Second, too many people, on both the Left and Right, are completely uninterested in fixing any of this, for that would require compromise. Politics is supposed to be the venue by which a diverse people finds points of agreement. But that is not how we treat it. Politics is our religion these days, and the worship of the divine does not usually admit of splitting the difference.

But this might be too charitable, for it implies that Americans have some profound, yet overwrought, commitment to abstract principles of right and wrong. Does that give us too much credit? Perhaps. Certainly, some Americans are so severely committed to a set of abstract principles that common ground is anathema to them. But many, many others enjoy the conflict for its own grubby pleasures. Our politics are a cafeteria food fight, and lots of people love flinging the meatloaf.

The ones who enjoy American politics for the sheer malice of it seem to sample disproportionately from the most engaged quarters of the citizenry. Anybody who has spent any time on Twitter is surely aware of this, at least on some level. Here’s a fun experiment. Take your “favorite” Twitter loudmouth, be it on the Left or the Right. Really, it can be anybody with a huge following who tweets provocative things that make compromise less likely, not more. Navigate over to his homepage on Twitter and take a gander at when he joined Twitter. Then, notice how many tweets he has sent over his time on that Godforsaken website. A little bit of fourth-grade division will quickly reveal how many times a day he tweets, on average. I conduct this experiment regularly and am shocked to discover the blue-check “thought leaders” on Twitter blasting out 100 or more tweets a day on average. Assuming they sleep at all, that can work out to be six to 10 tweets an hour, every waking hour, for a decade.