Jonah Goldberg (the serious version):

“We have people across this country who are scared to death,” New Jersey governor Chris Christie declared loudly at this week’s Republican presidential debate in Las Vegas.

Virtually the entire debate was based upon this premise. Which is understandable. Since the bloody Islamist attacks in Paris and San Bernardino, terrorism has shot up as the chief concern for most Americans, particularly Republican voters.

“For most of 2015, the country’s mood, and thus the presidential election, was defined by anger and the unevenness of the economic recovery,” pollster Fred Yang of Hart Research Associates explained upon the release of the latest NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll. “Now that has abruptly changed to fear.”

Only 34 percent approve of President Obama’s handling of the Islamic State, according to the poll, and more Americans are worried about terrorism than at any time since the aftermath of 9/11.

This abrupt change in the climate explains why Hillary Clinton is suddenly talking much tougher about terrorism and why the president is keen to get some good national-security photo ops in before he leaves for vacation.

But I can’t shake the sense that the polls, politicians, and my fellow pundits are mistaking a symptom for the disease.

We live in an anxious age. That anxiety runs like a river beneath the political landscape. Different news events tap into that river and release a geyser of outrage and fear. Right now, mostly on the right, it’s terrorism, but before that it was Mexicans illegally sneaking into our country. Sometime before that, there was the freak-out over Ebola and the administration’s aloofness about it.

One common explanation for the anxious age we are in is that the economy is undergoing a profound transformation that is leaving a lot of people on the sidelines. It seems obvious to me there’s a lot of merit to this explanation.

But I don’t think that economics explains everything. Seventy percent of Americans think the country is on the wrong track. Many of those people are doing just fine economically. No, I think the missing piece of the puzzle is the fact that Americans — on the left and the right — think that the folks running the country have an agenda different from theirs. The Left has a much richer vocabulary for such claims, given its ancient obsessions with greed and economic determinism. They see big corporations and the so-called 1 percent pulling strings behind the scenes. (Watch literally any Bernie Sanders speech on YouTube to learn more.) Paranoia about the influence of big money in politics has inspired the Democratic front-runner to make revising the First Amendment a top priority.

No, I think the missing piece of the puzzle is the fact that Americans — on the left and the right — think that the folks running the country have an agenda different from theirs. The Left has a much richer vocabulary for such claims, given its ancient obsessions with greed and economic determinism. They see big corporations and the so-called 1 percent pulling strings behind the scenes. (Watch literally any Bernie Sanders speech on YouTube to learn more.) Paranoia about the influence of big money in politics has inspired the Democratic front-runner to make revising the First Amendment a top priority.

But while there are a great many people on the right who also complain about crony capitalism and special interests, such concerns don’t get to the heart of the anxiety, at least not for conservatives.

Let’s go back to where we started. Christie says, “We have people across this country who are scared to death.” No doubt that’s true. But for a great many of them, I suspect, the fear is not so much a fear of the Islamic State but a fear that our own government, starting with the president, just doesn’t take terrorism seriously. We now know he was very late in taking the Islamic State seriously.

I suspect most conservatives think that if America marshaled the sufficient will to defeat the Islamic State, we’d make short work of it. Obama has no interest in such an undertaking. He reserves his passion for attacking Republicans or pushing his other priorities, such as climate change, which persistently remains a very, very low priority for most Americans.

But the president himself is a symptom. The whole system seems to have lost its mind. That there’s even a debate about whether security officials should be allowed to look at the social-media posts of immigrants is a sign that our bureaucrats have such open minds their brains have fallen out. We should have seen this coming five years ago, when we learned that Obama told the new head of NASA to make one of his top priorities outreach to the Muslim world. Terrorism is a big concern, but this sense that the political system is unresponsive, unaccountable, and operating on its own self-interested ideological agenda is bigger. It is the ur-complaint that explains everything from enduring outrage over the lies that greased Obamacare’s passage to fury over illegal immigration, disgust over corruption at the IRS and VA, the immortality of the Ex-Im Bank, and countless other outrages du jour.

