Mind you, America is a vast and diverse place; California/Silicon Valley/Google are at an extreme end of the spectrum, and they also get a disproportionate amount of attention. Rest assured, much of America is saner.
I see what you're getting at, but "saner" is biased language.
Cali/SV/Google all lean one way because they've been benefiting from the way things have been going. The thought that large swaths of the country have been experiencing a declining quality of life just doesn't register to them. That doesn't make them "insane," just uninformed.
It's definitely figurative language and I understand that it's charged, but I don't think it's "biased" in any sense of the term that might illegitimate my opinion. I don't think "uninformed" accurately conveys the phenomena we're seeing in our country, particularly since much similar ignorance flows out of institutions that ostensibly know better--notably the academy and media.
