The next time Americans hear from their government that they need to impose democracy in other countries — through wars, invasion, bombing campaigns or other forms of clandestine CIA “interference” — they should insist that democracy first be imposed in the United States. An already frazzled, intensely polarized and increasingly hostile populace now has to confront yet another election in the richest and most technologically advanced country on earth where the votes cannot be counted in a way that inspires even minimal degrees of confidence.

The reason why transmuting the repulsive into the routine is central to the rise of the pink police state is, brass tacks, because the professional class, swelled to historic proportions by the institutionalist liberal elite, had to have something to do; increasingly, as the 21st century set in, "knowledge work" became too much a "bullshit job" in the dispiriting sense and had to morph into the "fantasy work" of the prestigious imagineer and the critical theorist. The digital invasion made it ludicrous, inefficient, and disenchanting to toil away as "an elite" at knowledge jobs that machines could do better or soon would. There was little remaining makework abstract and complex enough to occupy and sustain the large professional classes. The solution -- the manufacture of a vast and ever-expanding realm of made-up and ever more recondite woke doctrines -- was more than a godsend. It was an imperative.