By Damon Linker, The Week
The risk and roots of our nonstop panic and alarm.
Have you heard the news about the imminent end of American democracy?
The president of the United States has been talking about it — how the country has embraced Jim Crow 2.0 and the midterm elections coming up in November could be illegitimate because the Democrats’ voting rights bill went down to defeat in the Senate last week.
Republicans, meanwhile, are busy preparing for the imposition of “soft totalitarianism” on the country by woke progressives who control all of America’s elite institutions and are eager to use their immense power to ruthlessly stamp out dissent from every sphere of life.
Then, of course, there’s the danger of COVID-19, even to those who have been fully vaccinated and to children too young to receive the vaccine, necessitating continued mask mandates even in elementary schools. Or, if you listen to the other side, vaccine mandates are apparently just like Nazism.
Don’t forget the threat of war in Eastern Europe, which could well lead to the destruction of NATO and the unraveling of the entire liberal international order.
And looming behind it all is climate change, which poses nothing less than a threat to humanity’s very existence.
No one worries about the whole list, but all of these hyperbolic claims (and many others) are swirling around in our political culture, emanating from the Oval Office and politicians of both parties in Congress, echoed and amplified by cable news hosts and talk radio personalities, in the pages of magazines and academic journals, and, of course, on social media.
