The advent of radical centrism; journalists’ fantasy that they are part of the professional elite; the shuttering of local newspapers; the impending extinction of the book editor; your Comp Lit degree from Brown: All are symptoms and causes of the dissolution of American society. In June, the day after Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s upset victory in the Bronx led many (but perhaps too few) to rethink the future of the Democratic Party, and the evening after we’d learned that Trump would be filling his second seat on the Supreme Court, Thomas Frank delves into his freakishly prescient book, Rendezvous with Oblivion: Reports from a Sinking Society. “The con-game is our national pastime,” he says. “And so we come to Donald Trump.”

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