As the Justice Department indicts Trump, the U.S. Congress investigates UFOs: This is why

[The] description of the role of magic and mythology in primitive society applies equally well to highly advanced stages of man’s political life.  In desperate situations man will always have recourse to desperate means – and our present-day political myths have been such desperate means.  If reason has failed us, there remains always the ultima ratio, the power of the miraculous and mysterious. …

… In politics we are always living on volcanic soil.  We must be prepared for abrupt convulsions and eruptions.  In all critical moments of man’s social life, the rational forces that resist the rise of old mythical conceptions are no longer sure of themselves.  In these moments the time for myth has come again.  For myth has not been really vanquished and subjugated.  It is always there, lurking in the dark and waiting for its opportunity.[1]

 Ernest Cassirer, The Myth of the State (1946)

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[1] Ernst Cassirer, The Myth of the State (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1946), pp. 179,180.