From Kevin Williamson at National Review, The World Keeps Not Ending:

The argument from our Democratic friends is that these are not normal political times, that current events present a unique threat to our institutions, a clear and present danger, and, hence, that the normal rules of civility must be abandoned, as Mrs. Clinton insists, that norms of civilized behavior and citizenship must be overthrown, as with the mobs chasing political enemies out of restaurants and stalking them in their homes, that honorable public servants must be traduced in the face of this emergency, etc.

All of that would be more compelling if the Left had not said the same thing and made the same exaggerated and hysterical claims during the presidency of Ronald Reagan (they were sure he would cause the nuclear annihilation of all life on earth) and George W. Bush (He’ll peep at your library records!), if they had not attempted to do to Mitt Romney more or less the same thing they attempted to do to Brett Kavanaugh. Among reasonable people, the market for wolf tickets is getting pretty saturated. There aren’t any death camps being set up in the suburbs.

One begins to suspect that the same people who insisted that things in these United States could hardly have been better in November of 2016 and that they could hardly have been worse two months later are not acting entirely in good faith.

In a healthy society, politics is a small part of life. There is a life outside politics, and there are places and situations that are outside politics. We have, for the moment, abandoned that distinction, especially for those on the left who insist on a totalitarian model of political life in which everything is subject to political scrutiny, in which the personal is truly and categorically — and horrifyingly — the political. They insist that this is necessary because of the extraordinary times in which we live, the extraordinary threats that we currently face, the emergency under which we are living.

But there is no emergency.

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