In the U.S., it’s now the survival of the shrillest

WASHINGTON >> Eric Hoffer (1902-1983) meant that intellectuals in his day tended not to be temperate. In our day, this defect — moral overheating — has been democratized: Anyone can have it. Now, everybody can be happily furious, delirious with hysteria and intoxicated with intimations of apocalypse, all day every day.

Hoffer was a longshoreman and an autodidact who wrote slender books hefty with wisdom. His first, “The True Believer” (1951), put him on a path from San Francisco’s docks to a 1982 Presidential Medal of Freedom, conferred by a fellow Californian. In Hoffer’s time, intellectuals often were feverish because this was the best way to be noticed, and to say, about this and that: Listen to our intelligent selves or the end is nigh.

In 2017, many others emulated this act. Were Hoffer still with us, he would marvel at today’s vast, deep reservoirs of extravagant rhetoric. For example:

During two decades, the Internet was barely regulated as it delighted its users. In 2015, net neutrality was imposed by bureaucratic fiat. Thirty-three months later, net neutrality was ended. And the rending of garments and gnashing of teeth commenced: “This is the end of the internet as we know it.” (Sen. Bernie Sanders); “A brazen betrayal … disastrous … I am disgusted” (Sen. Richard Blumenthal); “Outrageous” (Sen. Cory Booker).

Another example: A presidential assistant calls this year’s tax legislation “the most significant tax reform we’ve had since 1986.” Which is like bragging about the tallest building in Boise. On a scale of importance from 1 (negligible) to 10 (stupendous), the legislation might be a 3. Never mind. Cue the Cassandras. This tax cut of less than 1 percent of the next decade’s projected GDP is “the worst bill in the history of the United States Congress” (House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi).

The many Americans who are happiest when unhappy seem as addicted to indignation as the fewer Americans are to cocaine. Brain imaging might show the same pleasure points lighting up in both cohorts. Furthermore, because today’s technologies have eliminated barriers to entry into public conversations, ignorance and intemperateness are not barriers. Because modern technologies allow the instant, costless dissemination of fulminations, public conversations often quickly degenerate into something less.

Christopher DeMuth, president emeritus of the American Enterprise Institute, notes that as Americans have become “entangled by networks of communication,” they have entered “a world of empowered mass intimacy” that encourages the better but also “the darker angels of human nature.” New modes of communication enable us “to organize ourselves into highly defined networks of affinity and endeavor.” These enable splendid cooperative endeavors; but they also are “fracturing our politics.”

Institutions that hitherto organized and stabilized politics — parties, Congress, federalism, civic organizations — have been, DeMuth says, “deconstructed by a thousand networks of ideology, interest and identity.” Such “private networks have commandeered central institutions of government.”

Congress, especially, has buckled beneath the weight of “many more numerous political causes than a representative legislature can manage.” Congress has responded by offloading onto the administrative state’s executive agencies activities that are essentially legislative. So, its members are free to “strut and fret on the national stage.”

The result is an evermore-clamorous politics, and the survival of the shrillest. Hence 2017 has been replete with confirmations of Eric Hoffer’s aphorism: “Rudeness is the weak man’s imitation of strength.”

George Will is a Washington Post columnist.

“The intellectual cannot operate at room temperature.”

— Eric Hoffer, “First Things, Last Things” (1971)