Rousseau had identified the driving force in all political activity as something he called “the imagination.” This was what he believed “transported” people out of themselves and empowered them to act on behalf of others. The [revolutionary] events in the Netherlands, in Switzerland and in Poland [in the 1780s] were instances of imagination run wild, but not quite in the sense he meant. The protagonists in these events were inspired more by blind faith in the power of their own will, and this was the enduring legacy of the American revolution.
—Adam Zamoyski, Holy Madness: Romantics, Patriots, and Revolutionaries, 1776–1871

Adam Zamoyski’s, I find, is a helpful way of looking at the revolutionary temperament—which must lie dormant in the American body politic, like certain kinds of disease in the body natural, and break out anew in acute form from time to time. So it appears to have done recently in the ever more exotic and revolutionary strains of leftist thinking being tried out by the small army of would-be Democratic challengers to President Trump. But all of them trail in the wake of the media, who, presumably seeing themselves cast in the role of the revolutionary vanguard, have for more than two years produced redundant demonstrations of blind faith in the power of their own will to remake political reality in the Trump era.

You may have noticed, for instance, what a surreal experience just reading the daily papers has become. As