It was another scene of American horror. This time it was a Tallahassee yoga studio, where a 40-year-old man with a history of harassing, assaulting, and hating women walked in Sunday evening and shot seven people, killing two, before he shot himself to death. One victim said she was in Child's Pose when a bullet ripped into her body. You probably didn't even hear about it, because this is America. People in this country attempt mass murder all the time, because while Americans might have limited access to mental health treatment, they have, in a state like Florida, essentially unlimited access to deadly weapons.

Besides, there's an election happening. Who's got time for another incident of mass violence?

But to ignore this latest American atrocity—the 304th mass shooting in 2018, according to the Gun Violence Archive—just because there is an election today is to miss what is truly at stake in the 2018 midterms. Florida had long been one of the nation's true Wild West territories when it comes to guns, a state of affairs which improved significantly after the Parkland shooting. State lawmakers responded to the deaths of 17 people at Marjorie Stoneman Douglas high school in February by raising the minimum age to purchase a gun, instituting a waiting period, and implementing various measures authorities can use to seize deadly weapons from the mentally ill. Florida Governor Rick Scott, a Republican, admirably broke his close relationship with the National Rifle Association to sign the bill.

Police respond to a shooting at a hot yoga studio in Tallahassee. Mark Wallheiser Getty Images

One man who wants to succeed Scott in that office, however, has proudly declared he would have vetoed it. Ron DeSantis calls himself a "big Second Amendment guy," which in Republican parlance means he's a dependable tool for the NRA. He not only opposes these reforms, he backs the open carry of firearms in Florida. His opponent, Andrew Gillum, is the Democratic mayor of Tallahassee who opposes open carry and with it, the embrace of the Floridian Wild West. He supports a ban on assault weapons—like the Sig Sauer MCX, an AR-15 clone, that a man used to shoot 49 people at Pulse nightclub in Orlando— and on carrying firearms on college campuses. He wants to close loopholes in the background-check system.

What is Ron DeSantis's plan to address the epidemic of gun violence in this country, one that has left more than 12,000 Americans dead and more than 24,000 injured in 2018? He opposed the steps Florida has taken. He has offered few others. He seems to support the other world: of Stand-Your-Ground laws, and open-carry in the street—a militarized society where every citizen must be armed at all times to ensure their own safety, and you can shoot someone who scares you in the supermarket parking lot.

Chris O'Meara Getty Images

This is a philosophy which holds that where there are more guns, there are fewer shootings. Is the only way we can protect ourselves from mass shooters really for everyone to be armed themselves, at all times, with the hope they will get in a shootout with a domestic terrorist and win? Should the women at that Tallahassee yoga studio have been strapped while they assumed the Downward Dog? Does not just every school, but every business, need to have armed guards outside to stop a deranged man killing customers?

No, this is not a worldview that responds to evidence or reason. This is a world where the only true currency is fear. The National Rifle Association represents the interests of gun manufacturers, and those interests are to sell more guns. That's why the NRA opposes any law that would limit the number of guns sold, but it's also why they support laws that would allow people to be armed anywhere, everywhere, and all the time. The fear becomes a steady drumbeat in the background, and fear sells guns. These are the people who spend their whole lives trumpeting their love of freedom, and hold it up as the only legitimate value in a democracy. A world where everyone could be out to get you, and you can't leave your house unarmed, is not a free world. It is tyranny—but a very profitable tyranny if you happen to manufacture deadly weapons.

Erich Schlegel Getty Images

And that is the defining question of this election. It is truly a choice between the politics of fear and the politics of democratic truth. The differences between the two candidates for Florida governor are not limited to their views on gun control. Gillum, for instance, does not enjoy the vociferous support of white supremacists. As Gillum so memorably pointed out at a debate, DeSantis had neo-Nazis supporting his campaign, and has spoken in front of white-nationalist groups. He said Gillum, a black man, would "monkey this up" if he won. A white-supremacist group called Road to Power has been running robocalls in the state featuring a voice caricaturing a black dialect that refers to Gillum as a "negro."

