned on the promise of draining the ‘parliamentarian swamp — den parlamentarischen Sumpf,’” a promise that Trump has repeatedly echoed by vowing to “drain the swamp” in America.

Trump’s apologists can’t excuse or ignore his continuing refusal to disavow supporters who have made Nazi salutes while shouting “Hail Trump”; who have marched into Charlottesville in 2017 shouting, “Jews will not replace us"; who have brandished Nazi swastikas in the Capitol during their 2021 coup attempt; and who have flirted with Germany’s proto-fascist Alternative for Germany party, known as the AfD, as Elon Musk and Vice President JD Vance have both done.

Trump is more contemptuous and vengeful than Augustus in handling senatorial wind-sniffers and flip-floppers, not to mention the tech moguls whom he seated together at his inauguration this year, like dogs on a single leash, after they’d abased themselves at Mar-a-Lago. Like their new emperor, they see democratic politics as little more than a lubricant for their power and wealth. Musk may consider himself the top dog unleashed, but Trump will dump him and other Muskovites, as he did former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, former national security adviser John Bolton and others who’d done his fixing and his heavy, sometimes dirty, work but then made the mistake of differing with him in public.

The poison, and Trump as its pusher

One effect of the lubricant that would have been unimaginable in Augustus’ Rome and even in America’s beginnings has been recent “free speech” jurisprudence, such as the 2010 Citizens United ruling, that stretches the First Amendment’s original intent beyond recognition to protect disembodied, algorithmically driven corporate “speakers” and their huge megaphones. It's leaving other citizens with laryngitis from straining to be heard in the internet's supposed free-for-all, which is becoming a “free-for-none” whose engines track, distract, titillate, indebt and entrap us before flickering screens, like the helpless Athenians Plato depicted as chained to seats in a cave, watching images projected on the wall.

Such postmodern servitude liberates only those who “platform” it and profit from it with approval of our national marketer in chief, who hawks his own merchandise online: Bibles, steaks, meme-coins, phony university degrees.

Trump didn’t invent the poison that has worked its way into the vitals of American society, but he's its most prominent pusher and a carrier of its most virulent effects.

Trump didn’t invent the poison that has worked its way into the vitals of American society, but he’s its most prominent pusher and a carrier of its most virulent effects. Millions of voters seek relief by following him because he knows their addictions so well that he can voice and channel their pain while telling them, “I, alone, can fix it.” Never mind that he’s been a carrier since long before he peddled it to millions of Americans for nine seasons on his TV show “The Apprentice,” every episode of which accustomed them to being told what he’s now telling tens of thousands of public workers: “You’re fired!” He can’t “fix” what’s oppressing them, but he may be able to rig it for a favored few, becoming the heartland’s and the urban working-class’ imagined avenger when he’s really their pusher.

Gibbon anticipated — and Augustus mastered — something very much like Trump’s false bonding with plebeians:

The provinces, long oppressed by the ministers of the republic, sighed for the government of a single person, who would be the master, not the accomplice, of those petty tyrants. The people of Rome, viewing, with a secret pleasure, the humiliation of the aristocracy, demanded only bread and public shows; and were supplied with both by the liberal hand of Augustus. The rich and polite Italians… enjoyed the present blessings of ease and tranquility, and suffered not the pleasing dream to be interrupted by the memory of their old tumultuous freedom.

So now, too, with us. Civic implosion and loss have generated a spiritually deep hunger that's driving many Americans to sanctify Trump, as ancient Romans sanctified their emperors — and as Trump has sought to sanctify himself, ostentatiously surrounding himself with evangelical leaders and overt Christian nationalists.

As Gibbon wrote: “The influence of the clergy, in an age of superstition, might be usefully employed to assert the rights of mankind; but so intimate is the connection between the throne and the altar, that the banner of the church has very seldom been seen on the side of the people.”

Even Gibbon’s despairing judgment that history is little more than “a register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind" resonated with many American founders’ residual Calvinism, which was grimly realistic, right up through Abraham Lincoln’s reckonings with our fallen world. But the founders’ Calvinism, represented in “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” was intrepidly covenantal, crusading against abuses and addictions that Augustus merely massaged and that Trump actively trades on and peddles.

What historian Louis Hartz characterized as Americans' "vast and almost charming innocence of mind" hasn’t transcended the idealism of the 1960s, when Peter, Paul and Mary’s “If I Had a Hammer," a ballad of "danger" and "warning" and "love between our brothers and sisters, all over this land," electrified me at age 16 when I watched them sing it at the 1963 March for Jobs and Justice in Washington. But although that and other siren songs — The Who’s "Won’t Get Fooled Again," Bob Dylan’s "The Times They Are A-Changin'" — arrested millions of us morally and roused us against "the System," they couldn’t deliver us politically. That would have required untangling what’s more inherently destructive in our politics and markets, not to mention in human hearts.

Can Americans resist dictatorship and rescue fairness?

