It would be much easier to sleep at night if you could believe that we're in such a mess of misinformation simply because Russian agents disseminated inflammatory posts that reached 126 million people on Facebook.
The Russians also uploaded a thousand videos to YouTube and published more than 130,000 messages on Twitter about last year's election.
But the problem is not the Russians - it's us. We're getting played because too many Americans are ill equipped to perform the basic functions of citizenship. If the point of the Russian campaign was to get people to think there is no such thing as knowable truth, the bad guys have won.
As we crossed the 300-day mark of Donald Trump's presidency on Thursday, fact-checkers noted that he has made more than 1,600 false or misleading claims. At least five times a day, on average, this president says something that isn't true.
We have a White House of lies because a huge percentage of the population can't tell fact from fiction. But a huge percentage is also clueless about the basic laws of the land. In a democracy, we the people are supposed to understand our role in this power-sharing thing.
Nearly 1 in 3 Americans cannot name a single branch of government. When NPR tweeted out sections of the Declaration of Independence last year, many people were outraged. They mistook Thomas Jefferson's fighting words for anti-Trump propaganda.
Fake news is a real thing produced by active disseminators of falsehoods. Trump uses the term to describe anything he doesn't like, a habit now picked up by political liars everywhere.
But Trump is a symptom; the breakdown in this democracy goes beyond the liar in chief. For that you have to blame all of us: we have allowed the educational system to become negligent in teaching the owner's manual of citizenship.
Lost in the news grind over Roy Moore is how often he has tried to violate the Constitution. As a judge, he was removed from the bench - twice - for lawless acts that follow his theocratic view of governance.
I don't blame Moore. I blame his followers, and the press, which doesn't seem to know that the First Amendment specifically aims to keep government from siding with one religion - the so-called establishment clause.
Suppose we treated citizenship like getting a driver's license. People would have to pass a simple test on American values, history and geography before they were allowed to have a say in the system. We do that for immigrants, and 97 percent of them pass, according to one study.
Yet 1 in 3 Americans fail the immigrant citizenship test. This is not an elitist barrier. The test includes questions like, "What major event happened on 9/11?" and "What ocean is on the West Coast of the United States?"
One reason that public schools were established across the land was to produce an informed citizenry. And up until the 1960s, it was common for students to take three separate courses in civics and government before they got out of high school.
Now only a handful of states require proficiency in civics as a condition of high school graduation.
A related concern is historical ignorance. By a 48 percent to 38 percent margin Americans think states' rights, rather than slavery, caused the Civil War. So Trump's chief of staff, John F. Kelly, can say something demonstrably false about the war, because most people are just as clueless as he is.
There's hope - and there are many ways - to shed light on the cave of American democracy. More than a dozen states now require high school students to pass the immigrant citizenship test. We should also teach kids how to tell fake news from real, as some schools in Europe are doing.
But those initiatives will mean little if people still insist on believing what they want to believe, living in digital safe spaces closed off from anything that intrudes on their worldview.
The New York Times