Here’s breaking political news — Americans are nearly unanimous in one central belief: Our society, for the lack of a better phrase, is “going to hell in a handbasket” (i.e., quickly and directly, with the phrase possibly relating to Dante’s trip to the underworld in the Inferno, the heads carried away in baskets after guillotine executions during the French Revolution, or men lowered into mines in baskets during the Gold Rush to place often deadly explosives).

People on the political right and left, and many in between, share a cataclysmic dread as they look into the near future.

As listed by Jay Michaelson in a recent blog (https://tinyurl.com/yxf7cbyp), the end of the world has been wrongly predicted more than 20 times in the last 2,000 years. But he notes that ancient and modern doom scenarios rely on emotional feelings rather than factual information. Today, both sides feel a landslide of disconcerting events point to “the end of the world as we know it.” We believe that our world, as imperfect and tenuous as it is, will undergo a profound, and negative, change.

Those on the right and left differ on the causes of these seismic changes. According to Michaelson, the right fears the loss of American identity due to “immigration, multiculturalism, wokeness, and America-hating elites,” among other things. The left sees looming “climate disaster, anti-democratic nationalism in the U.S. and abroad, war, persistent xenophobia [fear of anything foreign, especially people from other countries and cultures],” along with “economic collapse.”

The dangers seen by both sides are highly resistant to contradictory facts, a problem Michaelson attributes to “the gap between rational risk assessment and emotional risk perception.” But people are consistent in assigning blame for the current crises: It’s “the other side” that has brought us to this precipice and is willingly pushing us over the edge.

The reality of this great divide, locally, was brought home to me on the editorial page of this newspaper on Feb. 13, a day on which I coincidentally had a letter published encouraging diverse opinion writers. I read a letter submitted by a woman from Orange and nodded approvingly through 96.4% of it 112 words. It detailed grievances of “normal” people, including high taxes that found their way into the pockets of politicians that lived “like Hollywood stars.” They were not honest, respectful, or working to improve our lives, but instead were corrupt and worked to promote “special interests.” She encouraged us to take the power and money away from corrupt officials in order to rescue our republic.

But the last four words threw me a curve worthy of Satchel Paige, Sandy Koufax, or Clayton Kershaw: “Come back, President Trump.”

Talk about putting the fox in charge of the henhouse! With two impeachments and 91 active felony charges against him, refusing to divest from business interests that produced 3,700 instances of a conflict of interest between his personal profit and taxpayer expenses, $13 million spent by special interests at his properties (https://tinyurl.com/mwvu5t6n), and revenue of about $2.4 billion during his term, Trump laps the field of previously corrupt presidents. And, according to an essay by cultural anthropologist Aaron Ansell, just pointing out his corruption allows him to peddle his own narrative: “His corruption is the revolutionary antidote to our corruption.”

But inconvenient facts such as these are useless, impotent in the face of people’s perceptions and entrenched emotions. At its most elemental, Michaelson identifies a “primal rage” at the clear decline of the “Christian-dominated, white dominated, male-dominated American patriarchy.” And Trump has a distinct advantage over others in tapping into that rage: “No candidate on either side of the aisle speaks to these profound, primal, emotional fears [like Trump], and fear is as great a motivator as hope.”

So, Americans are united in distress, and completely and utterly divided on who or what is responsible for the distress and ways to address it. It takes a near-religious faith to believe that hope can win out over the voracious fear that Trump and his team skillfully feed with every intentional insult, antagonistic speech, and contemptuous sneer, especially since it’s immune to fact and reality. But hope has occasionally won out in history, most notably, in my view, in the transformation of South Africa away from apartheid, and the advances of the civil rights movement in the U.S.

But I believe fear triumphed in the 2020 election: The fear of Trump was greater than the fear of Biden. We’ll see which fear is stronger in 2024.

Allen Woods is a freelance writer, author of the Revolutionary-era historical fiction novel “The Sword and Scabbard,” and Greenfield resident. His column appears regularly on Saturdays. Comments are welcome here or at awoods2846@gmail.com.