Trump's election has put all Americans on a playing field somewhat like the one on which Hitler was installed as the Weimar Republic’s duly elected chancellor, but it's a field unlike any other in the American republic’s history since the Civil War. Trump isn’t quite as crafty as Augustus or as brutal as Hitler, but he’s a wrecking ball for America’s civic-republican structures: “He’s been extremely good at persuading banks to lend him money for dubious business ventures and equally good at getting gullible customers to pay for things he never delivered,” writes Stephen Walt, a Harvard Kennedy School professor and Foreign Policy columnist:

He has proven to be remarkably adept at persuading voters that the United States was in desperate shape (no matter what the facts were) and that he alone could fix it, in good part because he is equally adept at finding fictitious enemies to blame for different problems. He’s in a class of his own at avoiding punishment for past crimes and pretty darn good at extracting benefits to himself, his family, and his pals.... What Trump has not shown much talent for is running a government, designing coherent policies, and delivering broad and tangible benefits to ordinary Americans.

Even Bret Stephens, the conservative New York Times columnist, assesses Trump’s governance as follows:

The Jan. 6 pardons were awful… Withdrawing Secret Service protections from Mike Pompeo and Bolton… will haunt [Trump] if Iran makes good on its efforts to kill them. The sale of Trump crypto tokens is tawdry and unethical…. The effort to revoke birthright citizenship and 160 years of jurisprudence on the 14th Amendment is abominable…. And the idea that Elon Musk has an office in the White House when he has billions of dollars of business before the federal government is appalling.

Watching U.S. senators cave in to confirm Trump’s horrid nominees for Cabinet positions and other high administrative posts, I can’t help but recall Gibbon’s report that after Augustus piously “professed himself the father of his country,… He was elected censor; and… he examined the list of the senators, expelled a few members, whose vices or whose obstinacy required a public example, persuaded near two hundred to prevent the shame of an expulsion by a voluntary retreat… The principles of a free constitution are irrevocably lost, when the legislative power is nominated by the executive.”

Our hideous gun massacres, degrading entertainments and rampant addictions make clear that tens of millions of Americans feel abused or alienated enough to crave easy explanations and scapegoats to blame for their pain.

Trump hasn’t expelled or “primaried” many senators into oblivion, nor is he yet as armed and brazen as Augustus. Most Americans aren't yet as frightened and angry as the desperate Germans who sought relief in hailing Hitler’s Third Reich. Yet our hideous gun massacres, degrading entertainments and rampant addictions are making clear enough that tens of millions of Americans do feel abused or alienated enough by corporate and finance capital's exploits to crave easy explanations and scapegoats to blame for their pain. Many swallow Trump’s lies like poisoned gummies and demand more.

It has become possible to imagine Trump delivering a speech, embellished perhaps by Stephen Miller and Steve Bannon, in which he boasts that MAGA and “all great movements are movements of the people, are volcanic eruptions of human passions and spiritual sensations… and not the lemonade-like outpourings of literati and drawing room heroes.” But that celebration of a MAGA-like movement was written in 1926 by Adolf Hitler, in "Mein Kampf,” to describe his own rising movement.

It has also become easy to imagine an influential conservative such as Bret Stephens becoming alarmed enough by Trump’s actions and rhetoric to issue this warning:

Right before our eyes, like something on the screen, the vast social fabric of [our republic] has crumbled and on its ruins, [Trump] and his confederates have run up a political front of startling and provocative modernity.…[MAGA’s] hand has been so much quicker than the democratic eye, and for his violence we have so little precedent. All the democratic countries, or if you like, the parliamentary countries, are unaccustomed to murder gangs…. We can no more count on the fruitful prospects of earlier days than we can count on ease in a hurricane. We… who made for ourselves a habit of give-and take in the faith that we were not at cross-purposes with anyone, have to confess that if goodwill runs out of the machinery of government and domestication is wrecked, to repose on our security is suicide.

But that assessment was written not by Stephens but by Francis Hackett, literary editor of the New Republic, in 1941 for his book "What Mein Kampf Means to America." Nazism wasn’t on my mind when I came upon and read Hackett's book one wintry morning early in 2016, as candidate Trump was rampaging through the Republican primaries and exposing the hypocrisies of conservative Republicans and neoliberal Democrats on his way to the GOP nomination.

An ordinary citizen, with the last word

To understand how creepily un-American Trump’s Project 2025-driven strategies are, compare them to a brief sample of American civic-republican thinking in action that an anonymous reader identified only as “SPHealy” sketched in a 2007 post, beneath something I'd written:

Back in the playground days, we used to play basketball with whoever was on hand... and people would rearrange and switch sides as needed to keep things even and fun. We were quite competitive and loved to win, but we were playing against our neighbors and schoolmates who were not necessarily our friends but with whom we knew we needed to maintain at least non-destructive relationships.
The problem is that such a system requires that all parties have a fundamental allegiance to getting along, and specifically to handling losses without developing longstanding brutal grudges. If a small group had ever gotten together and made an agreement to subvert the system and behave destructively in a coordinated manner, they could have done a lot of damage before the rest of us figured out what was happening — and then our only alternative would have been to terminate the system.
If trust had been destroyed it could not have been replaced. Strong as our constitutional system is, I don’t think it was ever intended to resist a large scale, long-term, tightly-organized effort to subvert it from within.

