To the many people around the world who admire America and want her to succeed, watching events in this country over the past few years has been a little like observing a dear friend going through a mental-health crisis.

Many of the symptoms of a full psychiatric breakdown have been on display—denial of objective reality, wild mood swings, episodes of paranoia, delusional thinking and grandiose ideation, a tendency toward lacerating self-harm.

But...

Supporters of former President Donald Trump protest President Joe Biden during his visit to McHenry County College in Crystal Lake, Ill., July 7.

Photo: saul loeb/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

To the many people around the world who admire America and want her to succeed, watching events in this country over the past few years has been a little like observing a dear friend going through a mental-health crisis.

Many of the symptoms of a full psychiatric breakdown have been on display—denial of objective reality, wild mood swings, episodes of paranoia, delusional thinking and grandiose ideation, a tendency toward lacerating self-harm.

But last week, voters in a handful of states and cities donned the white coats and began wrestling the patient back to reality. There’s a way to go yet, but for the first time in a while there are encouraging signs that sanity is reasserting itself.

The lunacy had been developing for some time, but it was the election of Donald Trump, himself surely a source of enough material to keep an entire psychology faculty employed for life, that seemed to send the country over the edge.

The derangement with which much of the nation’s elites responded to his election was symptomatic of something very wrong. We have spent the past five years wandering lost, pulled deeper and deeper through the darker recesses of a certain type of American psyche.

Paranoid conspiracy theorizing—across the political spectrum to be sure, but at its most damaging and far-reaching in the firm conviction in the heads of much of the media and others that the nation had been hijacked by the agent of a foreign power.

Multiple manifestations of Covid insanity—in which medical practice and the scientific method were subordinated to political exigencies. Example: You could get sick if you attended a football game or a biker rally, but not if you attended the right sort of political protest or looted an urban store.

The capture of the public discourse by the lunacy of righteous wokery, in which math is racist, logic is a tool of white supremacy, merit is privilege and mothers are “birthing people.”

Moral panic: One terrible murder in an American city plunged millions into an orgy of self-loathing, recrimination and a kind of Puritan revivalism. This led naturally to the unhinged ideas that getting rid of the police would be an excellent way of reducing crime and, more than 50 years after the end of segregation, that Americans need to be racially separated.

Self-laceration: A nation founded uniquely in the pursuit of human liberty, which had done more than any other country in history to lift people out of tyranny, suddenly decided it had all along been a moral pariah, on a par with Nazi Germany or apartheid South Africa.

Self-delusion: The grandiose promises of a Democratic president and Congress, elected on the thinnest of margins, who convinced themselves they were the second coming of Franklin D. Roosevelt.

And yes, it must also be said, since it has been perhaps the most unnerving of all, a certain, intensifying psychosis on the right that reached its frenzied peak in January when a few thousand badly misled partisans recast themselves as latter day Paul Reveres and thought they could overturn a constitutional process with some cans of bear spray and a mock gibbet.

The disorienting polarization of a seemingly disintegrating country manifested itself in the wild lability by which we went from a president who tweeted inanities at 3:00 in the morning to a president unable to string a sentence together at 3:00 in the afternoon. From “Make America Great Again” to “Pretend America is Evil Now.”

But thanks to those voters in Virginia, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Minneapolis, Seattle, Buffalo, N.Y., and elsewhere, the fever may have broken.

In Virginia, the rebuff to the woke educational establishment in a Democratic state was a firm message from the people that, no, the lunatics won’t be allowed to run the asylum. In New Jersey, voters sent a stern warning of their impatience with Covid authoritarianism. In Buffalo, citizens in large numbers patiently told their Democratic leaders that socialism wasn’t the answer. In Minneapolis and Seattle, people voted to stop the police-dismantling idiocy.

Almost everywhere, in fact, voters signaled they would really like their representatives to focus on sane, rational policies and clean up the various messes they have helped create.

And you realize as you contemplate these results—and look forward perhaps to more of the same next year—that it isn’t America, or most Americans, who’ve gone off the rails these past few years. It’s the American leadership class. Seized of their own righteousness, convinced by their own propaganda, pickled in their own ideology, drunk on their own Kool-Aid, these so-called leaders—political, media, corporate, academic—have come dangerously close to taking the country over the cliff.

Fortunately, this country is, despite the apparent attempts of some and the doubts of others, still a decent place, full of rational people repelled by all this nonsense. Perhaps democracy isn’t so crazy after all.

Wonder Land: From progressive dream, to democratic nightmare as voters in Virginia, New York City, Buffalo, New Jersey and Minneapolis push back against leftwing overreach, incompetence and intolerance. Images: Getty Images Composite: Mark Kelly The Wall Street Journal Interactive Edition