Americans are about to discover that their system is more vulnerable than they thought. There's a lot of complacency in American politics, there's a lot of complacency in advanced democracies generally.

Donald Trump is not supposed to save jobs one by one. He's supposed to build a sound macro economy in which private enterprises create jobs.

But the thought leaders on talk radio and Fox do more than shape opinion. Backed by their own wing of the book-publishing industry and supported by think tanks that increasingly function as public-relations agencies, conservatives have built a whole alternative knowledge system, with its own facts, its own history, its own laws of economics.

We all work for media, we all make mistakes all the time. That's inevitable. What the difference between a responsible journalistic institution is, does it care whether it makes mistakes or not? And does it correct them?

The business model of the conservative media is built on two elements: provoking the audience into a fever of indignation (to keep them watching) and fomenting mistrust of all other information sources (so that they never change the channel).

Partly because of the desperate economic situation in the country, what were once the leading institutions of conservatism are constrained.

A novel makes it possible to understand not just events, but the people who control the events; not only their choices, but also their motives.