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The popular business school theory of creative destruction holds that when the traditional way of doing things — like printing yesterday’s news in hot ink and maintaining an expensive fleet of trucks to get that to your doorstep — becomes hopelessly outdated, something better and more efficient arises to replace it. It’s a lot more complicated with journalism, which is very much a business yet also a critical vehicle for democracy ... or dictatorship.

Much of what raced to fill the vacuum of declining mainstream media has been misinformation, and much of that is disinformation — deliberate falsehoods in pursuit of political gain. Unlike the quest for universal truth, disinformation — like Tolstoy’s unhappy families — takes many different insidious forms. It ranges from your uncle’s conspiracy theories on Facebook to the American exile in Russia slandering Tim Walz on behalf of the Kremlin to the growing network of so-called pink slime websites that pretend to be traditional news outlets while peddling slanted news or lies.

The things that pundits have been talking about since Tuesday — an economy that hasn’t worked for the working class since the time of Ronald Reagan, anxieties among white voters about a potential end to white privilege and the patriarchy, and a Democratic Party that’s lost touch with the great American middle — all factored into this election. But nothing mattered more than this: Donald Trump was returned to power by the most badly informed electorate in modern American history.