So how did it happen? FDR once calmed a frightened nation when he said, with great confidence, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” Little did anyone realize how prescient he was, as fear became the weapon the enemies of democracy would use to destroy it. It was fear itself that we most should have feared.

Okay, fear and indifference.

In the 1980s two political operatives, Lee Atwater and Roger Ailes, changed the political equation. Until then Americans were passionate about politics but didn’t take winning and losing elections nearly so personally. Atwater and Ailes brilliantly made elections an emotional experience, pressing the same emotional buttons as rooting for a sports team, and voilà! a political loss had the impact of a personal rejection.

That coincided perfectly with the creation of the tools they needed to spark their revolution, the home computer and the internet. There always had been a significant number of disaffected, alienated, marginalized, and seemingly forgotten people in the country, Nixon’s “silent majority.” They were angry, bitter, and fearful that the world as they knew it was being taken over by some vague “them.” These people were scattered, and until the creation of the internet, they had no way of finding one another. The internet allowed them to form into highly motivated tribes. It was not an especially large movement, not at first, but its members were zealots. Somebody finally was paying attention to them, and it felt oh so good. They recruited candidates or bent other candidates to their will, threatening them with their numbers. While they were not a majority, not nearly a majority, they turned out and they voted, while those people who so easily could have defeated them stayed home to watch TV or just didn’t feel like schlepping to the polls.

That coalition of the disaffected gained power. To do so, they adhered to the phrase credited to French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre and made popular by Malcolm X, “by any means necessary.” The values upon which the republic had been built—among them truth, honesty, integrity and common decency—were cast aside, and what eventually was described as the “alternative truth” became acceptable. Where necessary, the electoral system was rigged through gerrymandering or worse, voter suppression. In some states with Republican governors, it would have been easier for me to beat LeBron one-on-one, without Mighty Chair, than it was finding sufficient voting machines in minority neighborhoods. The result of all that was Donald Trump.

A quirk in the nation’s electoral system allowed the candidate who received a minority of votes cast to become president. Donald Trump was not the choice of voters, but their respect for the system allowed him to take office. That’s the way the nation crumbled. Trump was not particularly well-informed or educated. He knew little about history or science, had difficulty with simple tasks like spelling, and had not been blessed with great intelligence or creativity. He was, however, a skillful liar. His greatest assets were that he was unfettered by the truth and lacked any moral clarity. (And the assistance of Vladimir Putin and a legion of Russian hackers. Whatever debt he owed to the Russians was paid off in policy decisions that weakened not only this country but the entire Western alliance.) The “truth” became whatever served his needs at that moment and by extension the needs of the Republican Party. The few ideas he did have were not supported by the majority, so for him to succeed, it became necessary to destroy the media. To roughly paraphrase George Orwell, he who controls the media controls the present. Who controls the present controls the past. Who controls the past controls the future.