That warning about “a small group” making “agreement to subvert the system and behave destructively in a coordinated manner” fits perfectly the Claremont Institute, the Heritage Foundation and such prominent right-wing activists as John Eastman, Michael Anton and Russell Vought, who are referenced tellingly in a darkly prophetic essay by the legal and political historian William E. Scheuerman.

Eastman, Anton and Vought could have been top strategists for Augustus or Hitler, and now perform those functions for Donald Trump. To understand where they, Bannon, Musk, Miller, Peter Thiel and others are taking us, ponder a prophecy from 18th-century Anglo-Irish writer Oliver Goldsmith, which the late Tony Judt adapted for the title of his final book: "Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey/ Where wealth accumulates, and men decay."

NOW READ: There's a hidden provision in that big ugly bill that makes Trump king

Now, even as they find themselves voting against Donald Trump's ballyhooed call to send $2,000 to desperate Americans, most congressional Republicans, from Louie Gohmert and Jim Jordan to Mitch McConnell, David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler, are finally suffering the Trumpian contempt and public humiliation that executive-branch saps such as Jeff Sessions and Bill Barr suffered as they set themselves up for and squirmed under Trump's all-devouring narcissism.

And so another raft of Trumpsters — this time including a majority of Republican lawmakers — is thrown into history's dumpster. Or so we might wish.

But let's not set ourselves up for embarrassment. It's not yet clear that Trump's millions of diehard believers are learning anything from watching politician after politician bite the dust.

Even in the unlikely event that Democrats win control of the Senate by defeating Perdue and Loeffler in Georgia's Jan. 5 Senate runoffs, potential victors Jon Ossoff and/or Raphael Warnock will inherit, along with Joe Biden, a mess even more dreadful than the awful one that George W. Bush's Republicans bequeathed to Barack Obama and Biden in 2009.

And, once again, Democrats will have to survive a tsunami of unrepentant, unending poison and unquenchable rage.

We can anticipate this because it's happened so often in American history that we, no less than the congressional Republicans, would be setting ourselves up for shock and despair if we didn't take steps to counter it.

Too many Americans who voted for Trump and who crave easy answers and scapegoats for their distress are following the New England Puritans who hunted witches; the masses of desperately poor who swooned in revival rallies and Great Awakenings across the 18th and 19th centuries, prompting the satirist H.L. Mencken to lampoon preachers who dammed brooks by baptizing the faithful; and the lynch mobs and Klansmen and believers who followed such demagogues as Louisiana Gov. Huey Long and Sen. Joe McCarthy.

The journal Democracy has just posted my essay warning that it's happening again. (Salon posted my similar warning in greater detail four years ago, when Trump was rampaging through the Republican primaries and demolishing both parties' establishments.) Many others have issued similar warnings: Chris Lehmann's "The Money Cult" nails more Protestant theologians and preachers than I like to acknowledge as "court poets" of the vulturous capitalism that has deluded Americans throughout our history.

Trump's demagoguery, I write in Democracy, has "enlarged and exploited a social and moral vacuum that was already swallowing faith in the republic and a corporate-capitalist economy that has driven countless little stabs of heartbreak and self-doubt into our lives":

These forces have been dissolving our freedoms for decades now, not out of malevolence but out of mindless, routinized greed. Trump has focused free-floating, inchoate rage against these material and cultural assaults into a syndrome that substitutes Authority for democracy by feigning populist indignation and by scapegoating women and people of color. His true believers' growing violence won't recede or be reversed even if it's set back. ...
[S]omething like Trumpism will outlast him because the fabric of liberal-democratic and civic republican norms and institutions was weakened long before his presidency: Leaders who weakened citizens' trust in public initiatives and assets were market-fundamentalist economists such as Milton Friedman, James Buchanan (both of whom died before Trump even ran for President), and Arthur Laffer, who advised Trump's 2016 campaign; businessmen who've long meddled in politics, such as the brothers Charles and David Koch and private-equity baron Stephen Schwarzman; and media moguls such as Rupert Murdoch and demagogues Rush Limbaugh and Tucker Carlson.

What differentiates Trumpism from the mass delusions I've mentioned is that we longer have even the ghost of an establishment that, for all its flaws, was credible enough to enough Americans — as, for instance, Franklin D. Roosevelt was — to buy off, deflect and sometimes educate enough stampeding witch-hunters, creationists, race rioters and rabid anti-Communists to give democracy another chance. Even conservative Republicans such as John McCain sometimes accomplished that. Where are they now?