All this led to that line from Gillum that ought to be a calling card for candidates running against opponents on the wrong side of Jim Crow:

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As my grandmother used to say — a hit dog will holler. pic.twitter.com/kC34Ldd0is — Andrew Gillum (@AndrewGillum) October 25, 2018

White nationalist ideology is also based on fear, and a distortion of reality. It's rooted in baseless notions about the inherent criminality and inferiority of non-white people, and the terror that a nation where white people are no longer the majority will be a nation where white people are subjugated as they have, through history, subjugated all others. It is irrational, it does not respond to reason, and it is now the defining feature of Donald Trump's Republican Party.

It is not just that this president has trafficked in virulently racist propaganda in the homestretch of this campaign, casting a "caravan" of refugees a thousand miles away as an "invasion" force of criminal brown people. It's not just that he deployed thousands of federal troops to the border to defend against an invasion occurring only in his own fever dreams, in order to gin up a Republican voting base that for years has been primed to respond to racial resentment and fearmongering and xenophobia.

Trump and DeSantis at a campaign rally on October 31. Joe Raedle Getty Images

It's not just that some of the people most responsible for that priming work at a news network, Fox News, that has now fully assumed the role of State Media, with its stars appearing on the campaign stage with the president they now serve up propaganda in service of on a daily basis. It's not just that this president has embraced political violence from the podium, and that people on the fringes of society who support him have responded by engaging in political violence. It's not just that the party that for much of the last decade has run on eviscerating protections for preexisting conditions is now saying they're the only ones protecting them, a stunning example of the lie as a foundational political strategy. It's not just that, in places like Georgia, members of the Republican Party are overseeing their own elections, attempting to disenfranchise as many voters as possible and making evidence-free claims that their Democratic opponents attempted to hack the election.

All of these things are symptomatic of a common political illness in this country. A section of the United States populace has steadily lost its grip on observable reality over the last decade, or two, or three, tumbling into an abyss of resentment and anger and almighty fear. Theirs is a world where there's an immigrant invasion, even though illegal immigration has been on the decline for years. It's a world where attempting to stop historically marginalized groups from accruing power through voter suppression can be justified on the basis that only Certain People know the values of the Real America. It's a world where more guns leads to fewer shootings, and where other people's John-Wayne fantasies mean you can only truly feel safe as long as there's a deadly weapon at your side. Even if you're doing yoga.

Alex Wong Getty Images

Donald Trump is merely the most grotesque, virulent symptom of a sickness borne of marinating in toxic propaganda and living in a society where the average person's prospects for a better life, for them and their children, has been in steady decline for some time. He has merely put the Republican Party's longstanding commitment to fantastical thinking on a number of issues, from taxes to regulation to climate change, into overdrive. This refusal to engage with reality has been combined with a taste for power-politics now verging on authoritarianism, an approach that has the complete support of the current Republican-controlled Congress.

The choice, in Florida and throughout the country, is clear. One of our political parties refuses to engage with reality, insisting that there's no way to address gun violence despite the fact the United States is the only industrialized country with an epidemic on this scale; that tax cuts for the rich and cuts to the social-safety net lead to general prosperity for all, despite the fact they never have; that nothing is happening to our climate and, besides, there's nothing for us to do about it if it is. Their response to an epidemic of mass shootings is to cut funding for programs like Medicaid that provide people access to mental-health treatment, while allowing gun manufacturers to flood the streets with deadly weapons.

The other party, of course, lives in the real world. Its members also oppose a president who is now deploying the military on U.S. soil to respond to a menace that does not exist. He already feels empowered to do this, and to lie 30 times a day in the lead-up to an election. What will he feel empowered to do if his power is not checked today? Now is the time to reject the politics of fear and unreality in favor of truth and the democratic method. The world can be a frightening place, but our response cannot be to lose our minds—or our republic. Vote like your democracy depends on it.

Jack Holmes Politics Editor Jack Holmes is the Politics Editor at Esquire, where he writes daily and edits the Politics Blog with Charles P Pierce.

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