What’s obvious is that people can be epistemically disadvantaged by gaining their beliefs from social networks that are radically unreliable. We get many of our false beliefs in the same way we get true ones: by listening to the views of people we trust. You can be partially responsible for being in an unreliable network if there are signs that something is wrong and you don’t examine the possibility that it’s misleading you. But the misjudgment here may not reflect bad moral values.

Once the fog of political warfare that surrounds an election has cleared, we could discover that most of our fellow citizens are not irredeemably indifferent to Trump’s evident vices; that whatever explains their attachment to the president, it is not that they repudiate the values he does not respect. Our tribal prejudices are at their worst in moments like these. Let’s hope we can recover some measure of equilibrium and move, however stumblingly, toward a modus vivendi that entails working to see the best in one another and not just the worst. Only if we learn to overcome our fiercest prejudices can we take up the business of steering the ship of state as a people united despite our disagreements.