from David French at National Review, Constant Hysterics Damage Our Democracy :

For the average American, who pays less attention to politics than to his professional and personal lives, all of this is exhausting. It’s numbing to the point where he can’t possibly determine what’s important and what’s not. So he checks out. He throws his hands in the air and gives up. But for the Americans who care the most about politics and drive our public debate, perpetual crisis is invigorating. It provides meaning and purpose.

The bottom line is that even “normal” American politics are far more broken than Trump’s Twitter feed. It’s debatable whether the public temperature would be one degree lower if Trump tossed his phone into the Potomac. Instead of solemn 86-tweet threads on why Trump’s retweeting British fascists heralds the founding of Panem from the Hunger Games, we’d get solemn 93-tweet threads explaining why lower corporate-tax rates will lead to bodies stacked like cordwood in the streets. And the same “serious people” will nod, tweet “The most important thread you’ll read today” or “indispensable analysis,” and continue to foster the notion that their political opponents are so depraved that they don’t care if people die.

There’s a range of political emotion. The choices aren’t limited to #nothingburger or endless screaming. Perhaps one of the greatest services any pundit, writer, or reader can provide is not only determining what’s right and wrong — good policy and bad — but also the degree to which a normal person should care and the level of certainty in the apocalyptic predictions. In other words, in our polarized times, finding the proper sense of proportion might be among your greatest patriotic duties. Save your fury for a real crisis. America needs you to be calm.

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