An edited version of a response to a pal’s question about my thoughts this morning.

I read Mark Lilla's piece in the NYRB about a month ago, and it's pragmatism resonated with me. To be honest, all that pre-election talk of "It's going to be a close one..." seemed to be subtextually finishing that sentence with "...but of course she'll win."

I have always assumed it was going to be closer than it turned out to be, but that he would squeak out a victory, because we have become a culture that sees everything through the scrim of entertainment, enjoyment, and likes—and, in our modern era of bread and circuses, video game thinking, and zero-sum, winner takes all-ism, he is simply America's greatest entertainment value.  

Note that fifteen million registered Democrats opted out of voting.   Clearly, they just weren’t entertained enough.

The diminishment of Civics education, let alone education itself, has created a Morlock polity on the right, a swathe of worried men and compliant women who fear their masculinity is threatened by a diverse and inclusive culture, representatives of which have been too often justifiably outed with feet of clay, to the delight of the oligarchs controlling information and its content.

On the left, that diminishment has manufactured an Eloi social class defined by smug self-regard that values performance over actual work, weaponizing fragility, as if nice is the same as good—presuming what they identify as “common sense” will appeal to a crowd which defended Rush Limbaugh as “a satirist,” and who would have presumed that Archie Bunker was the voice of reason.

Of course, neither side has the capacity for anything resembling self-doubt.

And that's where I am this morning.