Perhaps it is because there is not much in the way of genuinely bad American expletive-deleted with which I am not at least passingly familiar that the hysteria and negativity of our political discourse strikes me as so very expletive deleted insane.

You’d think the United States is poor, desperate, backward, and on the verge of either civil war or building concentration camps or both.

It isn’t.

The idiot children in Berkeley who risibly style themselves “antifascists” say that they are going to “war,” that the United States is descending into some sort of Nazi-style nightmare state, and that allowing a daffy Anglo-Greek homosexual writer to speak about current affairs on a University of California campus is only one step away from — their words — “genocide.” Surely, if there were to be some sort of neo-Nazi regime in the United States, its poet laureate would not be Milo Yiannopoulos, who is: gay, Jewish by birth, Catholic by profession, and something of an enthusiastic race-mixer to boot. He’s the guy who’d be put into a camp, if there were camps.

There aren’t.

Senator Bernie Sanders and Senator Elizabeth Warren want you to believe that the economy and the political system are “rigged” against you, that you have no real hope of prospering, rising, and thriving in what Senator Sanders insists is an “oligarchy.” (He pronounces it “Allah-garchy,” and, sharia hysteria notwithstanding, we aren’t getting one of those, either.) The guys on talk radio want to sell you gold coins and freeze-dried ice cream, and so they need you to believe that we are on the verge of total anarchy, that somebody — the Islamic State, Black Lives Matter, Chicago gangsters, somebody — is coming to get you. Politicos and angst-peddlers left and right want you terrified and anxious, and they want you to believe that these United States comprise a vast impoverished anarchic Eliotic wasteland, a kind of gigantic continental Haiti with lots of shopping malls and a surprisingly large number of Range Rovers.