In 1830, the King of France sent a young engineer to England to study a sensational invention: a steam train that ferried passengers from Manchester to Liverpool. Once he arrived, as Tony Judt recounts in The Memory Chalet, the engineer

sat by the track taking copious notes as the sturdy little engine faultlessly pulled the world’s first railway train back and forth between the two cities. After conscientiously calculating what he had observed, he reported his findings back to Paris: “The thing is impossible,” he wrote. “It cannot work.”

It is tempting to scoff at the engineer who disregards the evidence barreling in front of him at 30 miles an hour. But I must admit to having a soft spot for him. For it was, I think, not the mathematical equations in his notepad that misled him, but rather his all-too-human refusal to believe that his understanding of the world could so swiftly prove mistaken. So it is hardly surprising that, as one political shock has followed another over the last year, people who once seemed perfectly rational have come to resemble the young French engineer.

For decades, political scientists have claimed that “democratic consolidation” is a one-way street. Once a country is affluent and has been ruled in a democratic fashion for a long time, they argued, democracy becomes “the only game in town.” Citizens become deeply supportive of democracy and reject other regime forms out of hand. Major politicians accept the need to play by democratic rules. Extreme candidates are rejected at the ballot box. It should be clear, however, that this is no longer the case. Many Americans now believe that democracy is a bad system of government, and a striking number are even open to authoritarian alternatives. Over the past two decades, according to data from the World Values Survey, the proportion of Americans who express approval for military rule has more than doubled. Last October, a month before the election, another survey showed that 46 percent either “never had faith” or have “lost faith” in American democracy.

Had you asked a group of pundits and political scientists two years ago whether they would revise their most basic assumptions about American politics if Donald Trump were elected president, most would have answered with a resounding “yes.” But by the time Trump was moving into the White House, those same people had already found a way of fitting his victory into their long-standing narratives. Scholars who made their careers by arguing that America was becoming more liberal, for instance, now explained Trump’s victory by suggesting that the shrinking of the GOP’s electoral base makes it easier to mobilize. Their theories failed to predict Trump’s victory—and yet it turns out they are vindicated by it.

A desire to downplay threats to democracy extends beyond American politics. In coverage of the recent presidential elections in France, commentators were intent on emphasizing the signs of continuity and disregarding the signs of change. Neither the candidate of the historically dominant center-left party nor the candidate of the historically dominant center-right party managed to qualify for the run-off. With 33.9 percent of the vote in the second round, Marine Le Pen gained more votes than any extremist candidate in French postwar history, nearly doubling the record set by her father 15 years earlier. Young people were far more likely than older people to vote for her. Yet much of the media celebrated Emmanuel Macron’s victory as a triumph over populism, and intimated that the populist wave was finally cresting. The defeat of Austria’s far-right Freedom Party last December brought similarly demonstrative sighs of relief. “The thing is impossible,” one article after another seemed to say. “It must not be.”