“The spectacle of cruel laughter” It’s likely most of the Monday-morning quarterbacking on why Trump won last week is little more than speculation based on pundits’ existing biases. What novelist Joseph O’Neill offers The New York Time Review of Books is as good as any. Maybe better for being skeptical of conventional wisdom: The current prevailing theory about Trump’s victory is that most Americans, irked by an unpleasant encounter with inflation, cast an anti-incumbent vote without giving much thought to the consequences of that vote for US democracy. I don’t totally buy this whoops! theory. My sense is that, in this era of the Internet, there are millions more fascists in this country than people think, young men in particular. And I believe that many more millions are fascinated by Trump not for his supposed business prowess but for his transparent wish to hurt others. He is an evil guy, a villain—and many Americans are excited by it. Harris and the Democrats, by contrast, are boring, boring, boring. In this sense, the election was like a choice between four more years of church or four years of violent entertainment. Nihilistic consumerism, as much as authoritarianism, prevailed. Of course, political science is not designed to investigate this kind of stuff. The clearest insights we have come from the realm of philosophy and literature. Hannah Arendt and Primo Levi did not rely on focus groups. Regarding Arendt and Levi, somewhere last week I saw a comment that half of Americans outed themselves as the kind…