It is our responsibility as citizens to take better stock of our priorities, and to ask if expensive gasoline and pricier milk are grounds to overthrow democracy—or reasons to stay home while others vote to trash the Constitution.

Tom Nichols

Awareness of the Cold War kept American political discourse within some sensible boundaries. We had to be able to envision presidents not only as politicians but as the people who might have to open a briefcase in the middle of the night and issue codes that would open the gates of hell. This induced a certain amount of sobriety even in the most partisan voters.

All of that is gone. In foreign policy, the party of Reagan now fears Democrats more than it fears the Kremlin. At home, millions of people talk about things such as secession and sedition with utter unseriousness. Grown men and women, actual citizens of the United States, fly Confederate battle flags (in those traditional rebel strongholds such as New York and Michigan) like defiant toddlers scrawling obscenities on a wall. They yell “Let’s go, Brandon” (a convoluted euphemism that means “Fuck Joe Biden”) like snotty teenagers in the detention hall trying to see if they can make the teachers mad. People old enough to collect Social Security drive around in expensive cars and trucks covered in flags and obscenities as if it’s their first junker and they’ve just had their first beers.

Tom Nichols