The failure of credible politicians to address this anxiety created an opportunity for Donald Trump. At least he’s willing to say Washington is stupid.

Goldberg’s colleague Jim Geraghty demonstrates that the stupidity comes from the top:

November 25:

Ahead of the busy Thanksgiving holiday, the U.S. government is “taking every possible step” to keep the country safe, President Barack Obama said Wednesday, seeking to reassure travelers and adding there is no known “specific and credible threat” to the U.S.

“We are taking every possible step to keep our homeland safe,” Obama said following a meeting with his national security advisers.

Obama said he and his team “know of no specific and credible intelligence indicating a plot on the homeland and that is based on the latest information I just received in the Situation Room.”

We know what happened after that:

Enrique Marquez Jr., who bought the assault rifles used in a terrorist attack that killed 14 people this month, was charged Thursday with conspiring to carry out two other attacks in 2012, federal officials said.

Marquez and Syed Rizwan Farook, one of the shooters on Dec. 2, had planned to attack other targets in Southern California, including a nearby community college and highway, according to a criminal complaint.

The documents provide the clearest look yet not only of Marquez but also of Farook, who died in a shootout with police after the massacre. Farook was interested in violent extremism at least two years before he and his future wife, Tashfeen Malik, corresponded online about waging violent jihad, according to Marquez’s account to the government.

The charges against Marquez are the first to stem from the investigation into the massacre, the worst terrorist attack on U.S. soil since Sept. 11, 2001.

President Obama, [Thursday]:

Flanked by his national security team, President Obama reassured Americans that there was “no specific, credible threat” against the country ahead of the holidays.

“We do not have any specific and credible information about an attack on the homeland,” Obama said today at the National Counterterrorism Center. “That said, we have to be vigilant.”

For obvious reasons, there is nothing reassuring about Obama telling us he hasn’t seen any specific and credible information about an attack on the homeland.

Even when this president attempts to tell people he’s focused on what worries them, there’s that lingering note of condescension. The Washington Post’s David Ignatius, after an off-the-record meeting with the president at the White House:

Obama seems to have realized that he was slow to respond to public fear after the jihadist attacks in Paris and San Bernardino, Calif. His low-decibel approach led the public to worry he wasn’t doing enough to keep the country safe. Obama, not a cable television fan, apparently didn’t realize the state of anxiety.

Yeah, because only cable-news viewers are concerned about terrorism.

Then there’s the economy:

Bloomberg BusinessWeek points out the obvious, which is why despite the Obama administration’s crowing about the economy, neither Hillary Clinton nor Bernie Sanders are running on a vow to continue his economic record:

It’s an angry Christmas, and it’s worth thinking about why. Something has changed to create such a shift in the public’s leanings, from taking a chance on Obama’s audacity of hope to delighting in Trump’s straight-up audacity. Fear of Islamic terrorism has something to do with it. Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that achieved approximately nothing and the stunning rise of China as a rival power have also left many Americans feeling confused and vulnerable. But the most potent fuel for Trumpism is undoubtedly the sick economy. A long stretch of underperformance has seeded mistrust in the American Dream among millions of would-be breadwinners, especially people without college educations.

As everyone knows by now, a winner-take-all economy is producing big gains for a thin stratum at the top but little for anyone else. Bernie Sanders likes to point out that the top 10th of 1 percent of families control as much wealth as the bottom 90 percent. The inflation-adjusted income of the median American household is lower now than in 2000. On average, young men are earning less after inflation than their fathers did at the same age. More than a fifth of American children live below the poverty line, according to Census Bureau data. Even though the unemployment rate is down to 5 percent and the last recession ended in 2009, 72 percent of Americans think the country is still in a recession, according to a Public Religion Research Institute survey released last month.

This could explain the popularity of Donald Trump even though (1) he has never done anything without greasing the governmental skids, (2) he has never even run for office, and (3) he has espoused liberal positions until he decided to run for president as a Republican.