I am reading Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall.  In it, people are constantly throwing one another under the bus or plotting to do so, although they don't talk about it in those terms for obvious technological reasons.

"If you were against the New Deal and its wholesale buying of pauper votes, then you were against Christian charity.  If you were against the gross injustices and dishonesties of the Wagner Labor Act, then you were against labor.  If you were against packing the Supreme Court, then you were in favor of letting Wall Street do it.  If you are against using Dr. Quack's cancer salve, then you are in favor of letting Uncle Julius die.  If you are against Holy Church, or Christian Science, then you are against God.  It is an old, old argument."

-H.L. Mencken, Minority Report

“And the Voice said to me: 'We're not talking about eternal truth or absolute truth or ultimate truth. We're talking about impermanent, transient, human truth. I don't expect you people to be capable of truth, but god-dammit, at least you're capable of self-preservation!' And I said, 'Why me?' And the Voice said: 'Because you're on television, dummy!’”

Paddy Chayefsky, Network

I do not believe is single causes for historical events.  One can always find multiple reasons why events occurred, and of these some will be dominant, some will be material, and some will be trivial.

The words repeated above tell us something at least material about the reason for the result of the 2016 presidential election.  Demagoguery is in part a function of personality: many successful politicians have a charismatic nature that makes others will to pay attention to them and follow their lead. It well may be that the reaction to this charismatic nature is why the opposition to such politicians is also visceral and shrill.

When you take the demagogue out of the local hustings and place him (or her) on the larger stage access through the media to a larger population becomes an important ingredient. (Illustrating this phenomenon as depicted in popular culture, consider not only Network but also A Face in the Crowd.)

The recent conclave at Harvard of campaign “professionals” to give a collective post-mortem of the presidential election produced a fascinating observation. The participants were asked when they realized that the Donald might win the nomination and the election, and, according to the reports, they observed that his ratings and popularity did not suffer from his misstatements or missteps, which, they assumed, would have sunk the campaign chances of any other mere mortal.

I may be incapable to explaining why the president-elect has this effect upon people.  I find him and his politics unattractive.  But it is a fact that he has been a prominent feature in mass popular entertainment, and perhaps that is were a lot of the electorate formed their fundamental opinion of him, which made them willing to accept his word.

In any event, the Donald has become our new Teflon Don.

"Now is a different timeframe." Truer words were never spoken.

Don't Join the Book Burners

"Look at your country. Here is a country of which we are proud, as you are proud of Dartmouth and all about you, and the families to which you belong. But this country is a long way from perfection--a long way. We have the disgrace of racial discrimination, or we have prejudice against people because of their religion. We have crime on the docks. We have not had the courage to uproot these things, although we know they are wrong. And we with our standards, the standards given us at places like Dartmouth, we know they are wrong.

"Now, that courage is not going to be satisfied--your sense of satisfaction is not going to be satisfied, if you haven't the courage to look at these things and do your best to help correct them, because that is the contribution you shall make to this beloved country in your time. Each of us, as he passes along, should strive to add something.

"It is not enough merely to say I love America, and to salute the flag and take off your hat as it goes by, and to help sing the Star Spangled Banner. Wonderful! We love to do them, and our hearts swell with pride, because those who went before you worked to give to us today, standing here, this pride.

"And this is a pride in an institution that we think has brought great happiness, and we know has brought great contentment and freedom of soul to many people. But it is not yet done. You must add to it.

Don't join the book burners. Don't think you are going to conceal faults by concealing evidence that they ever existed. Don't be afraid to go in your library and read every book, as long as that document does not offend our own ideas of decency. That should be the only censorship.

"How will we defeat communism unless we know what it is, and what it teaches, and why does it have such an appeal for men, why are so many people swearing allegiance to it? It is almost a religion, albeit one of the nether regions.

"And we have got to fight it with something better, not try to conceal the thinking of our own people. They are part of America. And even if they think ideas that are contrary to ours, their right to say them, their right to record them, and their right to have them at places where they are accessible to others is unquestioned, or it isn't America."

Dwight D. Eisenhower: "Remarks at the Dartmouth College Commencement Exercises, Hanover, New Hampshire.," June 14, 1953