This time, they — and liberal Democrats — have let torrents of casino-like financing and consumer bamboozling, which seem harmless and anodyne but are in fact unprecedentedly powerful and intimately intrusive, turn millions of potentially thoughtful citizens into impulse-buyers who demand to be lied to because they're desperate for easy answers. And so we find today's congressional Republicans, locked in a blind, swooning embrace of delusions about how wealth is created and about how it escapes from the working people who actually create it.

The latest news out of Michigan — in which the current occupant of the White House has not only summoned Republican legislative leaders to meet with him but pressured two members of the Wayne County Board of Canvassers into attempting to rescind their votes to certify the election outcomes, potentially disenfranchising thousands of legitimate votes — makes clear that Donald Trump and his minions have opened a trap door in the foundation of democracy and are diving into an abyss of raw power and violence that none of us may escape. Joe Biden's administration will have to grow brass knuckles to deal with what's coming. Business and civic leaders, in the large corporations and the elite universities, should grow some brass knuckles, too. Other news of recent weeks makes one wonder if they will.

Thirty important CEOs of major corporations logged into an early morning, off-the-record Zoom meeting on Nov. 6 to explore responses to Donald Trump's defiance of democracy. One of those was Robert Iger, the 69-year-old executive chairman of the studiously apolitical Walt Disney Company. He and the other chief executives, including three former U.S. cabinet secretaries, convened with Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, the peripatetic maestro of confidential executive conclaves and business-leadership programs who is a professor of management at Yale and a founder of the Chief Executive Leadership Institute.

The virtually assembled CEOs had been shaken by Trump's delusional White House briefing room pronouncements about the election. So they listened intently as Yale historian Timothy Snyder, a scholar of 20th-century authoritarianism and the author of "On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons From the Twentieth Century," explained how business elites' inaction and prevarications about rising fascism in Weimar Germany and other countries had wound up facilitating Nazi and other fascist coups whose tactics Trump has been emulating, with eerie if somewhat loopy fidelity.

But after Snyder signed off, Stephen Schwarzman, billionaire CEO of the Blackstone private equity group, a key Trump confidant and mega-donor, and a Yale College alumnus whose $150 million gift to his alma mater prompted it to rename and repurpose its semi-sacred civic complex for him, defended the president's legal right to challenge the election outcome. Schwarzman urged the CEOs to be patient, and not publicly critical of Trump's refusal to concede defeat.

Although Disney's Iger and most others at the meeting had no connections to Yale, the university's background role in these conflicted reckonings isn't a coincidence. It's an emblem of the crisis itself.

First things first: Iger, born in Brooklyn and raised as a Democrat on Long Island — he co-chaired a fundraiser for Hillary Clinton's 2016 campaign — switched his voter registration to independent soon after Trump's victory. In a videotaped interview on Nov. 10, 2016, Iger praised the smooth transition then underway from Obama's presidency to Trump's, noting his hope for "a new tax policy" with lower corporate rates and better incentives to competition. "I think it's too soon to say" whether Trump would deliver it, he added, but on Dec. 2, 2016, he joined the president-elect's Strategic and Policy Forum, a business advisory council led by Schwarzman.

Yet Iger resigned from that group only six months later, when Trump withdrew the U.S. from the Paris Climate Agreement, and expressed discomfort with Trump more generally after the Las Vegas massacre (in which a Disney employee was killed), saying that, "In this day and age, we get outraged when an athlete doesn't stand for the national anthem — where's the outrage here?" This year, he donated more than $250,000 to Joe Biden's campaign.

Having worked for 25 years at Disney's helm to expand its entertainment offerings and media properties, Iger and other CEOs were "alarmed," Jeffrey Sonnenfeld told the Financial Times, by Trump's duplicitous, nearly deranged remarks in the White House briefing room just after the election. Such behavior, compounding the COVID crisis, endangered corporate efforts to expand their markets and profits "intelligently," by their lights, as demagogue-addled mobs destroyed the consumer-friendly, democratic comity that steady profit-making requires. CEOs "don't want fractured communities. They don't want hostile workplaces," Sonnenfeld told the FT, and, the very next day, Nov. 7, the influential national Business Roundtable, some of whose members had logged into the Yale meeting, congratulated the Biden-Harris ticket on its clear victory.

But, echoing Schwarzman's sinuous advice, the Roundtable statement also commended Trump "for a hard-fought campaign that has garnered over 70 million votes. We know the outcome is disappointing to his millions of supporters. While we respect the Trump campaign's right to seek recounts, to call for investigation of alleged voting irregularities where evidence exists and to exhaust legitimate legal remedies, there is no indication that any of these would change the outcome."

That statement exemplifies the tension between business leaders' need to acknowledge democracy's challenges to their tax-cutting, wage-cutting, public deregulatory and private surveillance agendas, on the one hand, and the public's need to limit the dangers those agendas pose to democracy, on the other. The Roundtable's statement certainly didn't illuminate what executives like Iger have worked so hard to finesse: the cold reality that top-down political derangement such as Trump's has been rising in America — at the hands of big business itself — since well before he emerged as a fake businessman on "The Apprentice" and in his many real but casino-like ventures. The Trumpism that has enveloped and devoured an entire political party is the result not only of his own pathologies but of systemic relations between the happy, confident consumerism that companies need and the accelerating decay of democratic legitimacy and comity that consumerism now promotes.

