"Politics? I Got Sick Of The Constant Rage."

The Exhausted Majority.

I read this column while laying in an AirBNB bed on Saturday.

The column is pretty good, even if it makes some obvious points here and there. I want to point you towards two pull quotes.

This kind of exhaustion magnifies our political inertia. If the wings aren’t changing their minds and the majority is checked out, then stasis can set in. The engaged members of the wings are negatively polarized. There is no way they’re switching teams. The exhausted majority is discontent with the status quo, but it’s largely passive. It doesn’t exert nearly enough energy to repair our political culture, even though it wants change.

In that paragraph, the author is essentially saying that the entire political discourse is hijacked by the 5% craziest on each side (super-liberal and ultra-conservative), and the rest of the people — most of whom are concerned with bills and getting their kids to activities on time while finding purpose in their own existence — couldn’t care less. If anything, they’re actively disengaged. You definitely see this at the local level of politics, where half the conversations you have include some version of the phrase, “So, what does a District Attorney even do?”

At the end of the article, the author says this: