Why can’t our leaders imagine anything other than a future of privation and control?

Listen, just about everyone seems to have fallen for one conspiracy theory or another. Americans regularly confess as much to pollsters. In 2018, 66 percent of Democrats polled by YouGov said they found it believable that Russia tampered with 2016 vote tallies to get Trump elected. In 2022, YouGov did polls of Republicans, and only 22 percent said that Joe Biden’s election was legitimate.

Oddly, these disquieting poll results are themselves a kind of emergent conspiracy. Here’s my theory. Without any coordination, the respondents to these polls use