But, echoing Schwarzman's sinuous advice, the Roundtable statement also commended Trump "for a hard-fought campaign that has garnered over 70 million votes. We know the outcome is disappointing to his millions of supporters. While we respect the Trump campaign's right to seek recounts, to call for investigation of alleged voting irregularities where evidence exists and to exhaust legitimate legal remedies, there is no indication that any of these would change the outcome."

That statement exemplifies the tension between business leaders' need to acknowledge democracy's challenges to their tax-cutting, wage-cutting, public deregulatory and private surveillance agendas, on the one hand, and the public's need to limit the dangers those agendas pose to democracy, on the other. The Roundtable's statement certainly didn't illuminate what executives like Iger have worked so hard to finesse: the cold reality that top-down political derangement such as Trump's has been rising in America — at the hands of big business itself — since well before he emerged as a fake businessman on "The Apprentice" and in his many real but casino-like ventures. The Trumpism that has enveloped and devoured an entire political party is the result not only of his own pathologies but of systemic relations between the happy, confident consumerism that companies need and the accelerating decay of democratic legitimacy and comity that consumerism now promotes.

The attempt by Yale's Sonnenfeld to reconcile or at least mediate between the conflicting assessments of Trump by Yale historian Snyder and Yale alumnus and mega-donor Schwarzman reflected a crisis in Yale's and other universities' mission to temper their students' preparation for capitalist wealth-making with commitments to scientific (originally, Puritan religious) truth-seeking and to the arts and disciplines of civic-republican governance. Although Schwarzman has lavishly funded, served and defended Trump's deranged politics since 2016, Sonnenfeld defended Schwarzman's attempt to steer the CEOs away from condemning Trump. He assured student reporters at the Yale Daily News that, in the meeting, "Schwarzman never defended President Trump's assertion that this was an unfair election. … There was no parochial self-interest, no corporate strategic angles that [Schwarzman and the other CEOs] were arguing. This was 100 percent a spirit of patriotism and common concern that alarmed them." A Blackstone spokesman assured the FT that "As an American, Steve believes the electoral system is sound and that the democratic process will play out in an orderly and legal manner, as it has throughout our nation's history."

But Sonnenfeld's fervent defense of Schwarzman as a disinterested citizen, standing like Horatio at the bridge to defending the republic, can't be reconciled with Schwarzman's fervent support for and collaboration with Trump, his powerful beneficiary and benefactor. Although Schwarzman has now acknowledged that "it looks like Joe Biden" has won the election, his years-long collaboration with Trump accelerates the unraveling of Yale's and other universities' mission to balance their students' (and some professors') assiduous wealth-making with liberal education's truth seeking and its great conversation across the ages about lasting challenges to politics and the human spirit.

Although Yale recently renamed its John C. Calhoun College to cease honoring that champion of white supremacy and Black slavery, it just as recently repurposed and renamed its civic center as the Stephen A. Schwarzman Center, honoring the man who bankrolls and counsels the current champion of white supremacy and, sotto voce, of Black death at the hands of rogue police officers and COVID.

The hypocrisy isn't confined to private universities like Yale. Christopher Newfield, a professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and a trenchant critic of misguided business policies that undermine higher education, showed recently in his authoritative blog Remaking the University that liberal Democrats capitulated decades ago to business leaders' worst priorities and practices. The universities did little to offset their own growing sense of themselves as corporations in an education industry that incentivizes students to become self-marketing, indebted buyers and sellers instead of deliberating citizens. That sea-change in liberal Democrats' own priorities is symbolized by Yale's renaming of Commons, but it's also devastating to the public universities fiscally and ideologically, as Newfield makes strikingly clear.

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Democracy's genuflection to plutocracy isn't hard to detect in convergences among participants in Sonnenfeld's meeting. He and Schwarzman grew up in suburban Philadelphia in the 1950s, albeit seven years apart, both attending public school in the Abington township, both working in their fathers' small businesses (the Sonnenfelds' men's clothing store, the Schwarzmans' dry goods store). Both sons went on to the Ivy League, Sonnenfeld to Harvard College and then to the Harvard Business School, which Schwarzman also attended after graduating from Yale. Both emerged as fanatical self-promoters, not only in business but also in education and public life. Schwarzman's "edifice complex," as egregious as Trump's, has driven him to put his name on countless public institutions, as I reported in Dissent magazine.

