We are on this Earth to continue a breathtakingly bold experiment in advancing human freedom that is bound to come at some cost, not to hush up and mind our manners.
I’m not saying that real Americans must have supported the shutdown—not by any stretch. Nobody believes that the past month showcases the best we can do as a country. But while exhausted quiescence and lowered expectations may empty the air of shouting, the nihilism they reflect is not any kind of national harmony worth having.
Yeats famously rhapsodized that “The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.” The poem that contains these words is a critical reflection on the soul-sucking aimlessness and disillusionment of post-WWI Europe, but the Axis of Acela seems to have mistaken it for a how-to manual.