The general election is about to unfold and we’ll soon see how smart or how foolish Americans really are. The U.S. may be the richest country on earth, but the economy is tanking, its working families are in trouble, it is bogged down in a multitrillion-dollar war of its own making and the price of gasoline has nitwits siphoning supplies from the cars and trucks of strangers.

Four of every five Americans want the country to move in a different direction, which makes this presidential election, potentially, one of the most pivotal since World War II.

And yet there’s growing evidence that despite the plethora of important issues, the election may yet be undermined by the usual madness  fear-mongering, bogus arguments over who really loves America, race-baiting, gay-baiting (Ohmigod! They’re getting married!) and the wholesale trivialization of matters that are not just important, but extremely complex.

In his book, “Crunch: Why Do I Feel So Squeezed?,” Jared Bernstein reminds us that the economic expansion from 2000 to 2006 was something less than nirvana for working people. The economy grew by 15 percent during that period, and the official rates of joblessness and inflation were low. But as most of us know, the benefits of that expansion were skewed to the high end of the economic ladder.