We knew, too, that “the economy” was a mirage: a lot of numbers going up on a screen as if of their own volition, with virtually no meaningful relationship to what is happening in the world. We knew that we could never do what the Germans and Koreans have done with their native industries, which were seamlessly converted to medical supply production, because we have no native industries to speak of. We don’t make things here — we just train economists to explain why it is better for other countries to do so, advice they are happy to take. We knew that millions of Americans were lonely and spending far too much time on their computers and their mobile phones; now this is the only thing millions more are able to do. We knew that there are too many guns in the hands of people who should not have them; now even more are being sold in record numbers. We knew that drug addiction and alcoholism were rampant in the post-industrial Midwest; now both are increasing. We knew that suicide was on the rise, especially in the military, where record-high numbers of active-duty servicemen were taking their own lives as of last fall; now calls to suicide hotlines are going up by as much as 800 percent as experts predict 150,000 additional deaths from drug abuse or self-murder. What exactly is new here?

The same is true of our institutions, formal and otherwise. We knew that Congress existed largely for the purpose of showboating “oversight” hearings, not for passing meaningful, well-advised legislation in a timely manner following a period of reasonable good-faith debate. We knew that our president was an irrational voluptuary, a would-be tribune of the plebs whose only redeeming quality is that he is rude to journalists. We knew that our idiotic patchwork of competing federal and state and municipal authorities, justified with lofty concepts like “federalism” and “laboratories of democracy,” was anarchy in practical terms. We knew that our wonderful free press was made up of self-aggrandizing dilettantes.