Opinion | Collusion Was a Seductive Delusion

In particular, Mr. Trump’s win pointed to tectonic failures within the mainstream news media, whose leading brands had fanned the showman’s rise with copious television coverage; indulged his every gimmick with yet more attention; and elevated his opponent’s trifling email-management kerfuffle into a scandal of world-historic import.

Mr. Trump’s win also pointed to the failure of our political parties. After years of playing footsie with extremists, the Republicans created an environment in which a racist demagogue could swallow them whole.

Democrats, meanwhile, dismissed the economic and social unease roiling their ranks and nominated a deeply unpopular candidate who lacked any novel vision for American life. And then she forgot to campaign in Michigan.

There were other minor factors in this American tragedy: Jim Comey’s grandstanding; the tech giants’ inability to appreciate or curb the chaotic powers of their new communications platforms; our collective innumeracy regarding polling; and a naïve failure to appreciate the profound fragility of our national enterprise.

Finally there was the plainer constitutional failure. You didn’t need a two-year federal investigation to determine the single most important lesson of the 2016 race: America does not treat all its voters, and all of its votes, equally. Across the country, the voices of thousands and possibly millions of people were suppressed. Millions more votes went essentially uncounted, because the perversities of the Electoral College elevate a few thousand votes in the Midwest over a few million in California.

It’s true that we have begun, belatedly, to shine a spotlight on many of these deep-rooted problems. But the Mueller investigation sucked up all the political energy. For many in the political and media establishment, the possibility of collusion offered moral expiation for collective complicity. Rather than begin the hard work of addressing what had actually gone wrong, many of us were swept up in social-media-fueled feedback loops looking for an instant fix: The orgiastic pee tape would turn up and clear up the whole funny misunderstanding.

From here, the story of 2016 looks rather straightforward: Mr. Trump was the corrupt, misbegotten choice of a citizenry mired in partisan mistrust, seething with racial grievance, informed by a beleaguered and fracturing news media, and laboring under an economic and political system that had long ceased functioning for all but the wealthiest of its citizens.

His victory pointed to a systemic failure. In the end the only golden shower that mattered was the one soaking American democracy — but it’s been raining so long and so hard that we’re just about content to ignore the storm.

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