Sonnenfeld, an effusive business pundit on MSNBC and in many other venues, is almost infamously ravenous for public attention and respect from business elites. "He's the Oprah Winfrey of business schools," the late political scientist Robert Pastor told Philip Weiss, a Harvard College classmate of Sonnenfeld who profiled him for The New York Observer. Although Sonnenfeld is acutely skeptical of Trump — in 2004, he disparaged "The Apprentice" for teaching wrong lessons about business leadership — it takes one to know one. Trump's compulsive attention-getting rides more on combat than on connecting, but both he and Sonnenfeld have had to fight maniacally to restore and embellish almost-ruined careers — Trump through bankruptcy after bankruptcy, and Sonnenfeld owing to an incident at Emory University in 1997 that ended with his vindication only after an excruciatingly long fight that impels him to advise CEOs on how to stage comebacks from career disasters. It's worth noting that Trump got his B.A. and MBA in Sonnenfeld's native Philadelphia, at the University of Pennsylvania and the Wharton Business School.

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Historian R.H.Tawney characterized the hypocrisies of leaders who try to put a righteous face on their uncontrollable power-lust and greed:

"Few tricks of the unsophisticated intellect are more curious than the naïve psychology of the business man, who ascribes his achievements to his own unaided efforts, in bland unconsciousness of a social order without whose continuous support and vigilant protection he would be as a lamb bleating in the desert," Tawney wrote in 1926. "That individualist complex owes part of its self-assurance to the suggestion of Puritan moralists that practical success is at once the sign and the reward of ethical superiority. … The demonstration that distress is a proof of demerit, though a singular commentary on the lives of Christian saints and sages, has always been popular with the prosperous. By the lusty plutocracy … roaring after its meat and not indisposed, if it could not find it elsewhere to seek it from God, it was welcomed with a shout of applause."

Plutocrats and their apologists don't exactly "roar" after their meat at redoubts such as Davos, the Aspen Ideas Festival and Sonnenfeld's Chief Executive Leadership Institute. Surveying the degradation and ruin of the democratic public that their own practices and premises have demoralized, they sigh sagely and wonder piously how "the people" might return to self-government, even as plutocrats like Trump show that they can barely govern themselves, let alone anyone else.

Democracy benefits only fleetingly when some plutocrats oppose others who've gotten out of hand: The historian Snyder, writing recently in the liberal Catholic journal Commonweal, contends that Trump is driven now by desperation to escape the legal and economic ruin that awaits him when he loses presidential immunity against civil and criminal indictment. Trump has come very close indeed to derailing the election with more than a little help from his Republican Party, thanks to which even Congress won't uphold the rule of law unless public resistance to current arrangements moves beyond episodic looting and assaults and beyond tweeting, texting, signing petitions and writing articles like this one.

Ultimately there's no substitute for disciplined, humane democratic movements such as those led by Mahatma Gandhi, Adam Michnick, Vaclav Havel, Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King Jr. and the founders of the American republic. They've reconfigured and sometimes replaced national-security states and regimes built on grinding inequality and corruption. Often, as in Eastern Europe and the American South, they've done it without perpetrating violence: Even the American Revolution "was effected before the War commenced ... in the Minds and Hearts of the People," wrote John Adams.

Perhaps the clearest assessment of such movements is the late Jonathan Schell's "The Unconquerable World: Power, Nonviolence, and the Will of the People." He recounts how leaders of such movements discovered that power flows ultimately not from the few who are daunting, dazzling or wealthy but from seemingly powerless masses who stop obeying and who reconfigure their lives together without official permission or reward, through disciplined non-cooperation that's nonviolent but all the more effectively coercive. Time and again, Schell wrote, rulers driven by power-lust and greed respond to such movements "with refreshed ignorance": A state that militarizes its police and floods its streets with soldiers, surveillance and thugs ends up displaying its impotence before massive but principled non-cooperation.

There's no revolutionary thrill in discovering that America has come to this. Elites, too, must act, but in ways that heal and empower others, not just by pouring money into Democratic Party coffers. And universities that fund institutes and programs for elite leadership and grand strategy-making should fund more courses like the one on nonviolence and power that Schell taught at Yale for years, along with programs that prepare organizers for the movements that democracies everywhere need now.

Financier and philanthropist George Soros must have seen Trump coming as early as 2011. He certainly saw where a disturbingly large proportion of American voters were going. "The United States has been a democracy and open society since its founding. The idea that it will cease to be one seems preposterous; yet it is a very likely prospect," he wrote in the New York Review of Books in June of that year.

George W. Bush's reelection in 2004 had convinced Soros "that the malaise in American society went deeper than incompetent leadership." The public had proved "unwilling to face harsh reality and was positively asking to be deceived by demanding easy answers to difficult problems."

Will the American public now reconfirm Soros' observation? This year's campaign has given us plenty or reasons to worry.

By the end of Bush's second term in 2009, few Americans denied the harsh realities of the Iraq war fiasco and of failed federal responses to Hurricane Katrina's devastation and to tsunamis of predatory financing that were throwing millions of people out of their homes and jobs. Yet Soros insisted that much of the public, reluctant to face other realities, grasped at vague, easy hopes that Barack Obama's 2008 campaign offered but that his presidency proved sometimes unwilling and sometimes unable to fulfill, especially against a Republican Congress after 2010.

The ongoing public 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.

