I'VE BEEN WARNING YOU.

Extreme skepticism has its place in intellectual inquiry.

Properly viewed, relativism is intellectual discipline: upon encountering a novel practice, ask yourself why that practice might have emerged, without immediately judging whether the underlying reasons are desirable or not. That discipline, however, does not lead to the conclusion that all beliefs are equally true. Historically contingent, yes. Emergent, yes. Condemning adherents to a crabbed existence, sometimes. Evolutionarily stable, thus not necessarily.

Unfortunately, there is no guarantee that Our Intellectual Betters can confine their discourse practices to the philosophy workshops and the common rooms.  "Truly, truly, I say unto you, institutions are civilization. They've been deconstructed, and to what end?"

Nor could they, and they alone, ensure that their authority would suffice to construct The Narrative.

Thus, Chris Cillizza notes, here we are.

This is what happens when you elect someone whose entire political reason for being began in a conspiracy theory about President Barack Obama not being born in the United States. And when you allow someone to substitute opinions for facts. And when you stop believing that there is even such a thing as objective truth or non-alternative facts.

I repeat, because repeat I must, "The most interesting part of the Trump presidency will be the efforts of constitutional conservatives, bourgeois tories, and sensible people of the left to find common cause. Perhaps social norms will be a good place to start."

Perhaps, even before the social norms, we might look at the rules of logic and argumentation.