phantasm

David Hume, the 18th Century philosopher, described it as “the phantasm of the senses.”

Even the implicit promise of a male-oriented community is a phantasm.

Republican politicians win by keeping their base voters focused on phantasms and symbolic, ego-driven identity politics, rather than real world issues.

This dependency on fighting imaginary phantasms — which are responsible for eroding our "values" and "culture" by making America browner, less Christian, more constitutionally equal and ever less heterosexual — is what unites GOP base voters.

And before that, I was reading accounts of specters and phantasms at a home built in the early 1800s.