Ours is an age where, with people unable to distinguish between actual reality and competing “alternative realities,” reasoned political debate over the relative merits of divergent policy options has been supplanted by a primitive form of mass psychodrama—where people genuinely believe they’re heroes saving their country, when they’re actually only following red-herring paths laid out by smirking totalitarian-state adversaries with the specific aim of disorienting democracies like ours to the point where we fail.

Can we reasonably believe we have the mental fortitude to resist such mind-meddling, when we live in a country where sound medical practices of demonstrated efficacy and safety that could have brought a raging pandemic to heel are stymied because of lack of acceptance by people who are more willing to listen to the suggestions of a politician that we try injections of household disinfectant?

How can we ever mount effective measures to mitigate the impending ravages of climate change, when, in the grip of unprecedented wildfires, floods, and tornadoes, vast numbers of our citizens still refuse to believe climate change even exists?

What chance do we have of maintaining an even modestly functioning government, when so many of our people find it more to pleasing to believe that a shadowy cabal purported to include Hillary Clinton running a child prostitution ring out of the nonexistent basement of a pizza parlor presents a more significant threat than the combined efforts of Russia, Iran, and China to confuse, hamstring, and incapacitate us?

What is it reasonable to conclude from the demonstrated ease with which large numbers of Americans have already been induced to doubt the legitimacy of the elections that are our bedrock, other than that the future of America as well as its democratic system has become questionable?