EDITOR’S NOTE: This article appears in the November 29, 2004, issue of National Review.

President Bush’s reelection has released a burst of mass hysteria in much of the world. It’s a fascinating phenomenon. Hundreds of millions of people are convinced of the wickedness and stupidity of Americans and their president. The mood must have been similar when Peter the Hermit was whipping up the Popular Crusade in the Dark Ages, and later when the Albigensian heretics, or the Levellers of the English civil war, were drumming the idea of apocalypse into the heads of audiences eager to believe it.

The thrill of apocalypse this time begins in America, when writers of the status of Garry Wills tell the world that Americans have gone back on the liberal values of 18th-century Enlightenment; or when Democrats fill the correspondence columns of the European press with letters about Republican horrors. The globalized media scoop up these symptoms instantly, magnify them, and presto–mass hysteria infects people in the manner of an epidemic.

See how easily it’s done. A cinema wardrobe assistant by the name of Caroline Gandon is sitting in a Paris café when up comes a correspondent from the Daily Telegraph. She tells him, “I thought the Americans were going to show the world that they are not completely brainwashed. I was wrong. We’re stuck yet again with a dangerous fanatic,” and a million or two readers nod. On Britain’s Channel 4, Peter Oborne, political editor of the nominally conservative Spectator, condemns American voters as “ignorant beyond belief,” concluding, “We should be very afraid.”

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