Jonathan Chait has a long lament in New York Magazine about the diminishing intensity of anti-Trump politics in America. Even as the former president shoulders his way toward the Republican nomination and leads President Joe Biden in many polls, Chait frets that “the imperative to keep Trump out of the Oval Office has become tiresome”. Indeed, a kind of “exhaustion” with anti-Trumpism, Chait writes, “may be the most dominant attribute of our national mood.”

His essay goes on to interpret this exhaustion as more psychological and even spiritual than simply political. Chait argues that the general mood in Biden’s America has become untethered from the reality of material conditions, as many Americans have embraced “an immutable belief in economic decline that no real-world statistical improvement can dislodge”.