Soros proposed that Americans' reluctance to face reality had been "coupled with the refinement in the techniques of deception" by Rupert Murdoch's and other right-wing media and by sundry impresarios and invaders of internet social media. But he also warned that democracy can be undone by a much older danger, inherent in human nature, that discredits the Enlightenment "assumption that freedom of speech and thought will produce a better understanding of reality." That assumption "is valid only for the study of natural phenomena," not of politics, Soros wrote. Instead of standing "apart from reality, acting as a searchlight illuminating it," reason and rational analysis were of little help in understanding how even prosperous, well-educated people think and act in society.

That disturbing proposition has been reinforced by Trump ever since 2016 and by the public distempers he stoked on the eve of this election. Those distempers won't abate even if Joe Biden wins. American history offers ample reasons why. Whenever the republic's civil society has been under great stress, defenders of its traditional values, joined by opportunistic free riders like Trump who are driven only by power-lust and greed, have ginned up public paroxysms of alarm and rage at selected internal enemies whom they've blamed for the crises.

In the 1690s, the enemy was witches, hysterical women and girls said to had been taken by Satan. In 1619 and ever since, it has been African Americans and other people of color, said to be inferior and therefore all the more dangerous to their oppressors. In the 1840s, it was Catholic immigrants, said by a presidential candidate to be besotted with "rum, Romanism and rebellion." In the 1920s, it was anarchists, Reds and pushy Hebrews. In the 1950s, it was Communist spies for Stalin, the Satan of that time. In the 1960s, it was hippies, inner-city rioters, and opponents of the Vietnam War. Since 9/11, it has been American Muslims.

Trump drew some of his inspiration from another such paroxysm in 2015, when a yet another scapegoat was conjured up by another cohort of self-avowed civic champions, propagandists, opportunists and keyboard-pounding alarmists (including more than a few sensation-hungry journalists). Civil society, they warned the public, was endangered by fragile, college-student "snowflakes" and petulant, censorious "cry-bullies," obsessing, with their coddling, over-controlling parents, counselors and deans, about "safety." According to this account, their perverse culture of "safetyism" censures all who don't follow its rules.

This was all well before the real threat to safety posed by COVID-19, which certainly does require that we follow strict rules. Yet public response to safety-obsessed college snowflakes and cry-bullies society was almost as intense as it had been in response to Puritan alarms about witches and alarms about domestic Communist spies. A 7,300-word article in the September, 2015 Atlantic magazine, "The Coddling of the American Mind," garnered more than half a million Facebook shares with its claim that a new "movement" on American campuses was demanding protection from even stray phrases uttered in conversation or offending sentences in textbooks that might frighten or discomfit students and their mentors.

Introducing readers to preoccupations with "trigger warnings," "micro-aggressions" and "safe spaces," Atlantic authors Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt warned that "safetyism" and "vindictive protectiveness," driven by "generally left-leaning campus sensibilities," was spawning "pathological thinking," such as "catastrophizing," a malignant pessimism that turns "commonplace negative events into nightmarish monsters."

Keyboard-pounding culture warriors, many of them older white men, including some of my own college classmates, responded, often anonymously but with alacrity, raging from internet "safe spaces" at videos of black students demanding apologies for racism and sexism. Some students' demands were histrionic and destructive to civility, but residential undergraduate college campuses, at least before COVID, have been civil societies on training wheels, where young adults sometimes experiment in a politics of self-discovery through moral posturing. Some act like hypersensitive barometers or canaries in a coal mine, registering tremors of a much larger civic implosion that they can't help but carry but certainly haven't caused.

The same can't be said of their angry elders, presumably more mature but nostalgic for visions of their own youth (which they might wince to recall accurately). They exhibit "a distinctive attitudinal structure" that the political theorist Peter F. Gordon, in "The Authoritarian Personality Revisited," reminds us has a "tendency to be on the lookout for, and to condemn, reject, and punish people who violate conventional values." In 2015, conservative provocateurs, editors and reporters obliged these keyboard authoritarians by prowling campuses, notebooks and video-cams at the ready to catch the "cry-bullies" in action.

Necessary though it is to challenge wayward students' and mentors' affronts to free inquiry and expression, it's just as important to understand what's driving them. But well-funded orchestrators of grand-inquisitorial takedowns of leftish "social justice warriors" and "safetyism" developed a strategy that was embraced and adapted by then-candidate Trump: Knowing a successful marketing gambit when he saw one, he promised his followers "safety" from "political correctness" in colleges and, soon enough, from urban anarchists, feral invaders of suburbs and other "nightmarish monsters."

Trump being Trump, he couldn't stop accusing his conjured-up adversaries of sins that he himself and his Republicans are guilty of: fear-mongering and craving the "safety" he supposedly defies; fomenting violence and the swamp of corruption that submerges his own family and supporters. In this year's campaign, "Make America Great Again" became "Make America Safe Again," outdoing the obsessions about safety that the anti-"coddling" crusade had ascribed to college scapegoats.

