Tim Rutten has an excellent op-ed up over at the L.A. Times. He picks up where my “What is happening to this country?” left off. After having been out of the country for a month, he returned with the following perspective:

[I]t’s hard not to conclude that hysteria is now the dominant characteristic of our politics and civic conversation.

How else to explain the fact that questions like secession and nullification — issues that were resolved in blood by the Civil War more than a century ago — have come alive again and are routinely tossed around, not just by fringe figures but by Republican officeholders and candidates? [...]

The most popular such movement involves abolishing or gutting the 10th Amendment as a way to deny American citizenship to the U.S.-born children of undocumented immigrants. [...] Rep. Louie Gohmert (R- Texas) speculates that such children actually are terrorist moles planted here to grow up as U.S. citizens as part of a long-range plot. [...]

One candidate for statewide office in Tennessee  [...]  argues that the 1st Amendment does not cover Muslims. [...]

In the midst of moral panic, inchoate indignation stands in for reason; accusation and denunciation supplant dialogue and argument; history and facts are rendered malleable, merely adjuncts of the moral entrepreneur’s — or should we say provocateur’s — rhetorical will. As we now also see, a self-interested mass media with an economic stake in the theatricality of raised and angry voices can transmit moral panic like a pathogen.

“A self-interested mass media with an economic stake…” Bingo. The news has been commercialized, politicized, and pulverized into something unrecognizable. To repeat, an uninformed electorate leads to the degradation of democracy.

We are constantly subjected to extreme, often irrational, hot air, giving credibility to the assertions of punditiots as if their viewpoints are valid and reasonable. The hysteria is force fed to viewers who either become desensitized or compliant, accepting unsubstantiated blather as fact.

The more often endorsements of secession, segregation, nullification, and fear mongering are given legitimacy, tacit or overt, the more likely it is that they will eventually become acceptable.

Please read Rutten’s entire piece here.