Consider the following:

From a news report: “The American Heritage Children's Dictionary, Webster's Dictionary for Students and Merriam-Webster's Elementary Dictionary are among more than 2,800 books that have been pulled from Escambia County school libraries and placed into storage. Along with dictionaries, the books removed from Escambia County school libraries as a result of this process include eight different encyclopedias, two thesauruses and five editions of The Guinness Book of World Records.” (The westernmost county in Florida, Escambia is part of the United States.)

Or this video (I refrain from hyperlinking, lest I dispatch your attention to greener pastures, but this one you’ve got to see. Mind you, this is no SNL parody, but a communication from the Trump campaign.)

Have you picked yourself off the floor? Considered the implications of such absurdities? There will always be a lunatic fringe. But here, in Escambia and the Trump campaign, lunacy is in charge.

How to cope. Batshit crazy in command is not OK. Have you ever watched madness in action? What’s scary is the absence of rules. Madness is self-engrossed, self-protective, murderous. Disliking an outcome, it changes the rules. You cannot reason with madness – reason is its enemy. Reason will clap madness in a cell for its own and society’s protection.

That these examples are nuts you need no convincing. The way to teach children is to deprive them of information? God dispatched a political leader – and His spokesman spews patent lies? (It wasn’t my God, I can tell you. If my God got involved in local disputes… but we won’t go there.)

Some well-meaning and well-informed pundits insist we’ve got a political fight on our hands, and there’s something to be said for either side. It is political – on one side. On the other side, it’s existential: the end of the world is at hand, the Devil rules, America must be saved! Politicians indulge and inflame this mania, for ambition knows no shame.

It’s dangerous and useless to combat insanity with sense. If God sent us Trump, Trump can do no wrong, q.e.d. Contrary facts are self-evidently fictions. If God lets His guy tell whoppers, it’s only because, under the circumstances, He had to, etc. No use persuading if your every word is deemed a priori false.

Historians will wonder (if history survives) what drove Americans so bonkers. Popular mania is not unprecedented in our past, but none so durable or dangerous. The question before us is how to respond. With Lincolnesque charity? I think not. Madness, to be subdued, must first be contained. The whole Republican party, with a few lonesome exceptions, needs to be confined to a rubber room to cool off. They need to be converted – forcibly, if necessary – not convinced.

What does this mean? I’m not sure. But for sure it means believers in sanity must force ourselves onto a war footing. It’s a shame, it’s ugly, there will be casualties, it’s scarcely credible, but here we are. Not to wage this war with all our might may be to lose it. And nobody except a few party bosses and their flunkies will be happy in the nation that survives.

The idea behind democracy is that the majority will seek what’s best for most. Interests and strategies will vary but in the end the people will coalesce behind a common plan. For now that dream has shattered on the shoals of cynicism and selfishness. Is democracy salvageable for modernity? Unless we win this war, we’ll never know.