A catastrophic breakdown in the constitutional order threw journalist Walter Lippmann into a sense of dread back in 1938. Public opinion had gotten too big for its britches.

It was the beginnings of what he called a "morbid derangement in the true functions of power" – a subtle but radical shift in the relationship between the government and the governed.

The derangement was so alarming that Lippmann believed, if not reversed, it would bring about the fall of the West. He was right.

"Mass opinion has acquired mounting power in this century," he wrote in "The Public Philosophy" (1955). "It has shown itself to be a dangerous master of decisions when the stakes are life and death."

Warning signs blared the loudest between the world wars.

After winning the first war, the West wanted peace so badly that it pretended not to see Hitler giving a middle finger to the Peace Treaty. Year after year, he rearmed. Year after year, they acted as if he wasn't – reacting to events rather than governing them.

They refused to confront Hitler while he was, at the time, so easy to stop. So he soon became nearly impossible to stop.

But who could blame them? Confronting reality couldn't have come at a worse time.

With wreckage still piled up from both WWI and the Great Depression, they longed for "peace, safety, and a nice life."

"They were so very late," Lippmann wrote. "They had refused to take in what they saw, they had refused to believe what they heard, they had wished and they had waited, hoping against hope."

Why? Because leaders were being ruled by the tyranny of prevailing........

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