People used to care if they way they talked about politics made them look intelligent, reasonable, and informed. Now many of them speak online where they get wa

People used to care if they way they talked about politics made them look intelligent, reasonable, and informed. Now many of them speak online where they get warped signals of approval, and these signals elicit behavior that they would never engage in if they still depended on the good opinion of their friends, neighbors, family, and coworkers. This is liberating and positive in so many dimensions of personal expression, but in politics, the effects are turning out to be the opposite. Some become entirely dependent on these online signals of approval, and they let themselves be guided by a warped perception of political effectiveness, where effectiveness might mean using disinformation to motivate people on "their" side (which I guess actually is politically effective) or it might mean winning meaningless games of online dunking. People who invest time and energy in online political discourse see themselves as heroes, above the judgment of those who don't engage, and see their online activity as brave and dangerous, even though in reality, both sides always go home the winner in their own eyes, and there are no consequences except degraded mental habits all around. It has long been dogma on the far left and far right that the concepts of civility, reasonable debate, and legitimate political process are only cloaks for the brutal exercise of power, and the sooner cast aside the better. If you pay any attention to the quality of how we do politics, you have allowed your liberal oppressors to trick and distract you. Thirty years ago, I heard it from left-wing professors at university and from far-right gun nuts promoting race war in chat rooms. Now it seems a lot closer to the mainstream, on one side in rhetoric and on both sides in practice.