From M. Gessen in NYT, an astute commentary on where we’re at:

Biden and Trump represent entirely different values and policies…. Biden is right: Trump poses an existential threat to democracy.

But both campaigns are creating a sense of unreality, in presenting politics as formulaic spectacle, abstracted from the actual politics each candidate represents and from people’s lived experiences….

Autocrats and aspiring autocrats, whatever their political orientation, have been telling this story for a long time. They say that the country is on the verge of catastrophe and that only one person — the great leader — can save it. They use this rhetorical strategy because it works. That is, it works in times when a critical number of people are feeling insecure, precarious, frightened, as many Americans clearly are….

It’s tempting to say that Trump’s autocratic movement has spread like an infection. The truth is, the seeds of this disaster have been sprouting in American politics for decades: the dumbing down of conversation, the ever-growing role of money in political campaigns, the disappearance of local news media and local civic engagement and the consequent transformation of national politics into a set of abstracted images and stories, the inescapable understanding of presidential races as personality contests.