"In Joe Biden's America, you and your family will never be safe," Trump told a Tampa audience in July. In a perfect instance of "catastrophizing," he warned that under Biden, "rioters and criminals will be totally protected, law-abiding citizens will be totally disarmed, and American families will be at the mercy of the violent left-wing mob that you've been watching on television."

Adopting a more coddling tone, Trump assured senior citizens in Fort Myers, Florida, in August that "our groundbreaking therapies have significantly ... improved our outcomes for elderly patients, but I'll not relent until all American seniors are safe. You're going to be safe — 100 percent safe." Losing his train of thought in the midst of that talk, he added, "Suburban women want security, they want safety, they want law and order. They want their homes to be protected…. You know why they like me? Because I'm saving their homes."

In a tweet reported by the Boston Globe, Trump added, revealingly, "They want safety & are thrilled that I ended the long running program where low income housing would invade their neighborhood."

The biggest irony in Trump's "safety" gambit is that it doesn't really copy the campus left as much as it picks up a strong current in conservative thought that generated campus "safetyism" in the first place. In 1972, conservative activists David and Holly Franke wrote a book identifying towns — including Holly's hometown of Wellesley, Massachusetts — that they deemed safe from the social upheavals and maladies of that time. Catastrophizing that 50 percent of Americans felt "afraid to walk the streets of their own communities at night" and that 47 percent predicted "a real breakdown in this country," the Frankes commended "only one rational route possible for the law-abiding citizen: escape."

Their book — "Safe Places — sold well through several iterations ("Safe Places West" and "Safe Places for the '80s"). But to revisit the book's fear-driven, fear-inducing assessments of American society now is to uncover some instructive ironies.

The first involves the conservative turn from demanding safety for suburbs that, in 1972, weren't truly threatened by inner-city invaders, to condemning the more-recent demands for "safe places" by students and mentors, many of whom were raised in precisely the "safe places" defended so ardently by the Frankes.

A second irony lies in David Franke's history, since his student days in the 1950s, of mobilizing campus conservatives against leftist radicals. In 1970, two years before publishing "Safe Spaces," he edited "Quotations from Chairman Bill: The Best of William F. Buckley Jr." He co-founded the Intercollegiate Studies Institute to train college students to counter "liberal betrayals" of "our nation's founding principles — limited government, individual liberty, personal responsibility, the rule of law, market economy ... ideas that are rarely taught in your classroom."

So when Trump rails against political correctness on campuses and danger in the suburbs, he's forgetting or denying that imaginary escapes from nightmarish monsters have been peddled successfully for decades by conservatives to millions of people burdened by harsh realities they were reluctant to face honestly. Huge, swooning crowds followed evangelical impresarios such as George Whitefield in colonial times, Billy Sunday in the early 20th century, and a swarm of opportunistic preachers since the 1980s. Earthbound salvation was promised by demagogues such as Louisiana Gov. Huey Long (fictionalized memorably by Robert Penn Warren in his novel "All the King's Men") and the Communist-hunting Sen. Joseph McCarthy.

Trump is outdoing them all. Tens of millions of Americans have surrendered their independence of mind and even of body and property to him, mortgaging their liberties and material security for the dubious satisfactions of wreaking imaginary vengeance on false targets. Forgotten or excused are the greed and power-lust that drive both the coolest and the most impassioned dealers of such delusions.

If there's been little news lately about coddled, safety-obsessed campus "snowflakes" and "cry-bullies," it's because Trump's marketing of fear and false solutions has shifted public attention from political censure to political violence, not only by a relatively few looters, anarchists and antifa militants, but by uniformed murderers of unarmed young Black people, by militias with assault rifles converging on state capitols, by militarized riot cops, by military itself in Lafayette Square and by mysterious federal agents yanking peaceful protesters off the streets in Portland.

Eruptions of "unsafety" have also come from financialized, market-mad distortions of civil society and governance since long before COVID exposed as much devastation as it has caused directly. Trump has ridden and compounded these distortions. His efforts to project responsibility and blame for the damage onto those who are protesting it — including some protesters who, yes, have been damaged by it — were parodied unintentionally by Rudy Giuliani in his speech to this year's Republican National Convention about New York City's supposedly riotous crime and anarchy.

A better American response to Trump and his Republican Party came in the NBA coach Doc Rivers' almost-plaintive, at one point tearful, lament after he'd watched the Republican convention:

All you hear is … all of them talking about fear. … We're the ones getting killed. … [We] protest. … They send people in riot outfits. They go up to Michigan with guns. … Nothing happens [to them]. … My dad was a cop. I believe in good cops. … It's amazing why we keep loving this country, and this country does not love us back. It's really so sad. [I]f you watch that video, you don't need to be Black to be outraged. You need to be American and outraged.

This election has shown that many Americans love the country as Doc Rivers does and that they're determined to keep the republic and all that's been redemptive in its political culture. They have voted to safeguard a pluralist, economically sane, civically rich society against its real enemies, who include Trump himself. Whatever Joe Biden's weaknesses, he said rightly that that kind of civic love really was on the ballot.