Amid the parade of outrages, what we’re feeling isn’t numbness. It’s more like airsickness.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

The Nation Shrugs

“At what other moment in American history,” Anne Applebaum recently asked, “could a presidential candidate praise a fictional serial killer, and inspire almost no reaction at all?”

Even by the standards of the times, what she was referring to did seem a vertigo-inducing moment. Amid an anti-migrant tirade at a rally earlier this month in New Jersey, Donald Trump gave a shout-out to the “late, great” Hannibal Lecter, referring to the fava bean–loving cannibal played by Anthony Hopkins in the 1991 film The Silence of the Lambs as a “wonderful man.”

And the nation shrugged, because this was simply the latest in a long list of 2024’s bizarre and disorienting moments (including an earlier recent reference to cannibalism from the president himself). “The scale of the abnormality is so staggering,” ABC’s George Stephanopoulos argued recently, “that it can actually become numbing.”

But Americans’ reaction is less like numbness and more a response to something like airsickness, which results when we experience a disconnect between our senses—a nausea-inducing conflict between what we know and what we see. Motion sickness is caused by a discrepancy between what the inner ear detects and what the eye sees. The effect can be vertiginous—so the way people avoid being nauseated is by trying to ignore the dissonance.

We’ve been led to believe that things work in a certain way, that there are mores and norms. We thought our world was right side up, but it now feels as if it’s been turned upside down. Words don’t mean what we think they do. Outrage is followed not by accountability, but by adulation. Standards shift, flicker, vanish. Nothing is stable.

More than a century ago, Émile Durkheim, the father of modern sociology, described what he called “anomie,” a condition of instability “resulting from a breakdown of standards and values or from a lack of purpose or ideals.” Anomie could result from a conflict of belief systems, leading to a breakdown of social ties and a “shared moral order.”

Call it anomie or call it airsickness—we find ourselves in a land of confusion. Trump pays off a porn star and yet is hailed as a champion of Christian values. He mocks prisoners of war and calls dead soldiers “suckers,” and his MAGA base is thrilled by his patriotism. And, as Tom Nichols notes in The Atlantic today, Trump brags about his tight relationship with America’s implacable adversary, Vladimir Putin, claiming that the Russian president will release detained Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich “for me, but not for anyone else.”

To hear conservative Christians argue that personal character doesn’t matter, or to witness self-described constitutional conservatives defend a relentless attack on the rule of law, is disorienting. To see advocates of law and order embrace rioters who attacked the Capitol and beat police officers is baffling. To watch the party of Ronald Reagan embracing isolationism and following Trump in truckling to the Butcher of Ukraine, Putin, is bewildering. Mind-bending, also, is that, despite Trump’s fire hose of lies, 71 percent of Republicans describe him as “honest and trustworthy.” Recent polls suggest that Trump is leading President Joe Biden in the swing states that will decide the November election.

Maybe that’s why following the news these days feels like swallowing crazy pills. You don’t have to be a particularly cynical observer of American politics to recognize that, past a certain point, no norms endure that cannot be abandoned, and that any position can be flipped if doing so is expedient.

Trump has been found liable for sexual abuse and defaming his victim. He incited a violent attack on the Capitol, called for terminating rules in the Constitution, dined with a neo-Nazi, and floated the idea of executing the nation’s most senior general. He has been fined for fraud on a massive scale, faces more than 80 felony charges, and is accused of withholding and sharing top-secret national-security documents.

Faced with all of this, the Republican Party says, Yeah, we want four more years of that. GOP leaders wearing red ties make lockstep pilgrimages to his felony trial in New York to show their fealty, while wannabe running mates mimic his rhetoric and echo his lies about the 2020 election. And now there’s Nikki Haley, who has called Trump “unhinged,” “toxic,” “diminished,” and unqualified. Yesterday, she said that she would vote for him anyway. The alleged frauds, adultery, sexual assault, threats, and possible felony convictions don’t matter. Close to half the electorate seems to agree.

Which brings us back to our chronic airsickness. Most of us took it for granted that Americans by and large shared certain ethical assumptions. Despite our differences, we imagined, we all used roughly the same moral compass to judge right and wrong.

But what if that’s not true anymore?

What if the guardrails of the U.S. legal system turn out to be illusory or broken beyond repair? What if we have exhausted our reservoirs of democratic values and shared norms? And what if the constant turbulence buffeting our sense of reality is a sign that we are in a different world, one whose values we don’t understand?

I suspect that the great thinker Hannah Arendt would recognize some of the aspects of that world. In The Origins of Totalitarianism, she described the annihilation of truth and the collapse of moral reasoning:

Or, to paraphrase the immortal line of Bette Davis’s character, Margo Channing, in All About Eve: Fasten your seat belts; it’s going to be a bumpy year.

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Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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