Trump Supporters & Biden — Don’t Let Politics Define Us

I’m more sanguine than a lot of columnists when it comes to the question, “How divided are we?” In the George W. Bush years, I started to play a little game, which is to pretend people are drunk when they start talking about politics. “Pay him no mind,” I tell myself these days, a hundred times a year, “He just saw a Trump tweet, so he may as well have just downed six shots of Patrón.” Even among the highly intelligent, when the political circuits of their brains get lit up, they tend to say the stupidest things, especially on Facebook. (Which is why I hardly ever look at Facebook. Some sort of logic-destroying algorithm is at work there.) At dinner parties, when people contend that, say, our democracy is imperiled because the Supreme Court ruled that the government can’t ban books and movies in election seasons, I just sit silently and wait for people to get the craziness out of their system.

Political writers who submit their ideas to the broad public for scrutiny tend to be a bit better at thinking about politics than those who merely share their thoughts with friends, but sometimes they too seem to find their cranial oxygen supply going a bit thin as they turn purple in the face, or at least in their prose. For quite a few years now, the most hysterical and extreme columnists who use the least temperate language and make the wildest predictions have gotten caught up in a perverse-incentives feedback loop. The louder they scream, the more attention they get. I tend not to take these people all that seriously either; columnists have been warning about a theocratic takeover of America since the Reagan era, and when that fear became inoperative in the notably secular Trump years, they simply swapped in warnings about Nazis where they used to fret about evangelicals.

About the Author

Kyle Smith

Kyle Smith is the film critic for the Wall Street Journal.

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I’m more sanguine than a lot of columnists when it comes to the question, “How divided are we?” In the George W. Bush years, I started to play a little game, which is to pretend people are drunk when they start talking about politics. “Pay him no mind,” I tell myself these days, a hundred times a year, “He just saw a Trump tweet, so he may as well have just downed six shots of Patrón.” Even among the highly intelligent, when the political circuits of their brains get lit up, they tend to say the stupidest things, especially on Facebook. (Which is why I hardly ever look at Facebook. Some sort of logic-destroying algorithm is at work there.) At dinner parties, when people contend that, say, our democracy is imperiled because the Supreme Court ruled that the government can’t ban books and movies in election seasons, I just sit silently and wait for people to get the craziness out of their system.

Political writers who submit their ideas to the broad public for scrutiny tend to be a bit better at thinking about politics than those who merely share their thoughts with friends, but sometimes they too seem to find their cranial oxygen supply going a bit thin as they turn purple in the face, or at least in their prose. For quite a few years now, the most hysterical and extreme columnists who use the least temperate language and make the wildest predictions have gotten caught up in a perverse-incentives feedback loop. The louder they scream, the more attention they get. I tend not to take these people all that seriously either; columnists have been warning about a theocratic takeover of America since the Reagan era, and when that fear became inoperative in the notably secular Trump years, they simply swapped in warnings about Nazis where they used to fret about evangelicals.