In almost every survey since the Iraq War began to go wrong in 2004, upwards of 60 percent of Americans assessed the country as on the “wrong track.” In the aftermath of the financial crisis of 2008, the wrong-track number spiked past 70 percent. It would return to that disturbing peak at intervals during the slow, weak recovery that followed.17 How removed from interactions with ordinary Americans did political elites have to be to plan the 2016 election as a return engagement between the two most famous political dynasties of late twentieth-century America: Bush versus Clinton? Yet the
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