It bled over into the idea that as an American I am absolutely free to ignore science, expertise, and reason to believe what I feel to be true. That happened over hundreds of years.

Then another part of it, certainly relevant to the election and presidency of Donald Trump, is the degree to which a more benign blurring between fiction and reality—entertainment—has affected us. Entertainment values and show business have seeped more and more into American life, whether it’s in the press, politics, the pharmaceutical industry, you name it. The end of the twentieth century gave out-of-control thinking the perfect infrastructure to make the untrue, unreasonable, and unprovable seem real: that infrastructure being the internet.