Seeing through Madness: A Roman Holiday

This essay was written in Rome on September 24, the eve of a general election that may be a turning point in the fortunes of democracy, the political system that Plato called a “ship of fools” for its tendency to elect incompetent captains on the basis of their popularity. On November 8, the United States will have conducted a kind of national referendum that could determine the future of the oldest and most powerful democracy in the world. The very idea of free and fair elections and the peaceful transfer of power is at stake, though the question appears nowhere on the ballot. Scores of candidates are running for office on the explicit commitment to the Big Lie that the presidential election of 2020 was stolen from Donald Trump, who lost by seven million votes. The Big Lie is accompanied by a mass popular delusion, namely that “a group of Satan-worshiping elites who run a child sex ring are trying to control our politics and media” (Kevin Roose, New York Times, September 3, 2021). This basic doctrine of the QAnon Movement, an extreme outgrowth of a long-standing strain of political insanity in American culture, has now been publicly embraced by a former President of the United States. His incitement and planning of the violent insurrection of January 6, 2021 is now understood to be a dress rehearsal for the real thing, combining an epidemic of disinformation with the arming of fascist militias and the election of corrupt officials who will make sure that elections come out the way he likes. His hand-picked Supreme Court is busy overturning the basic principles of liberal democracy, and efforts to hold him accountable for his innumerable violations of civil and criminal law are stymied by the corrupt judges he has in-